Father’s Day – The Holiday Men Didn’t Want and Almost Didn’t Get
Fatherhood – and public opinion of the holiday celebrating it – has changed over the years.
By: Kelli Ballard | June 15, 2025 | 795 Words

(Photo by H. Armstrong Roberts/ClassicStock/Getty Images)
“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 uncountable 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 about 70.1 million men filling the role in the United States.
Today, June 15, is a day set aside to honor those fathers and all they do for their homes and families. For 115 years, Americans have been celebrating Father’s Day, but it was a hard-won holiday fraught with resistance and controversy that is still present today.
Father’s Day Gained Traction During War Times
Father’s Day began in a West Virginia church, which 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 onetime 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 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 want such 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.”
But then the Great Depression happened, and retailers promoted Father’s Day as a “second Christmas” for men, marketing, among other things, neck ties. When World War II began, advertisers suggested it was a day to honor American troops and support the war effort. Finally, in 1972, Father’s Day was made a federal holiday after President Richard Nixon signed the proclamation to make it so.
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. 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 that time, in the early years of America’s development, dads worked primarily on home farms and were around to guide their children on work ethic, religion, and other important facts of life. After the Civil War, though, commercial growth meant 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,” Johansen said. “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.
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!
- The first Father’s Day celebration took place in a church in West Virginia in 1908, but it didn’t become a national holiday until 1972.
- When the tradition of celebrating fathers on Father’s Day began, many men thought it was silly or overly emotional, or even just a corporate gimmick to get people to spend more money.
- The role of fatherhood has changed throughout American history, and dads today aren’t expected to behave quite the same way they were a century ago.