Father’s Day 2025, which falls on Sunday, June 15.

As accustomed as we are to the annual holiday, many are less aware of the history behind it.

Father's Day originated in the early 20th century, with the first known celebration occurring on July 5, 1908, in Fairmont, West Virginia, to honor fathers who died in a mining disaster. The holiday was later popularized by Sonora Smart Dodd, who proposed a day to celebrate fathers in 1909, leading to its official recognition in the United States in 1972 when President Richard Nixon declared the third Sunday in June as Father's Day.

Father’s Day can sometimes seem like an afterthought in the late-spring holiday lineup: third place behind Mother’s Day and Memorial Day, a mere warm-up barbecue before the Fourth of July. But the occasion wasn’t invented merely to sell greeting cards, coffee mugs, and last-minute neckties. On the contrary, when Father’s Day became a national holiday in 1972, it was intended—though, badly—to address the most contentious and persistent issues in American history and politics. Its origins lie in the social movements of the 1960s, in stunted efforts to fight deep inequalities of race and class, and in a previous generation’s attempt to solve a perceived crisis of masculinity and fatherhood through ambitious, though ultimately unrealized policies to support families.

This story starts in the fall of 1964, when a middle-aged father and mid-level federal appointee named Daniel Patrick Moynihan hit on what he believed to be the solution to America’s racial conflict in his sleep. Following the passage of the Civil Rights Act in July, many of the bill’s champions, including Martin Luther King Jr., argued that new laws weren’t enough to end centuries of discrimination. Something more substantive was needed. That November, Moynihan, then an ambitious Assistant Security in the Labor Department with three young children of his own, woke up at 4 a.m. certain that the key to avoiding more racial unrest, and even revolution, was to help Black fathers stay with their families.

Moynihan spent much of the next year working on a study, published in the spring of 1965 under the title The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. Initially confidential and anonymous, the document quickly became indelibly identified with its author: The Moynihan Report.

Daniel P. Moynihan is shown appearing before the Senate Government Operations subcommittee which continued it's hearings on urban area problems December 13, 1966.

In the six decades since its publication, the Moynihan Report has come to symbolize how assumptions of racial difference have skewed even liberal policies aiming for social equality. Fair as these charges are, Moynihan’s initial thinking was as much about biased views on masculinity and Freudian psychology as it was about race, and it was shaped by his own experiences with fatherhood.

Born in 1927, Moynihan had grown up in New York City during the Depression, the eldest child of a struggling Irish-American family. When Moynihan was 10, his father, an alcoholic, abandoned them to move to California. Moynihan, his siblings, and his mother were left to scramble for food, work, and shelter. Sometimes they stayed in an apartment for only a month before moving on.

They had few other options. Around the turn of the 20th century, fearing that immigrant children were overwhelming American cities, many local and state governments started requiring paternal child support. Yet enforcement was impossible, for there was no way to track down absent and delinquent fathers. Public benefits were reserved primarily for the families of veterans, and private charity went almost exclusively to widows, for even do-gooders were loath to let absent fathers off the hook by helping their children.

While shining shoes and selling papers to help his mother and siblings, Moynihan graduated from his East Harlem high school at 16. In 1944, the Navy sent him to college, and it was then that he started graduate work on the international labor movement, which led in 1950 to a Fulbright fellowship at the London School of Economics. For Moynihan, succeeding in England meant finding “a wife and a job—simple enough.” To help, he started psychoanalysis.

These private sessions are recorded in Moynihan’s London journals, housed today at the Library of Congress. The journals contain graphic accounts of the inner turmoil around sexuality and fatherhood that Moynihan hoped to resolve through analysis, leading to marriage, family, and a successful career.

In sessions, Moynihan dug up old memories of his father, all of them good. Quickly, his analyst concluded that Moynihan wanted to love his father despite his abandonment; he was grateful to his mother but feared her anger. Female authority had become entangled with the pain of his father’s absence. Between appointments, Moynihan was “literally overwhelmed by simple tender childish emotions” when he saw fathers and children together. When Moynihan had a month left in London, he dreamed that he woke up sobbing because he wanted his father to come back. His analyst said this was the breakthrough. Moynihan had faced his father and was finally ready to honor him.

Soon after Moynihan got back to the United States in 1954, he married Elizabeth, who would be his partner in and out of politics for the rest of his life. They named their youngest John, after Moynihan’s still absent and estranged father. Through friendly connections, Moynihan got a post in Kennedy’s Labor Department.

