Father's Day was established in the United States many years after Mother's Day which was created by Anna Jarvis in 1908. Getting a holiday celebrating fatherhood was not easy. It took so many years for it to be agreed upon as a day to be celebrated. Although many people advocated for Father’s Day, it took a very long time for it to be accepted and recognized as a real holiday.

During the earliest years that Father's Day was celebrated, it was merely a very small event and was not spread because nobody promoted it. It had its first step in 1907 in a church of West Virginia after a horrible mining accident in Monongah which killed more than 200 fathers.

Grace Clayton, one of the children involved in the loss of a father, asked the pastor of Central United Methodist Church to hold some sort of event to honor and remember all the fathers who had died in that tragic disaster. The pastor agreed. However, the event passed unnoticed outside the town and stopped there.

In 1909, a woman named Sonora Dodd— whose father, a Civil War veteran, raised her and her five siblings after their mother died in childbirth— first heard about Mother's Day and wanted to have a similar celebration for fathers. She shared her opinion with her pastors, who supported her. Thus, they decided to hold a sermon on the third Sunday of June, the 19th of June 1910.

This continued for a few years and Dodd attempted to make the day famous into the 1920s. In the United States, Father's Day got a boost from President Calvin Coolidge in 1924, who encouraged state governments to begin observing the holiday. However, Father's Day faded again. Thus, Mrs. Dodd started promoting it again in the 1930s, trying to get people to embrace Father's Day. She was even supported by different companies this time since the companies would benefit from the gift sales. This went on for many years, but was never really seen as a holiday like Mother's Day.

Many years later, in 1957, a senator, Margaret Smith, addressed to Congress that it was inequitable to celebrate only mothers and not fathers. However, nothing really resulted from this until President Lyndon Johnson issued a presidential proclamation to honor all fathers on the third Sunday of June. That was in 1966, but it was not really observed as a national holiday until 1972, when President Richard Nixon finally declared it a law.

Generally speaking, there has been a lot of resistance to Father's Day. Mother's Day, on the other hand, was recognized as a holiday in 1914, just a few years after it first appeared in 1908.

Sources: Britannica, History, Hopkins House