The inspiration for Father’s Day actually comes from Mother’s Day. In the late 1800s, activist and poetess Julia Ward Howe wrote her “Appeal to Womanhood,” which exhorted women to step forward and work together to end wars. The title of her proclamation was later changed to “Mother’s Day Proclamation,” and she asked that June 2 of every year be set aside to commemorate women and mothers.
Her efforts were unsuccessful, but a few decades later, another woman named Anna Jarvis took up the mantle of making a national day to celebrate mothers.
She began her letter-writing campaign in 1908. This time —perhaps because the times had changed, or because Jarvis made her version of Mother’s Day less explicitly political — it was a huge success almost from the start.
By the next year, 45 states observed Mother’s Day and, in 1914, then-President Woodrow Wilson signed legislation making it the second Sunday in May.
But back to 1908, when Jarvis’s campaign began. Like Mother’s Day’s original beginnings in the Civil War, Father’s Day too had its seeds in tragedy.
In December 1907, a huge explosion killed at least 362 West Virginia miners. The Monongah Mining Disaster changed the course of the United States in more than one way — mines finally got thorough federal oversight and hundreds of families were torn apart.
The following July, a Methodist church in nearby Fairmont,W.V., held services for the men who had been killed working in the mine.
That was the first Father’s Day celebration.
It was a sad and solemn day, and one not acknowledged outside the town of Fairmont.
Slowly but surely, the day caught on. The next year, in 1909, a Washington state woman named Sonora Smart Dodd was galvanized enough by the rise of Mother’s Day to push for a day to acknowledge male parents.
In 1924, 10 years after Mother’s Day was made official, President Calvin Coolidge urged states to celebrate it.
As it gained in popularity and Anna Jarvis began to disavow her own creation, another movement emerged to get rid of Mother’s Day and Father’s Day in favor of the more egalitarian, though ultimately unsuccessful, Parent’s Day.
What finally cemented Father’s Day into history was what Mother’s Day was initially created to end: war.
During World War II, celebrating the fathers who were off at war was part of the family’s patriotic duty, while advertisers, burned by the Depression, tried to promoted a spending day in July for “the man of the house.”
And in Fairmont a historical marker proudly commemorates the birthplace of what is now known as Father’s Day.
