For Father’s Day today, my ward gave men a treat, but sacrament meeting talks weren’t focused on the importance of fathers or anything like that. This feels consistent with my experience generally. Father’s Day is mentioned at church, and sometimes talked about, but Mother’s Day by contrast is absolutely essential. It would be unthinkable to have talks about tithing or food storage on Mother’s Day, or even (at least in my experience) to have a stake conference. But Father’s Day is totally fair game to tromp on with other topics. Just to be clear, I’m absolutely not complaining about this. I’m just observing. I can buy my own treats.
The reason this happens is, I think, pretty obvious. Since it has become less acceptable to openly put women down and GAs have largely rhetorically moved from patriarchy to chicken patriarchy, they’ve needed to embrace their opportunities to pedestalize women, and explain at every turn how very very honored and equal they are. Mother’s Day is a great opportunity. Largely male speakers can rhapsodize at the pulpit about how wonderfully self-sacrificing their mothers and wives are, and how inspiring they find it that these women choose to give up their own aspirations in life to serve as supports to the men in their lives. Needless to say, there is no parallel need to reassure men about how important we are. The very structure of the Church communicates it to us constantly. Father’s Day is a nice afterthought, a reminder that oh, sure, fatherhood matters too. But it’s not doing the work that motherhood is, rhetorically, to make it seem more okay that women aren’t ordained or allowed to handle money or run wards or sacrament meetings or the highest Church councils or baptisms or funerals or excommunications. The Church embraces Mother’s Day more than Father’s Day for the same reason that we get conference talks called The Honored Place of Woman, The Moral Force of Women, LDS Women Are Incredible!, and Woman—Of Infinite Worth, but no parallel talks directed at men.
But of course it’s just my experience that a bigger deal is made at church of Mother’s Day than Father’s Day. And I’d understand if you’re a bit suspicious that I’m remembering it that way simply because I expect it to be that way. So I thought I’d do a quick look at Church magazines. I looked for references to both Mother’s Day and Father’s Day in the Ensign (this was the Google search string I used for Mother’s Day: “mother’s day” site:churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign). I didn’t read through each article, but I did do some quick checking to make sure the results weren’t spurious (for example, excluding those that matched only because the Table of Contents on the left of the article listed another article that had “Mother’s Day” in the title).
Here are two hypotheses I had before I gathered the data: (1) There would be more references to Mother’s Day than to Father’s Day, and (2) the number of references to Mother’s Day in particular would go up from the 1970s to the 1990s as the Church moved more toward becoming the Church of the Family Proclamation.
As you can see, the total number of mentions is small enough that I put it into five-year bins to make the results easier to look at. The data are surprisingly consistent with both of my hypotheses. Mother’s Day has 68 total mentions, and Father’s Day only has 24. Also, the mentions of Mother’s Day went up markedly in the 1980s and 1990s, although they’ve dropped off again since then.
Again, the number of mentions is really small. For Mother’s Day, 68 in the 50 years of the Ensign is only 1.4 mentions a year. So it’s not like discussion of these holidays is dominating Church discourse. But when one or the other does get brought up, it is, as I expected, far more often Mother’s Day.
I’d love to hear your experiences of whether Mother’s Day or Father’s Day has gotten more emphasis in wards you have lived in.
I often noted that discrepancy as well, but it was just impressionistic, so it’s interesting to see a chart with actual numbers. As you say, it makes sense in a context in which to be a woman literally means to be a mother (at least for the Sherri Dew school of thought), but the same isn’t true for fathers, at least not in the same way, because to be a man is to be a person, not a role.
Extremely anecdotally, though, since I haven’t been to LDS church in several years now, I hear that Father’s Day is getting more emphasis, and even treats sometimes, too, though I imagine that varies by ward. Like you, I’d be curious to hear people’s experiences!
Our ward had the primary children sing. Treats were handed out to all men aged over 18… same as for the women on Mother’s Day. In contrast the talks were not about fathers. Which is fine, I ‘d prefer for them not to be about mothers too.
Three talks about presiding, providing and protecting from the EQ presidency. All men of about my age, they varied in how strongly they adhered to the presiding aspect. The first said that presiding was about being the ones who asked the questions of providing and protecting and if they weren’t asking those questions, then they weren’t presding correctly even though both parents were technically in charge. He undercut his point when he then talked about the bishop doign the same thing for the ward. The second talk was pretty Proclamation heavy. Gender roles are god-given etc. The third one did the best in centering his partnership with his wife throughout it. I later told him (because we’re friends) that it’s funny to me that those who are the most thoughtful about the Proclamation pretty much have to redefine the proclamation to make it work and triple highlight the “your milage may vary” line.
During the years I sat in Ward Council as both Primary and Relief Society president, each year a man would say that he would prefer that we not celebrate Fathers Day in Sacrament Meeting. Each year, my response was the same: if I have to sit through a Mothers Day program, you have to sit through a Fathers Day program. You can drop Fathers Day when you drop Mothers Day. As a result, each year we had a Fathers Day program.
This year our ward delivered treats to our door on the Saturday before the program for both days, so I don’t have any idea how broadly they were distributed. A married couple spoke in Sacrament Meeting. She spoke about the role of fathers in the family, with a very traditional approach. He spoke about how Heavenly Father worked in his life. His was an excellent talk. But that approach of focusing on Heavenly Father is also a very traditional approach in our ward.
Our ward knocked it out of the park this Sunday. I can’t remember one word that any of the speakers said, but when the primary kids sang “the Grandfathers Song” (not sure of it’s real name) and ended with a shout of “hooray!”, well, it don’t get no better than that.
just one thought: when the World and the Church has finally overturned and squashed all gender roles, is there any chance that we could leave some parts of being a grandpa still intact? Many of us long ago acquiesced all power and authority in our home to our wives – willingly. We’ve found that the great wisdom and life experience that we were told to past down to our children a) doesn’t exist, b) falls on deaf ears, and c) admittedly, isn’t that wise and has little place in the 21st century. Which leaves what many of us would prefer doing in the first place: being head cheerleader for our grandchildren. In everything. Every place. Every time. Under Every condition, no matter what they choose to do.
The world won’t be creating a lot of cheerleaders for our grandchildren and I can’t think of a higher calling for old dudes.
Cheiko Okazaki wrote “Healing From Sexual Abuse: Eight Lessons for Survivors, Families and Leaders in 1993 and it was published by Deseret Book. She cited that 33% of the population had been sexually abused, and pleaded with primary leaders to understand that according to that statistic, many primary children in *every ward* and likely most classes have been abused. She asked us to be more sensitive to their pain and to be healers. For example, (she said) how would a child who has or is being abused by a father or father figure feel singing “I’m so glad when daddy comes home”?
As much as we loved Sister Okazaki, I’m afraid that cultural norms are extremely difficult to change, even in light of the pain and suffering of little children. We might say that “you can pry this [song] from my cold dead hands.”
Thanks, everyone, for your comments. It’s interesting to hear what different wards have done.
Mortimer, that’s an excellent point. A couple of the mentions of Mother’s Day and Father’s Day I found were about being sensitive to kids for whom the holidays might be painful. But as you said, it seems unlikely that we’ll really change things on the whole for the better for these kids.
And methuselah, I love your idea of being a cheerleader and supporter for your grandkids in everything they’re doing. I’m not quite to that stage of life, but if or when my kids have kids, I would be thrilled to take on that role!
You’re a good person, Ziff.
I agree, Mathuselah!
Aww, thanks! You all are very kind!