Did you know that while the first Father’s Day was celebrated on June 19, 1910, in Washington, it was not until 1972 that the day honoring fathers became a nationwide and global holiday, with many that were opposed to both Mother's and Father's Day celebration advocating for Parent's Day?

Mother’s Day as celebrated in the modern era has its origins in the peace-and-reconciliation campaigns of the post-Civil War era in the United States of America. During the 1860s, at the urging of activist Ann Reeves Jarvis brought together the mothers of Confederate and Union soldiers to celebrate Mother's Work Days. In 1909, 45 states observed Mother's Day, and in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson approved a resolution that made the second Sunday in May a holiday in honor of  mothers.

On July 5, 1908, a West Virginia church in the United States of America sponsored the country’s first event explicitly in honor of fathers, a Sunday sermon in memory of the 362 men who had died in the previous December’s explosions at the Fairmont Coal Company mines in Monongah, but it was a one-time commemoration and not an annual holiday.

The next year, at Spokane, Washington, a woman named Sonora Smart Dodd, one of six children raised by a widower, tried to establish an official equivalent to Mother’s Day for male parents. She went to local churches, the YMCA, shopkeepers and government officials to drum up support for her idea, and she was successful: Washington State celebrated the country’s first statewide Father’s Day on June 19, 1910.

Slowly, the holiday spread. In 1916, U.S. President Wilson honored the day by using telegraph signals to unfurl a flag in Spokane when he pressed a button in Washington, D.C. In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge urged state governments to observe Father’s Day. 

Today, the day honoring fathers is celebrated in the United States and elsewhere on the third Sunday of June. In other countries–especially in Europe and Latin America–fathers are honored on St. Joseph’s Day, a traditional Catholic holiday that falls on March 19.

Many men, however, continued to disdain the day. As one historian writes, they “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.” 😃

During the 1920s and 1930s, a movement arose to scrap Mother’s Day and Father’s Day altogether in favor of a single holiday, Parents’ Day. Every year on Mother’s Day, pro-Parents’ Day groups rallied in New York City’s Central Park–a public reminder, said Parents’ Day activist and radio performer Robert Spere, “that both parents should be loved and respected together.”

Paradoxically, however, the Great Depression derailed this effort to combine and de-commercialize the holidays. Struggling retailers and advertisers redoubled their efforts to make Father’s Day a “second Christmas” for men, promoting goods such as neckties, hats, socks, pipes and tobacco, golf clubs and other sporting goods, and greeting cards.

When World War II began, advertisers began to argue that celebrating Father’s Day was a way to honor American troops and support the war effort. By the end of the war, Father’s Day may not have been a federal holiday, but it was a national institution.

In 1972, in the middle of a hard-fought presidential re-election campaign, U.S. President Richard Nixon signed a proclamation making Father’s Day a federal holiday at last. Today, economists estimate that Americans spend more than $1 billion each year on Father’s Day gifts.

SOURCE: History | Image: Telegraph

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