Sonora Smart Dodd, 1882-1978

Photo credit - Discovery Robots website

The founder of Father's Day in the US

Sonora Smart Dodd was born and raised in Arkansas. At the age of 7, she moved with her family to Spokane, Washington. When she was 16 years old, her mother died during childbirth. As the oldest child and only daughter of six children, she helped her widowed father raise her siblings, including her newborn brother. At 17, she married John Bruce Dodd, one of the founders of Ball & Dodd Funeral Home, where she later became a part-owner and served as its vice president for 30 years.

In 1909, during a church sermon, Dodd heard about the newly recognized celebrations of Mother’s Day. She thought that fathers also deserve a day of honor, and there should be an official recognition of the devotion and braveness of fathers, such as her civil war veteran single dad. She presented her idea to the Spokane Ministerial Alliance, offering June 5, her father’s birthday, as the day of honor. The Alliance accepted her suggestion but chose the third Sunday of June as the annual celebration, and on June 19, 1910, the first Father’s Day was celebrated in Spokane, WA.

In its first years, Father’s Day was celebrated in fatherhood-themed church sermons that included giving bouquets to the father with the most children, the father with the youngest child, or the oldest men in the congregation.

Over time, the day became popular throughout the country, and Father’s Day committees were founded in Virginia in 1921 and NYC in 1936. The day had many supporters, including Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Calvin Coolidge, though it has not been formalized nationally. Dodd continued to promote the recognition of the day, partnering with local businesses and lobbying groups of various manufactures, such as menswear, whiskey, tobacco, and greeting cards. Eventually, in 1966, President Johnson signed a presidential proclamation stating the third Sunday of June as Father’s Day. In 1972, after 63 years of hard work, 90 years old Dodd lived to see President Nixon establishing Father’s Day as a nationally observed holiday.

In addition to her lifetime advocacy for nationalizing Father’s Day, Dodd was a working artist and a poet. In her 30s, she studied painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, later working as a teacher there. She died at the age of 96.

This post is also available in:

Español

We hope you enjoyed this article.
Please support us so we can publish more herstories about pioneer women.
Donate

We hope you enjoyed this article.
Please support us so we can publish more herstories about pioneer women.
Donate

Fun Facts

  • She had one son.
  • In the 1920s, she worked in fashion design in Hollywood.
  • She was an active member of the Spokane chapter of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union.
  • She wrote and illustrated a series of children’s books about the Native Americans of Spokane titled Children of the Sun.
  • She was honored at the Expo World's Fair of 1974.
  • She is honored with a bronze memorial plaque installed near the YMCA in Spokane. The plaque title is - The Mother of Father's Day.

This post is also available in: Español

Category: Activism & Feminism
Tags: Poet

Shop & Support

Donate & Support
 
Our feminist project of wanderlust and equality-aspired community maps the HerStories of worldwide wonder women.
Explore the website for excellent guided tours, travel tips, unique landmarks, fun girlfriend getaways, events, and in-depth articles about gender, equality, space, and (not-told-enough) female legacy.

About the Project

 

Adrienne-Rich-WWP
Literature & Poetry

Adrienne Rich, 1929-2012

An award-winning American poet, essayist, and feminist thought influencer, who was called “one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century.”

