3102 - The Battle to Abolish Father's Day and Mother's Day(Ralph LaRossa)
Course Description
Instructor: Ralph LaRossa
Father’s Day and Mother’s Day occupy sacred positions in American society. Unbeknownst to many, however, was a campaign in the 1920s and 1930s to abolish Father’s Day and Mother’s Day and replace them both with a conjoint celebration, titled Parents’ Day, so that fathers and mothers could be honored simultaneously. More than simply a push to alter the annual calendar, the Parent's Day campaign was, at its core, a battle that reflected the changing social value of fathers and mothers in the early twentieth century. This course offers a blow-by-blow account of how the Parents' Day campaign came to be and why in the end it ultimately failed, and tells a story that illustrates the political maneuvering that often characterizes people’s efforts to draw symbolic boundaries around fatherhood and motherhood.
Bio: Ralph LaRossa is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Georgia State University and the author of, among other works, The Modernization of Fatherhood: A Social and Political History; and Of War and Men: World War II in the Lives of Fathers and Their Families. He has received grants from the National Science Foundation (principal investigator) and National Institutes of Health (co-investigator) in support of research on the social realities of fatherhood during the Machine Age (1918-1941) and on the experience of becoming a father in contemporary society. He also has done research on the transition to parenthood, the social transformation of childhood, the changing culture and conduct of fatherhood, and the symbolic connection between fatherhood and baseball.