While many people might think Father’s Day has become a purely commercial exercise, the day has its origins around 113 years ago in a daughter’s gratitude for her widowed father’s dedication to love and support his family.

Back in 1909 in Spokane, Washington, Sonora Smart Dodd was listening to a Mothers’ Day sermon which inspired her to devote a special day to her father. William Jackson Smart had single-handedly raised Sonora and her five siblings after their mother died. Deeply appreciative of his love, courage and sacrifices, she organised the first Father’s Day celebration which was held on Sunday 19 June 1910. (Dodd had wanted her own father’s birthday, 5 June, as the day of honour for fathers, but the Spokane Ministerial Alliance instead chose the third Sunday in June.)

Over the years, her idea took root more widely, and in 1924 then US President Calvin Coolidge supported Dodd’s petition on the acceptance of fatherhood and the idea of a national Father’s Day. Two years later, a National Father’s Day Committee was formed in New York City, but it was another 30 years (1956) before a Joint Resolution of Congress recognised Father’s Day – and then another 16 years before President Richard Nixon established the third Sunday of June as the USA’s permanent observance of Father’s Day.

But even before Dodd heard the Mother’s Day sermon that sparked her mission to celebrate fatherhood, it appears that Dr Robert Webb of West Virginia conducted what is considered the first Father’s Day service in 1908 at the Central Church of Fairmont. Word has it that Grace Golden Clayton suggested the service to the pastor having felt inspired to celebrate fathers after a deadly mine explosion in a nearby town several months earlier. The disaster claimed the lives of 361 miners, many of whom were fathers.

Another possible inspiration for Webb’s service was the first official observance of Mother’s Day in the West Virginian town of Grafton two months earlier.

Despite these theories, there’s little doubt it was the efforts of Dodd, the adoring daughter of a widowed Civil War veteran who took on all the duties, love and care of raising his six children, that eventually led to the official recognition of Father’s Day in the USA. Her father died in 1919 aged 77.

Dodd was honored at the World’s Fair in Spokane in 1974. She died four years later at the age of 96, and was buried in Greenwood Memorial Terrace in Spokane.

Across much of the rest of the world, Father’s Day is also celebrated on the third Sunday in June as it is in the USA, but in Australia and New Zealand we celebrate our dads on the first Sunday in September – possibly because it’s better barbecue weather in spring?

The Roman Catholic tradition celebrates fatherhood on the Feast of Saint Joseph, 19 March, although most countries recognise Father’s Day as a secular occasion.

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