During her long and productive career, Rich published more than 30 books of poetry and essays. In her writing, she explored issues of gender, racism, consumerism, class privilege, and politics. She was considered a radical figure in Second Wave Feminism, yet she was accepted by the institutions, won many awards, and is now considered a classic. The first one was for the collection of poetry, which she published at 22. The same year she graduated from Radcliffe College. Adrienne Cecile Rich was born in Baltimore, MD, and over the years she taught English, poetry, and creative writing at several institutions, including Swarthmore College, Columbia University, City College of New York, and Scripps College in Claremont. Among her most influential works, were two texts that dissected heterosexuality and motherhood as socially constructed institutions. In both cases, she provided a critical perspective toward every woman’s freedom to choose. In the case of Compulsory Heterosexuality, for example, she presented the notion of Lesbian Continuum as an alternative way of thinking about the variety of relationships between women. Both in her poetry and her non-fiction writing, the honestly spoke of taboos, like that of motherhood. In her book “Of Woman Born”, she points out to the difference between motherhood as an experience and an imposed political institution. Her mother was a concert pianist who put her career aside to raise her family, while her father developed his career as an academic. Rich embodied the feeling that she was the benefactor of her mother’s sacrifice. When awarded the 1973 National Book Award, she declared that she accepted it on behalf of all women and shared it with her fellow nominees, Alice Walker and Audre Lorde. In 1997 she refused the National Medal of Arts, she did so to express her critique of the Clinton administration. Her famous quote from the refusal letter stated: “art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of the power which holds it hostage”. By her thirties, she was married and had three children. After her husband’s suicide, she had a relationship with novelist and poet Michelle Cliff. This post is also available in: Español Read more...
Alice-Dunbar-Nelson-WWP
Literature & Poetry

Alice Dunbar Nelson, 1875-1935

A poet, journalist, playwright, and political activist. Associated with the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.

Alice Ruth Moore was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, the daughter of a Creole seaman and a former enslaved black seamstress. After graduating high school at 14, she attended a teacher-training program at Straight University, and at 17, she began teaching at an Elementary school in New Orleans. She became involved with activism at the Phyllis Wheatley Club and wrote for the Woman’s Era Club newspaper – the first newspaper created for and by African American women. In 1895, she published her first collection of poems, essays, and short stories titled “Violets and Other Tales.” That same year she moved to NYC, where she helped establish the White Rose Mission – a settlement house for colored girls. Furthering her education, she took courses at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University. Her writings for the Woman’s Era newspaper caught the attention of the poet and journalist Paul Laurence Dunbar, and in 1898, after two years of correspondence, she moved to live with him in Washington, DC, and they got married. Their relationship fertile their writing but was also disruptive and abusive. He raped her before they got married, and after three years of violent behavior, she left him and moved to Wilmington, Delaware. There, Dunbar taught at various institutes, including Howard High School, the Hampton Institute, and the State College for Colored Students. She never stopped studying, and at 32, she received her M.S degree from Cornell University. In 1913, Dunbar worked as the co-editor and writer for the A.M.E. Review – the African Methodist Episcopal Church’s newspaper. She met poet and civil rights activist Robert J. Nelson, and they got married in 1916. Although she was always involved in political activism, supporting the women’s rights movement and working toward the empowerment of women of color, it was only in 1918 that Dunbar-Nelson was appointed to an official role in the movement as a representative of the Woman’s Committee of the Council of Defense. In 1920, she became the co-editor of the progressive black newspaper, the “Wilmington Advocate.” In that same year, she published a literary anthology, aiming at black readers, titled “The Dunbar Speaker and Entertainer.” At 45, Dunbar-Nelson was a successful and popular writer, consistently publishing articles, columns, and essays in newspapers as well as in academic journals. Dunbar-Nelson became a speaker at various events, including the 1928 American Negro Labor Congress Forum in Philadelphia. After she moved with her husband to Philadelphia in 1932, her health declined, and two years later, she passed away at the age of 60. Dunbar-Nelson is a representative of the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Her writing is characterized by complex understandings of race, gender, and ethnicity. In her work, Dunbar-Nelson explored issues that she dealt with as a woman of color, especially her mixed-raced experiences, not belonging here or there. She wrote about her perspective of education opportunity, workplace environment, and social oppression, inspiring generations of black writers to come. This post is also available in: Español Read more...
Alice Walker WWP
Literature & Poetry

