BATON ROUGE, La. (BRPROUD) — Most parents would do anything for their child.
From the start of their offspring’s life, parents sacrifice their sleep.
In fact, one survey revealed that a new parent loses a staggering 109 minutes of sleep every night for the first year after having a baby.
From that initial year onward, parents in Louisiana spend approximately $2,686 annually on their child’s needs.
Considering the countless sacrifices mothers and fathers make for their children, it’s no wonder certain days of the year are set aside to show appreciation for each parent.
But what exactly is the history of Father’s Day? Who was motivated to start it? And, why?
The two women behind the movement
Historians generally acknowledge Grace Golden Clayton as proposing the first unofficial Father’s Day event on U.S. soil.
It was a service that took place in Fairmont, West Virginia, on July 5, 1908.
Clayton’s aim in suggesting the service was to honor all fathers and especially the 360 men, most of whom were fathers, who’d recently been killed in a coal mine explosion seven months earlier.
The service took place as planned, but was not recognized as an official national Father’s Day event.
The following year, a second woman made an effort to put Father’s Day on center stage as a national observance.
A 27-year-old resident of Spokane, Washington named Sonora Smart Dodd was the daughter of a single father who’d served in the Civil War and raised six children on his own after his wife died in childbirth.
It was 1909 when Dodd was reportedly listening to a sermon on Mother’s Day and came up with the idea to have a similar day set aside for fathers.
She pushed for it in her local religious community and as her efforts gained traction the first Father’s Day was celebrated on June 19, 1910, a date that was selected to honor the month Dodd’s father was born.
Pushback against the holiday
As a result of Spokane’s work to name the third Sunday in June as Father’s Day, cities around the U.S. occasionally held similar observances.
But not everyone was in favor of the special day.
In fact, it was generally men who rejected the idea of such a holiday.
The reason boiled down to the view of gender roles at the time.
Many men thought it insulting to their titles as ‘breadwinners’ and ‘heads of the household’ to be honored by a holiday in the same way that women were honored on Mother’s Day.
One historian wrote that men, “scoffed at the holiday’s sentimental attempts to domesticate manliness with flowers and gift-giving, or they derided the proliferation of such holidays as a commercial gimmick to sell more products–often paid for by the father himself.”
This didn’t stop the highest office in the nation from announcing its support of Spokane’s proposed holiday.
The observance gained verbal approval from a U.S. President in 1916 when President Woodrow Wilson spoke in favor of Father’s Day, but did not sign a proclamation for it.
Despite the president’s approval, the controversy surrounding the observance didn’t let up.
By the 1920s, there was so much emotion tied to the proposed holiday that every year on Mother’s Day, protestors marched in New York’s Central Park to demand that both Mother’s Day and Father’s Day be nixed to make way for “Parent’s Day.”
When and how Father’s Day became an official national holiday
But as the nation fell under the grip of the Great Depression from 1929 to 1939, retailers and financial experts suddenly saw the value of the commercial aspect of Father’s Day.
So, advertisers doubled down to rebrand Father’s Day as something that would be appealing to men of that generation.
They gift-wrapped the idea as a “Second Christmas” for fathers and handed it to a downtrodden public that craved something worth celebrating.
Their efforts succeeded and years later, in 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson issued a proclamation that recognized the observance.
It finally became a national holiday in 1972, when President Richard Nixon signed legislation designating the third Sunday of June as Father’s Day.
Sonora Smart Dodd was still living, at the age of 90, when the observance she’d championed became an official national holiday.
Father’s Day is one of many holidays that, though seemingly straightforward in its purpose, has a surprisingly complex background.
