This year, ahead of Father’s Day, Dove has been running an ad for its collection of men’s personal-hygiene products which shows dads performing the various tasks of contemporary fatherhood. There are a few old-fashioned superhero moments—teaching a child how to swim, coming to the rescue after a bad dream, dancing with a daughter on her wedding day—but most of the scenes are more mundane. We see a dad scuttling to the bathroom to assist with potty training, doing the laundry, comforting a crying toddler, brushing a daughter’s unruly hair. There is an emphasis on the father as a soothing caregiver, a role that is traditionally associated with motherhood. In one clip, a father kisses his teen-age son on the forehead on prom night. The boy crinkles his nose, smothered and embarrassed. “Isn’t it time we celebrate Dads?” the tagline reads, positioning the spot as a corrective to outmoded ideas of the father as a distant, aloof domestic presence.
Yet Father’s Day began as a celebration of the father’s engaged and able participation in the family. In 1909, in Spokane, Washington, a twenty-seven-year-old woman named Sonora Dodd was sitting in church, listening to a sermon marking Mother’s Day, which had yet to become a recognized national holiday but was celebrated widely. Her mother had died giving birth to her sixth child when Sonora was sixteen, leaving her father, William, alone to raise his family. William was a farmer and a former sergeant in the Union Army, and seems to have acquitted himself well, with the help of his only daughter. Sonora figured that fathers like William should get their own day of formal recognition. As Leigh Eric Schmidt writes in his book, “Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays,” Sonora’s original petition for a local holiday emphasized fathers’ duties as “the training of children” and “the protection of womanhood and childhood.” Schmidt writes that “as initially envisioned by Dodd, Father’s Day sounded distinctly ‘feminized,’ with core concerns about Father’s role within the home…. In this context, the images of fatherhood were often tender, gentle, sensitive, and companionate.” Local officials were convinced, and the next year marked the first celebration of Father’s Day in Spokane, on the third Sunday of June. Over the next few years, it gained national attention and caught on across the country.
Woodrow Wilson made Mother’s Day a national holiday in 1914. But for years, Father’s Day was mostly considered, and often derided as, an informal, commercial holiday. From the beginning, some of the resistance stemmed from the fact that there was something funny about buying presents for dads. Fathers, it seemed, had little use for the kinds of gifts given to mothers, such as flowers or other small tokens of affection. As for other presents, the idea was that the father, as the higher wage earner, already had to the ability to satisfy his consumer desires. Dads knew what they liked, and their purchasing decisions could be as private and as mysterious as the rest of their professional lives. Leigh Eric Schmidt notes that many of the criticisms of Father’s Day pointed out that it was fathers who would end up footing the bills for the unwanted gifts bestowed on them by their kids. Men’s comparative economic autonomy created a kind of anxiety about gift-giving that still lingers—the common, lamenting phrase “What to buy the man who has everything” is, in part, a rephrasing of the notion that men could buy what they wanted.
Father’s Day got a significant boost, and a final push toward general recognition, in the early thirties, when the Associated Men’s Wear Retailers, a New York trade group, formed a Father’s Day Committee and débuted a new slogan, “Give Dad Something to Wear.” In 1938, the trade group redoubled its efforts, forming the National Council for the Formation of Father’s Day and hiring a retired adman, Alvin Austin, to marshal its promotion. This is the holiday’s other origin story, and it is a plainly commercial one: Father’s Day would become what Schmidt identifies as a “second Christmas” for men’s retailers. In 1972, Father’s Day was made official, signed into law by Richard Nixon, who wrote, grandly, “In fatherhood we know the elemental magic and joy of humanity.”
The custom of buying Dad a necktie (or another manly present, such as tobacco, cologne, or, later, power tools and gadgets), aided by yearly ad blitzes, became the midcentury’s middle-class standard, with mothers taking their kids to the department store to pick out a tie, a razor, or a bottle of Old Spice. They were rather gloomy offerings, and symbols of the white-collar dad’s professional life: his routine, his absence, and his almost generic unknowability.
The necktie, especially, became a go-to gift—and a frequently used joke in Father’s Day advertising, an example of the lame present that no father actually wants. A magazine ad for Chivas Regal, from 1981, captured that idea, which still endures: photographs of ties, still in their boxes, gifts from the past seven Father’s Days. And then, by ‘81, finally, some relief: a bottle of scotch surprises Dad in the same-shaped box. “Patience does have its rewards,” the caption reads—Dad deserves a drink. Gift-guide articles, another boon of these marketing-engineered holidays, often still begin with the premise of the tie as the default gift, offering better, more creative alternatives from that derided baseline.
But the tie is also still a useful symbol for the ways in which, through its commercialization, Father’s Day has travelled far from its beginnings as a sentimental corollary to Mother’s Day. For years, the gifts that children have been encouraged to buy for their fathers have emphasized the dad as a man apart. They are symbols of an adult world that children don’t quite understand—work clothes, alcohol, shaving paraphernalia, cordless drills—representing places that take men away from home, where they can be alone.
In a Talk of the Town story from 1999, Nicholas Lemann wrote about the time that he met Alvin Austin, the adman who helped give us Father’s Day as we know it. Lemann worried about the modern role of dads, citing a Princeton study which argued that there was little evidence that the involvement of fathers in the home had a positive effect “on the well-being of mothers and children.” Sonora Dodd would have been disappointed. Lemann continued:
The Dove commercial, however, is a celebration of the value of the soccer dad—and of the dad who changes diapers and kisses his children. From a brand perspective, it makes sense: buying your father moisturizer anticipates closeness; skin-care products are, in large part, about the value of softness and intimacy. It may not be revolutionary, but its sincerity stands out compared to another high-profile Father’s Day campaign from this year, which continues to emphasize fatherhood as a fraught and unsettled emotional enterprise. The American Greetings card company has produced a response ad to its own Mother’s Day commercial, called “World’s Toughest Job,” which showed women taking part in mock job interviews that emphasized the daunting nature of motherhood. In “World’s Toughest Job-Dad Casting,” actors bumble through scenes of domestic conflict, flubbing their lines, revealing themselves to be clueless, emotionally stunted, and largely bewildered by the customs of middle-class American parenthood. At the end, the moment of sincerity is simply that they are there to listen—“I’m here for you”—like dumb sounding boards, holding down the fort until Mom gets home from work to sort things out. These dads are goofballs, and probably, at best, deserve another necktie.
