MOTHER’S DAY, FATHER’S DAY, AND MARKETING

The ancient Greeks were the first to pay tribute to mom, sort of…. The Greeks celebrated Rea, the mother of all Greek gods. This spring festival didn’t stick, however.

In medieval Britain, servants were given the fourth Sunday of Lent to go see their moms. This custom was called “mothering Sunday.”

The American incarnation of Mother’s Day was established by Anna Jarvis in 1908 and became an official U.S. holiday in 1914 in honor of her late mother’s own overheard prayer. Jarvis would later denounce the holiday’s commercialization and spent the latter part of her life trying to remove it from the calendar.

With a monthlong gap between Mother’s Day (May 10 this year) and our upcoming American salute to dads (June 21) in which to think about it… we wondered, why does Father’s Day sort of get overshadowed by a holiday that the creator wishes never existed?

For that we delve into a brief origin story of Father’s Day, was created right here in my green state of Washington. A Spokane woman, Sonora Smart Dodd, was one of six children ultimately raised by a widower. When she was 16, her mother died in childbirth with her sixth child. Sonora was the only daughter, and shared with her father, William, in the raising of her younger brothers, including her new infant, Marshall.

In honor of her Civil War veteran father, Sonora 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 officially commence the holiday that would be transmitted and heard in Spokane. In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge urged state governments to observe Father’s Day. Today, the day honoring fathers is celebrated nationwide on the third Sunday of June.

However, much like the turn that Anna Jarvis regretted about Mother’s Day taking, Father’s Day would soon evolve into another marketing ploy to get people to spend. When the honor was first established, many men continued to disdain the day. As one historian writes, 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.”

During the 1920s and 1930s, a movement arose to scrap Mother’s Day and Father’s Day altogether, in favor of a single holiday, Parents’ Day. Every year on Mother’s Day, pro-Parents’ Day groups rallied in New York City’s Central Park – a public reminder, said Parents’ Day activist and radio performer Robert Spere, “that both parents should be loved and respected together.”

In somewhat of a paradox, however, the Great Depression derailed this effort to combine and de-commercialize the holidays. Struggling retailers and advertisers redoubled their efforts to make Father’s Day a “second Christmas” for men, promoting goods such as neckties, hats, socks, pipes and tobacco, golf clubs and other sporting goods, and greeting cards.
In this writer’s opinion, I call that a wash: Two holidays that started out with thoughtful meaning quickly commercialized into a money-making scheme.

But then again, we in the U.S. are more of a business than a country; after all, the U.S. was founded by entrepreneurs looking to strike it rich in the promise land. Is it not the American dream to establish an idea and make money off of it? The same money that promises us a better life if one possesses enough of it? We are corporate America – should we take that into account before ousting the notion of commercialization?

Maybe we should make Mother’s Day and Father’s Day into one holiday, as some people wanted nearly a century ago.

In the true spirit of Father’s Day and Mother’s Day, meantime, I would like to thank all parents, of all shapes and sizes, for the sacrifices you make every day so that your child can live a good life.

Advocate Staff