Alice Walker, 1944

A novelist, poet, and social activist. The first African-American woman to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Alice Malsenior Tallulah-Kate Walker was born in Eatonton, Georgia, the youngest of eight children of sharecroppers. At 8, she was injured in her eye after her brother played with a BB gun, causing her permanent blindness in one eye. The mark on her eye made her an easy target to her classmates, so she turned to poetry for comfort. Growing up in the segregated south, she attended an only black kids’ high school, from which she graduated valedictorian. Her high scores granted her a full scholarship to Spelman College, where she studied for two years before transferring to Sarah Lawrence College in NYC. In this period, Walker had an abortion which caused her suicidal thoughts. She wrote all about it in her poems. In 1965, at the age of 21, Walker moved to Jackson, Mississippi, and became active in the civil rights movement. She worked for the Legal Defense Fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and as a consultant in black history to the Friends of the Children of Mississippi Head Start program while serving as writer-in-residence in various academic institutes publishing essays and short stories. At 23, she married Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal, a Jewish civil rights attorney. At the time, interracial marriage was illegal in the south, and the couple had to travel to NYC to get married. On their return, they became the first legally married interracial couple in Mississippi since 1822, when the miscegenation laws passed. During their nine years of marriage, they suffered recurring harassment from the Ku Klux Klan. In 1970, at 26, Walker published her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, following the life of an abusive sharecropper husband and father. Three years later, she was appointed editor of Ms. Magazine, published her second poetry collection and her first collection of short stories. In 1976, Walker returned to NYC and published her second novel Meridian, about several civil rights activists in the south during the 1960s. In the late 1970s, she moved to California, where she wrote her best-known work, The Color Purple. Published in 1982, the novel explores the struggles of a black woman in the racist and patriarchal society of 1900s Georgia. The book was a best-seller, and in the following year, 39 years old Walker became the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Later the novel was adapted into a film featuring Oprah Winfrey and Whoopi Goldberg and a Broadway musical produced by Quincy Jones and Oprah Winfrey. In 1984, she co-founded the feminist publishing company Wild Tree Press. She deepened the world of some of her characters from The Color Purple in two of her novels, The Temple of My Familiar and Possessing the Secret of Joy, and created new characters that allowed her to delve into other social issues, such as female sexuality in By the Light of My Father’s Smile from 1998, and identity questions in Now Are the Time to Open Your Heart from 2005. Throughout the decades, Walker published seven novels, ten poetry collections, four short stories collections, four children’s books, and a dozen collections of essays and articles. In all of her work, Walker deals with the struggles of black people, especially women, and their experiences in sexist, racist, and violent surroundings. Often using Black vernacular, which highlights the hundreds of years of slavery and oppression, she had dealt with complex topics such as rape, isolation, bisexuality, and troubled relationships within the black community. Walker is a long-time social and political activist, promoting and fighting for various causes, from black and women’s rights to environmental issues, Palestinians’ fight for independence, and the elimination of female genital mutilation. This post is also available in: Español Read more...
Anne-Whitney-WWP
Arts

Anne Whitney, 1821-1915

A 19th century independent "New Woman", poet and a sculptress, known for statues that reflect her political and social views as an abolitionist and women’s rights advocate.

Born in Watertown, Massachusetts to a family of Unitarians and abolitionists. Her interest in the arts began in childhood, first as a poet and later on as a sculptress. At the age of 34, Whitney made her first portrait busts, and at 38, she published a collection of her poems but decided to focus mainly on sculpturing. To get a better understanding of the human body, Whitney moved to New York to study anatomy at Brooklyn Hospital, and then to Philadelphia to study drawing and modeling. When she was 46 years old, Whitney and her life partner, Abby Adeline Manning, moved to Rome to learn new sculpturing practices and creating art using nude male models (which was considered inappropriate in the US). At the age of 52, two years after she returned to the USA, Whitney started to work on her most famous work – a sculpture of Samuel Adams, located in the National Statuary Hall Collection in Washington, DC. As part of the ‘New Women’ Movement, Whitney believed that the best way to express her social and political viewpoint is via art. She created many statues, among them were of leading figures of the Suffrage Movement, such as Frances Willard and Lucy Stone, political figures such as the Haitian leader Toussaint Louverture, and the philanthropist Alice Tileston Hemenway. Whitney lived an unconventional and independent life, opened her own studios and traveled through Europe and the US. She was an abolitionist and fought for women’s rights. These days her art pieces are presented around the US, in museums and other public spaces. This post is also available in: Español Read more...
View all

 

*Disclaimer: Please be aware that the information on this page is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. Learn more here.

Skip to content