Father’s Day, as we know it today, largely exists because of the efforts of one American woman. Questioning why a counterpart to Mother’s Day did not exist, she launched a decades-long campaign to honour the memory of her father. Sonora Smart Dodd is a name often associated with the day’s history. The American woman first marked the day in 1910 as a tribute to her widowed father William Jackson Smart, who fought in the US Civil War (1861 to 1865) and raised Dodd and her five siblings.
