Father’s Day is celebrated on the third Sunday in June. It honors fathers and the importance of fathers in society as well as the paternal bonds of fatherhood in a family setting. Sonora Smart Dodd of Spokane, Washington is credited with being the first person to suggest a day to honor U.S. fathers in 1909. The day was meant to complement Mother’s Day celebrations in May.
In Europe, Catholic countries have celebrated Father’s Day on March 19, as St. Joseph’s Day since the Middle Ages.
Sikhs celebrate Father’s Day on December 29, the birthday of Guru Gobind Singh.
South Korea celebrates Parent’s Day.
On July 5,1908, the Williams Memorial Methodist Episcopal Church South (now the Central United Methodist Church) held a Father’s Day service to honor the 361 men killed in a mining accident in Fairmont, West Virginia on December 6, 1907.Two hundred-fifty of those men were fathers and around a thousand children lost their fathers. The service was suggested by Grace Golden Clayton who lost her father, the Reverend Fletcher Golden in the accident. The service was well attended, but drew little attention from the press because two other newsworthy events occurred around the time of the celebration. Copies of the service were lost, and the event wasn’t repeated. Clayton was a private person and didn’t push for further recognition of the event.
The first Father’s Day in the United States was celebrated at the YMCA in Spokane, Washington in 1910. Dodd’s father was a Civil War veteran and single father of six children. After hearing a sermon about Mother’s Day, Dodd suggested to her pastor that fathers should also be recognized. She wanted the date of Father’s Day to fall on June fifth, which was her father’s birthday, but there was not enough time to organize the celebration. Area pastors suggested the third Sunday of June to give them time to prepare their sermons.
In 1911, Jane Addams proposed a citywide Father’s Day celebration in Chicago, but state officials turned her down.
A bill to establish national recognition of the holiday was introduced in Congress in 1913, but it failed.
Two years later, Harry C. Meek, a member of the Lions Club International, claimed that he had the first idea for a Father’s Day celebration. Meek claimed the third Sunday in June had been chosen because it occurred on his birthday that year. The Lions Club recognized him as the “originator of Father’s Day.” Meek made several attempts during his lifetime to establish Father’s Day as a national holiday that would be celebrated on his birthday.
In 1916, President Wilson traveled to Spokane to speak at a Father’s Day celebration. He wanted to make it an official holiday, but Congress again refused on the grounds the celebration would become commercialized. President Coolidge supported recognition of Father’s Day, but stopped short of issuing a national proclamation in 1924.
It took several years for the event to become popular. While Dodd was attending the Art Institute of Chicago, she stopped promoting Father’s Day and it almost faded into obscurity. When she returned to Spokane in the 1930s, Dodd committed to saving the holiday. She recruited the help of businesses that stood to benefit from the celebration, tie manufacturers, tobacco shops, and local haberdasheries.
In 1938, the New York Associated Men’s Wear Retailers founded the Father’s Day Council to promote the holiday. People resisted suspecting retailers were only promoting the celebration to try to boost sales as they had for Mother’s Day.
In 1957, Senator Margaret Chase Smith from Maine wrote a proposal to recognize Father’s Day. In her proposal, she accused Congress of ignoring fathers for forty years while celebrating mothers on Mother’s Day. She did not believe one parent should be singled out. She argued that both parents should be celebrated for their contributions to home and family.
In 1966, President Lyndon Johnson issued the first presidential proclamation honoring fathers, designating the third Sunday in June as the day to celebrate fathers. In 1972, Father’s day became a permanent holiday when President Nixon signed it into law.
International Men’s Day is celebrated around the world on November 19, to include and honor all men who are not fathers.