Origins of Father’s Day

The first Father’s Day in the United States was celebrated on June 19, 1910, in the state of Washington. However, it was not until 1972—58 years after President Woodrow Wilson made Mother’s Day official—that the day honoring fathers became a nationwide holiday in the US.

In the Philippines, Father’s Day is officially celebrated every third Sunday of June according to a recent presidential proclamation, but it is not a public holiday. It is more widely observed by the public on the 3rd Sunday of June due to American influence and as proclaimed in 1988 by President Corazon C. Aquino.

Under Proclamation No. 58, issued in 1998 by President Joseph Estrada, the first Monday of December of every year was designated as Mother’s Day and Father’s Day.

This repealed the Proclamation issued by Corazon Aquino. The campaign to celebrate fathers did not meet with the same enthusiasm as Mother’s Day.

On July 5, 1908, a West Virginia church sponsored the nation’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, a Spokane, Washington, 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 nation’s first statewide Father’s Day on June 19, 1910.

Slowly, the holiday spread. In 1916, 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 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, continue to disdain the celebration. As one historian wrote – 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.”