In Washington, Moynihan cast himself as an expert on and advocate for boys and men. Following his dreamlike revelation in November 1964, Moynihan got the go-ahead to look into helping Black fathers and families specifically. He reached out to Kenneth Clark, a distinguished Black psychologist and professor. Through Clark, Moynihan began to see, as his now-infamous phrase put it, a “tangle of pathology” ensnaring Black families—a complex set of social disadvantages that perpetuated racial inequality.

Moynihan saw divorce and illegitimacy increasing in the United States, but not equally everywhere. “Fatherless nonwhite families,” he noted, were strikingly up. Most Black children lived at some point with only one parent at home. Most also received federal welfare, which was only available if one parent was absent or incapacitated. Merging these statistics together, Moynihan concluded that a disproportionate number of Black fathers were not living at home with their children.

Why were some Black men not living with their children? Moynihan’s answer had two parts. First was the history of slavery. Scholar Stanley Elkins, comparing American slavery to the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, argued that enslavement had forced Black men into “infantile regression,” because they were treated as “boys” and denied the “honorific attributes of fatherhood.” For Moynihan, restoring the “viability” of the Black family meant reversing the legacy of slavery by boosting Black men.

The second, compounding problem, according to Moynihan, was the welfare system—begun to aid families of dead and injured veterans, it unintentionally encouraged men to leave. Moynihan concluded that the result of these conjoined histories was a Black culture of matriarchy that, he thought, had negative consequences for the children who grew up in it, especially given the “dominant” culture of patriarchal masculinity.

In June 1965, Johnson incorporated Moynihan’s ideas into a well-received speech at Howard University. But quickly, the political ground shifted. Johnson committed more resources to Vietnam, straining the budget. Then Moynihan’s full report, still anonymous, was leaked to the press. On August 9, Newsweek identified him as the author. Two days later, the violent arrest of a Black driver by a white police officer developed into a widespread protest centered in Watts, a Black neighborhood of Los Angeles.

Moynihan was hailed as a prophet who had foretold the summer’s violence by some, and condemned as a racist and misogynist who was only “blaming the victim,” especially Black women, by others. As scholar Angela Davis pointed out, the Black single mothers of America did not constitute a matriarchy in any sense that implied a preponderance of social power.

Moynihan’s defense was a simplified, even naive version of his own family story. “I grew up in Hell’s Kitchen,” he told the New York Times in December 1965. “I know what this life is like.” Among other blind spots, he seemed not to have considered that his college scholarship, fellowship in England, and friendly connections within the Kennedy administration might be opportunities that would have been near impossible for a person of color to receive. In 1966, feeling like an outcast from power in Washington, Moynihan took a position at Harvard, where he would lead a center for urban studies.

That June, the Johnson administration finally did something for fathers, as Moynihan had proposed. In the preceding years, the President had used his legislative savvy to shepherd civil rights and voting rights into law. Now Congress gave official recognition to what had long been an informal tradition, a distant afterthought to the widely observed Mother’s Day. “In the homes of our Nation, we look to the fathers to provide the strength and stability which characterize the successful family,” Johnson announced, Moynihan’s phrases still echoing. By special resolution, Father’s Day would be officially celebrated on the third Sunday in June.

In 1969, Moynihan took a leave from his post at Harvard and went back to work on family policy and welfare reform in the Nixon administration. He succeeded in convincing Nixon that a guaranteed basic income would help encourage fathers to remain with their families. Nixon was in favor, but the proposal was cut down in Congress as an undeserved handout. With Moynihan’s most ambitious proposals to support men and families scuttled again, Nixon, too, was left only with symbolic gestures and formalities. In 1972, he went one step further than Johnson and declared Father’s Day a permanent national holiday. [x]

But of course, Father’s Day hardly resolved the problems it was meant to address. Today, we face renewed questions about masculinity, fatherhood, and family. Men are in trouble. Parents need help. This Sunday, we might take the opportunity to revisit the origins of the holiday and think again about other ways to help all men and families thrive. At the core of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s agenda was the belief that easing economic burdens would create more room for families to grow together. Even the most thoughtful gifts, cards, and flowers aren’t enough to feed and educate a family, to pay for childcare, healthcare, and housing, plus maybe a dinner out and the occasional vacation. Perhaps instead, the time has come for policies that will reduce the financial pressures that all families face but weigh disproportionately on those who can least afford to bear them. The world’s greatest dad, and mom, deserve it.

The Untold Story of Father’s Day and the Woman Who Created It

This is surprising!

Take a moment to read up on the history of Father’s Day.

When was the first Father’s Day?

