100 years ago in Spokane: Sonora Smart Dodd backs plan to merge Mother’s Day and Father’s Day

A plan was underway to merge Mother’s Day and Father’s Day into one single day — Mother and Father’s Day — and Sonora Smart Dodd was all in favor of it.

She was the Spokane woman who founded Father’s Day about eight years earlier.

“We, the Fathers’ champions, are elated,” she told the Spokane Daily Chronicle. “This is the culmination of our ideal.”

She said the whole point of Father’s Day was to make certain that, when the “good and great” are honored, fathers would not be forgotten.

“Now, magnanimous minds all over the world are willing to acknowledge father as part of the great human family,” she said. “Good!”

She said the Father’s Day movement had taken hold around the country and that it was “not unusual now to find an entire magazine spread given over to extolling the pater-familias.”

The merged Mother’s and Father’s Day was planned for the next year, 1919. However, this was an idea that ultimately failed to take hold. Parents retained their special, and separate, days.