“No matter how tall I grow, I still look up to you.” Though the author remains unknown, this quote – or some version of it – has graced the covers of countless Father’s Day cards. In a recent Napolitan News Service poll, 74% of respondents said that being a father is the most important thing a man can do – and, according to The Fatherhood Commission, there are around 70 million dads in the United States.
Today, June 15, is a day set aside to honor fathers and all they do for their homes and families. For more than 50 years, Americans have been observing Father’s Day, but it was a hard-won holiday fraught with resistance and controversy, which are still present today.
Mother’s Day and Father’s Day Gained Traction During War Times
Mother’s Day started during the peace-and-reconciliation campaigns of the post-Civil War era. Ann Reeves Jarvis got the ball rolling when one West Virginia town celebrated “Mother’s Work Days,” which united moms of both Confederate and Union Soldiers. It became more commercialized after Jarvis’ daughter, Anna, held a Mother’s Day service at her late mother’s church in 1908. Six years later, President Woodrow Wilson made it a national holiday.
Father’s Day started a little differently, though not far away. A West Virginia church sponsored the nation’s first celebration in 1908 during a Sunday sermon in memory of 362 men who had died in explosions at the Fairmont Coal Company. This was a one-time event, though, and Spokane, Washington, is credited with having the nation’s first statewide celebration on June 19, 1910. It was started by Sonora Smart Dodd, who wanted to honor her dad, a Civil War veteran and a twice-widowed man with 14 children.
President Woodrow Wilson used telegraph signals to unfurl a flag in Spokane to honor and recognize the day in 1916, and in 1924, President Calvin Coolidge urged states to observe Father’s Day. However, at the time, a lot of men didn’t appreciate the idea or didn’t want a day of recognition. A 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.”
In the 1920s and 1930s, activists tried to get rid of individual days of celebration and combine them into one “Parents’ Day” because, as radio performer Robert Spere said at the time, “both parents should be loved and respected together.”
But then the Great Depression happened, and retailers promoted Father’s Day as a “second Christmas” for men, marketing, among other things, neckties. When World War II began, advertisers suggested it was a day to honor American troops and support the war effort. Finally, in 1972, President Richard Nixon signed a proclamation making Father’s Day a federal holiday.
The Changing Role of Fatherhood
“I think the key change for the invention of the modern father is in the 1920s,” Historian Robert L. Griswold, author of Fatherhood in America: A History, told Time magazine. The Great Depression was hard on families and marriages since society expected fathers to provide for their families, but at the time, service jobs, mostly held by women, were not hit as hard as male-dominated industrial jobs.
Up until then, in the early years of America’s development, dads worked primarily on home farms and were around to educate their children about work ethic, religion, and other important facts of life. After the Civil War, though, commercial growth meant working more jobs away from the family. “This shift jump-started the rise of a middle class,” Time explained.
“Fathers’ identities revolved around bread-winning and their ability to place children in work positions,” historian Shawn Johansen, author of Family Men: Middle-Class Fatherhood in Early Industrializing America, told Time. “The vagaries of industrial work, however, made working-class fathers’ authority more vulnerable than even the middle-class fathers.”
Around 1975, the New Fatherhood movement started, morphing dads’ roles once again, this time with the expectation that fathers should be changing diapers and playing with children when they weren’t at work.
Fun Facts
Pew Research estimated that there were 11.3 million stay-at-home parents in 2021, and 2.1 million of those were fathers. In 2023, roughly 1 in 5 dads were stay-at-home parents.
The classic gift of a necktie – dreaded by many – has been somewhat of a tradition dating back to the Great Depression. Currently, about 100 million ties are sold on Father’s Day each year, according to Infoplease. About 72 million cards are exchanged, and Hallmark says Father’s Day is the fourth-largest card-sending holiday.
This year, there are many celebrities celebrating becoming a father for the first time: musician Justin Bieber, actors Henry Cavill (Superman) and Luke Grimes (Yellowstone), and athletes Aaron Judge (New York Yankees), Ryan Murphy (Olympic gold medalist), Shohei Ohtani (Los Angeles Dodgers), Justin Reid (Kansas City Chiefs), and Max Verstappen (Formula 1 driver).
In the words of former President Ronald Reagan:
“Our fathers bear an awesome responsibility – one that they shoulder willingly and fulfill with a love that asks no recompense. By turns both gentle and firm, our fathers guide us along the path from infancy to adulthood. We embody their joy, pain and sacrifice, and inherit memories more cherished than any possession.
“On Father’s Day each year, we express formally a love and gratitude whose roots go deeper than conscious memory can recite. It is only fitting that we have this special day to pay tribute to those men – our natural fathers, adoptive fathers and foster fathers – who deserve our deepest respect and devotion. It is equally fitting, as we recall the ancient and loving command to honor our fathers, that we resolve to do so by becoming ourselves parents and citizens who are worthy of honor.”
Happy Father’s Day!
