What's Wrong with Father's Day?

 

Look, I say this as a dad. As fathers go, I have sacrificed more than many--I'm a gestational father, who carried and delivered my kid like seahorse fathers do. I've dealt with the gauntlet of gender transition so that I can be recognized as a father, so that my kid can roll her eyes at me and say "Daa-aaaad!" when I tell a punny joke. Being recognized as a primary-parent father is important to me.

But Father's Day is still an annoying holiday.

Mother's Day has a grand political history. It was founded by Victorian feminist pacifists during the Civil War to demand recognition of the unpaid labor of love and care performed by women. It took hold in the imaginations of women of the time, who performed all sorts of labor as charity without pay in the 1800s and early 1900s, and wanted recognition of the vital work they did to save the lives of impoverished children, serving as an unpaid social safety net. It was a feminist holiday at root.

Then it got commercialized and sentimentalized in the 20th century as a day to shower mothers with flowers and perfume and jewelry--a practice that thrilled companies and shops. Oh yes, and to allow Mother one day off a year in which she would not have to shop for groceries or cook dinner or clean, which is really pretty winceworthy. "You get 1 vacation day a year!"

So why was Father's Day founded? Because commercial enterprises loved the new commercialized Mother's Day, and wanted people to feel obligated to buy another round of gifts. Corporate leaders meeting together spoke with glee of shoppers considering Father's Day a "second Christmas for men." So they said it wasn't fair that mothers got a holiday and fathers did not. This framed mothers as receiving special treatment and fathers being disrespected. It completely ignores the history of Mother's Day as a push for the recognition of unpaid domestic and social service labor, in an era of "separate spheres" in which only men were supposed to work for pay. (This was never the case in poor households, but working class women were socially disdained for their labor as servants or factory workers.) And commercial spokesmen claiming that women were unfairly getting special treatment founded a long line of antifeminist argumentation that continues to this day. Ick. 

Today, lists of Father's Day gifts continue to be astonishingly gender policing. Stores advertise neckties and whiskey stones, golf balls and heavy wristwatches, shaving brushes and pocketknives. Imagine a single dad struggling to work fulltime and feed and care for his kids--do you think he's playing a lot of golf? Why not offer him a spa day to relax as so many offer moms on Mother's Day? 

I mean, don't get me wrong. I wear ties to work, and I love that my kid gets me a fun tie with seahorses or dinosaurs or UFOs on it! I enjoy campy masculine fripperies like shaving brushes. 

But if we are going to celebrate Mother's Day as a sentimental and not feminist holiday, then rather than having two binary-gendered holidays of Mother's and Father's Days, where we give highly-gendered gifts, as I have said before, we should just have a Parents' Day. That would be inclusive of people of any gender, and recognize that it's not just moms who nurture or dads who play sports.

Anyway, happy parental holiday, friends! That's something worth celebrating.