The founder of Father’s Day was a mother who wanted to honor her single dad: Who was Sonora Smart Dodd?
- Sonora Smart Dodd is widely regarded as the Mother of Father’s Day
- She launched a campaign to have a celebration for fathers when Mother’s Day gained popularity
- She wanted to recognize her father, William Jackson Smart, after he was left to raise his children alone following his wife’s sudden death
As we celebrate Father’s Day on Sunday, June 16, we should also remember the passionate young woman who made the holiday a reality more than a century ago.
Sonora Smart Dodd campaigned for a day to celebrate fathers after noticing all the fanfare surrounding Mother’s Day, which was started in 1908 by a woman named Anna Jarvis.
Dodd and her five brothers were raised by her father, William Jackson Smart, who became a widower after his wife, Ellen Victoria Cheek Smart, died while giving birth in 1898, when Sonora was just 16 years old.
Sonora Smart Dodd was just 16 when her mother died and she later started a campaign to have Father’s Day recognized as a real holiday to celebrate her own and other hardworking dads.
Aside from the assistance of Sonora, the tragic event left the Civil War veteran to raise the couple’s children on his own in Spokane, Washington.
Then in 1909, Dodd interrupted her priest during a sermon about Mother’s Day, wondering why there was no such equivalent for fathers, thinking of course, of her widowed dad.
‘I liked everything you said about motherhood,’ she later reflected about the experience in a 1972 interview, according to Today. ‘However, don’t you think fathers deserve a place in the sun too?’
William Jackson Smart was a Civil War veteran who had to raise his family on his own after his wife died while giving birth.
Married and herself the mother of a son by then, she set out to get her plan in motion and approached the Spokane Ministerial Association and the local YMCA with the idea of celebrating Father’s Day on June 5, which was her father’s birthday.
Both groups liked the idea, but due to timing constraints, the celebration would take place on June 19 instead.
Speeches were given in church and roses were handed out to mark the first Father’s Day celebration in Spokane. Though the day was treated as one of importance in the state of Washington, it took some time to spread across the United States. For comparison, Mother’s Day was made a national holiday in 1914.
President Woodrow Wilson backed the idea as early as 1913 but it would be several decades before it came into law.
Father’s Day was created by Sonora Smart Dodd in Spokane, Washington in 1910. The holiday celebrated its 100 year anniversary in 2010.
In 1957, Senator Margaret Chase Smith from Maine introduced a bill to create an official day, writing: ‘Either we honor both our parents, mother and father, or let us desist from honoring either one. But to single out just one of our two parents and omit the other is the most grievous insult imaginable.’
Rep. Walt Horan took the task to DC in 1966, campaigning to make it an official holiday on the House Floor, according to Politico. He told Dodd’s story and explained how her father worked tirelessly as a single parent.
President Lyndon B. Johnson issued the first proclamation to celebrate fathers on the third Sunday in June. On April 24, 1972, President Richard Nixon signed the holiday into law.
Dodd died in 1978 at the age of 96. The mother-of-one was a children’s book author, sculptor, and a business owner. Her gravestone reads, ‘Founder of Father’s Day.’