With Father’s Day coming up this Sunday, a look at the holiday’s history in New Jersey newspapers seemed apt. While celebrations honoring fathers have existed in different forms around the globe at various points, the celebration that we know in the United States today can trace itself to a woman named Sonora Smart Dodd (photo below, identified by her husband’s name, John Bruce Dodd).
Dodd was the daughter a civil war veteran who, after the death of his wife, had to raise his six children as a widower. When Dodd heard a sermon on the recently-established Mother’s Day in 1909 (click here for another post on the history of Mother’s Day), she thought it would be appropriate to have a day that gave as much reverence to people like her father, and she campaigned to have the holiday recognized; others were receptive, and the first Father’s Day was celebrated on the third Sunday of June in 1910. Although that first celebration was largely limited to Dodd’s hometown, Spokane, Washington, it received a decent amount of press attention, largely because, as mentioned in a June 17, 1910 Penn’s Grove Record article, the Ministerial Alliance and YMCA of Spokane sent out messages to churches and other related organizations across the country, encouraging their participation as well. Like Mother’s Day, the holiday was intended to be celebrated simply, with the wearing of a flower being one of the primary acts of celebration; in this case, per the June 2, 1924 Perth Amboy Evening News, “A colored rose is worn for a living father and a white one for one who is dead.”
This burst of attention made it appear that the holiday would become quickly adopted. As The Lambertville Record asserted in an October 11, 1910 article, “Fathers’ Day is likely to be observed in all the states of the Union next year.” However, the holiday did not spread quite so quickly. As the Perth Amboy Evening News noted in their June 5, 1917 issue, “fathers’ day is not quite so well known throughout the United States,” though “in recent years the movement to do a bit of honor to ‘daddy’ has grow rapidly—thanks to Mrs. Dodd—who must have had a wonderful father to inspire the idea.” Indeed, it took several decades longer than Mother’s Day to receive federal recognition.
There are several reasons for why Father’s Day did not catch on in the same way Mother’s Day did. One major one was the feeling that the holiday was too derivative of Mother’s Day. An article in the July 1, 1915 issue of the Bridgeton Pioneer highlighted this, describing it as an “apologetic imitation of Mother’s Day.” The article went on to sarcastically add that if new holidays like this could just be invented, there ought to be “a Cook’s Day, a Cop’s Day, an Ice Man’s Day, a Newsboy’s Day, and a Shoe Shiner’s Day and round out the list with a day of honor for the family horse, cow, dog and cat, all of which have their characteristic virtues and are worthy of reverence.”
Another reason that Father’s Day was not embraced in the same was as Mother’s Day initially was that there were concerns about the commercialization of the holiday. Given how quickly Mother’s Day had become commercialized, many saw this new holiday as another attempt by businesses to create a reason to spend. While that was certainly not the intention of Dodd, it’s hard to blame anyone who saw the holiday as the product of marketers given its adoption by advertisers, as can be seen in the ads below.
Regardless of these initial misgivings regarding the holiday, it began to be embraced by Americans, and today is held in similar regard to Mother’s Day, proving to be a popular gift-giving day for those looking to celebrate their fathers and those who have served as father figures in their lives.
(Contributed by Tristan Smith)
Sources:
“Father’s Day.” Britannica, April 19, 2022. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Fathers-Day.
“Father’s Day 2023.” History, February 7, 2023. https://www.history.com/topics/holidays/fathers-day.