History
Father’s Day was inaugurated in the United States in the early 20th century to complement Mother’s Day in celebrating fathers, fathering, and fatherhood.
Father’s Day was founded in Spokane, Washington, at the YMCA in 1910 by Sonora Smart Dodd, who was born in Arkansas.[3] Its first celebration was in the Spokane YMCA on June 19, 1910.[3][4] Her father, the Civil War veteran William Jackson Smart, was a single parent who raised his six children there.[3] After hearing a sermon about Anna Jarvis‘ Mother’s Day at Central Methodist Episcopal Church in 1909, she told her pastor that fathers should have a similar holiday honoring them.[3][5] Although she initially suggested June 5, her father’s birthday, the pastors of the Spokane Ministerial Alliance did not have enough time to prepare their sermons, and the celebration was deferred to the third Sunday of June.[6][7]
It did not have much success initially. In the 1920s, Dodd stopped promoting the celebration because she was studying at the Art Institute of Chicago, and it faded into relative obscurity, even in Spokane.[8] In the 1930s, Dodd returned to Spokane and started promoting the celebration again, raising its awareness at a national level.[9] She had the help of those trade groups that would benefit most from the holiday, for example the manufacturers of ties, tobacco pipes, and any traditional presents to fathers.[10] Since 1938, she had the help of the Father’s Day Council, founded by the New York Associated Men’s Wear Retailers to consolidate and systematize the commercial promotion.[11] Americans resisted the holiday at first, perceiving it as just an attempt by merchants to replicate the commercial success of Mother’s Day, and newspapers frequently featured cynical and sarcastic attacks and jokes.[12] But the trade groups did not give up: they kept promoting it and even incorporated the jokes into their adverts, and they eventually succeeded.[13] By the mid-1980s, the Father’s Council wrote that “(…) [Father’s Day] has become a Second Christmas for all the men’s gift-oriented industries