The first Father’s Day was held in Spokane, Washington, in 1910—two years after the first Mother’s Day sermon, which occurred on May 10, 1908—thanks to the efforts of Sonora Smart Dodd, a Civil War–veteran’s daughter who wanted to honor her father and the sacrifices he made.

William Jackson Smart single-handedly raised Sonora and her five younger brothers after their mother’s death in 1898. After listening to a Mother’s Day sermon in 1909, Sonora set out to establish a Father’s Day celebration. For a year, she worked tirelessly with local clergy and civic groups to spread the word, and in June 1910, with help from Spokane’s ministerial alliance and the YWCA, the first Father’s Day took place.

Eventually, The Whole Country Caught On

Sonora hoped it would become a nationwide celebration by 1911, but it wasn’t until 1972 that Father’s Day truly caught on. It was then, when Sonora was 90 years old, that President Richard Nixon declared the third Sunday in June would henceforth be known as Father’s Day, a national holiday.

While Sonora passed away in 1978, her great-granddaughter, Betsy Roddy, lives on with her family’s history in tow.

“Betsy Roddy is now the last direct descendant of the woman who created Father’s Day,” a spokesperson reveals. “Only child of an only child, recently widowed and without children of her own, she admits that as a child she ‘took Father’s Day largely for granted,’ believing the holiday’s traditions were simply her family’s practice. Today, however, she’s ready to embrace her great-grandmother’s legacy.”

Are you looking to embrace Father’s Day, too?

Where Did Father’s Day Come From? Let’s All Cheer for Fathers!

The “Father’s Day” or day that recognizes the role of fathers in the family is an ancient tradition. In history books, there is mention of a Southern European tradition dating back to 1508.

Certainly, in modern days, we do not give Father’s Day a second thought. It’s been almost 50 years since President Richard Nixon’s administration declared the third Sunday in June a day to recognize and honor the role of fathers in society (that occurred in 1972).

Richard Nixon's tenure as the 37th president of the United States began with his first inauguration on January 20, 1969, and ended when he resigned on August 9, 1974, in the face of almost certain impeachment and removal from office.

父亲节（Father's Day），是感恩父亲的节日。约始于二十世纪初，起源于美国，现已广泛流传于世界各地，节日日期因地域而存在差异。最广泛的日期在每年6月的第三个星期日。

1910年，世界上的第一个父亲节于美国诞生，由布鲁斯·多德夫人倡导。多德夫人的父亲威廉·斯马特先生在妻子去世后，独自承担起抚养和教育六个孩子的重任。经过几十年的辛劳，子女们终于长大成人，但斯马特先生却因过度劳累而去世。多德夫人在参加完教会的母亲节感恩礼拜后，深感父亲在养育子女过程中所付出的爱和艰辛不亚于任何一个母亲，因此她希望有一个特别的日子来纪念全天下的伟大父亲。在父亲节这一天，人们会选择特定的鲜花来表达对父亲的敬意和思念。佩戴红玫瑰向健在的父亲表示爱戴，佩戴白玫瑰则表达对亡父的悼念。民国时期“八八父亲节”设立的目的是纪念战争中前赴后继、英勇杀敌的父亲们。

中华人民共和国官方没有设立正式的父亲节。但内地民众习惯上使用6月第三个星期日当做父亲节；但是1949年以前的中国和当前中国台湾地区，父亲节是8月8日。

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Father's Day is a holiday to express gratitude to fathers. It began in the United States in the early 20th century and is now widely spread around the world. The date of the holiday varies from region to region. The most common date is the third Sunday of June every year.

In 1910, the world's first Father's Day was born in the United States, advocated by Mrs. Bruce Dodd. Mrs. Dodd's father, Mr. William Smart, took on the responsibility of raising and educating six children after his wife died. After decades of hard work, the children finally grew up, but Mr. Smart died of overwork. After attending the Mother's Day Thanksgiving Service in the church, Mrs. Dodd felt that the love and hardship her father put in raising his children was no less than that of any other mother, so she hoped to have a special day to commemorate the great fathers in the world. On Father's Day, people will choose specific flowers to express their respect and miss their fathers. Wearing red roses shows love for living fathers, while wearing white roses expresses mourning for deceased fathers. The purpose of establishing "August 8 Father's Day" during the Republic of China period was to commemorate the fathers who bravely fought in the war.

The People's Republic of China has not officially established a Father's Day. However, people in mainland China customarily use the third Sunday of June as Father's Day; however, in China before 1949 and in Taiwan today, Father's Day is August 8.

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