Father’s Day (or occasionally, and originally, “Fathers’ Day"), is (of course) a celebration honoring dads and celebrating positive paternal roles. In most of the world it’s observe on the third Sunday in June (this year, 17 June).
Father’s Day was (rather tellingly) first celebrated a couple of years after the first Mother’s Day, in 1910… and the driving force behind its creation was a woman, Arkansan-born Sonora Louise Smart Dodd.
Sonora Louise Smart Dodd
Her father, William Jackson was a veteran of the War Between the States who raised Sonora and five other siblings as a single father in Spokane, Washington. June was chosen because Dodd’s father’s birthday was 5 June. A bill to make Father’s Day an official holiday was introduced in 1913 (the same year the first film called Father’s Day was released) and in 1916, President Woodrow Wilson visited Spokane and voiced his support. He’d succeeded in garnering official recognition for Mother’s Day in 1914 but, for whatever reason, recognition of Fathers’ Day met much more resistance and measures to do so were rejected several times by Congress through Wilson's and President Calvin Coolidge’s presidency.
