As someone once wrote “Why is it that when Joe Pesci clamps a guy’s head in a vise it’s horrific, but when Moe clamps Curley’s head in a vise it’s hilarious?”
What’s weird is the same people who like shows like Father Knows Best are often the same people who lose their shit if the Little Mermaid is played by a Black person, or if The Odyssey is “historically inaccurate.”
It’s almost as if they internalized all the racist indoctrination of those shows and never learned to take anyone else’s worldview in to account.
Which is almost certainly a nod to Married… with Children (a.k.a. the 1990s rejoinder to the Father Knows Best brand of sitcom), where David Faustino played Bud Bundy.
After unemployment and poverty in the Great Depression, and chaos and destruction in World War II, a lot of people wanted to be safe, secure cogs in a gigantic corporate machine.
I happened to watch a late-era LitB a couple of weeks ago. While cool Uncle Billy is watching the kids (Ward and June are on a trip), the Beav gets caught sneaking someone into the theater, and rather than being cool, Uncle Billy demands the theater give him an even longer ban from movie attendance. When Ward and June come home, however, Uncle Billy lies and says nothing exciting happened, and the Beav learns that it’s okay to lie in a good cause, or at least one that benefits him.
My main takeaway was watching Hugh Beaumont and Barbara Billingsley deliver lines that must have been so utterly familiar to them that they could do them in their sleep, but they still somehow provide the right amount of animation. It must have felt like a treadmill.
Kind of a fascinating wrap to Hugh Beaumont here: What happened to Hugh Beaumont after Leave It to Beaver?
Those old shows did exactly what they were made to do, spread the commercials out. If they had found a way to make them blander and less offensive, they would have. TV audiences at the time weren’t too critical about what was offered.
Lauren Chapin wrote a book about her miserable childhood and after ‘Father Knows Best’. I love celebrity biographies and am always shocked when I read how bad some had it before fame and fortune. But her experiences were truly shocking and gross. Classic classic acting out after dysfunction, drugs and alcohol, prostitution, and horrendous experiences with men. She went to rehab after rehab, the last one for a long time, and the only thing that seemed to stop her from immediately getting back on the drugs was finding out she was pregnant. And that was the best thing that ever happened to her! She later became a preacher, I think.
His mother was the home furnishings editor at The Des Moines Register, basically a needed female name on the masthead of what was basically an advertising section, and the fact that her husband already worked there as a long-standing (50 years) sports journalist might have a bit to do with it.
I was able to find one small writeup on her, Mary Agnes McGuire Bryson (1913-2015) - Find a Grave Memorial, where “She had fond memories of her years with the newspaper overall, noting however some disparities, including pay (women’s being far less) and how certain news items were covered.”
Am getting around to chipping in my two cents after lurking in this thread for a while.
For me as well, “Father Knows Best” is a show I know about only from media references (and from the aforementioned movie “Pleasantville,” a critical parody of the show’s ethos). But that it would have been premised on the kind of culture described by the OP, which culture would have been highly retrograde by today’s standards, doesn’t surprise me at all. I’m certainly not a child of the 50s, having been born in 1979 (my memories stretch back to at least 1982). But years of acquiring factual knowledge have long taught me that the values of mainstream society were very different until mainly young people began to challenge them with the counterculture movement of the 1960s, which basically laid the foundations for the more tolerant, questioning, and egalitarian society of today.
There have been numerous related threads here; just recently we discussed girls often not being allowed to wear pants to school until the early 1970s. Or here is a classic thread that grew to be very long and that should be highly educational as to numerous strictures and expectations that society had well within living memory: In the dustbin of our cultural history.
Bland staple TV sitcoms and other media would have reflected established social expectations, not necessarily what everyone would have been happy to expect. Case in point: the OP describes how “Father Knows Best” performs mental hygiene encouraging girls and women not to aspire to having serious careers but to focus on getting a husband and becoming a homemaker. This was the “official line” at the time, to promote the ideal of a nuclear family where Dad was the sole breadwinner and Mom took care of the house, the kids, and her husband.
This was in fact a patriarchal reaction to what had happened in World War II, where tons of women took jobs to free up man to go into the Armed Forces. Women were massively employed in factories, some got jobs as pilots ferrying military aircraft across the Atlantic, others joined the women’s branches of the military (WACS, WAVES, WRENS, ATC, whatever), and supplemented the “men’s army” as clerks, drivers, postal workers, and so on. When the War ended, their conitnued employment was highly discouraged, as it was seen as keeping jobs from men who had served in the military and were now being demobilized. There was a lot of pressure for women to simply accept the idea that their proper role in society was to be housewives. Where this idea was not promoted by a woman’s friends, it was encouraged by gendered advertising, mainstream media, and the way the job market worked).
But this doesn’t mean that all women and blindly accepted such a fate. There is numerous data to the effect that many 1950s housewives were very dissatisfied with the role that society had foisted on them (for fictional examples, think of April Wheeler in the 1961 novel / 2008 movie “Revolutionary Road” and Laura Brown in the 2002 movie “The Hours”); and many of them turned to psychotherapy, alcohol, and prescription drugs in order to cope.
This dissatisfaction culminated in Betty Freidan’s landmark 1963 book “The Femnine Mystique,” in which the author talked about the lot of women in society and shared accounts of dissatisfaction of actual housewives. This book more or less singlehandedly kicked off Second Wave Feminism, during which women started to fight for having fully equal rights with men. To put things into perspective, First Wave Feminism (more or less the 19th century to the 1920s, suffragism, etc.) had achieved giving women the right to vote and hold public office, not to have their property taken and controlled by their husbands, not to have their physical person under direct control of their husbands, and to be able to get certain jobs. However, in the 1960s, it was still legal to pay women less than men, to withhold jobs from them on the basis of their sex, to require a husband’s or other male’s countersignature for credit cards, etc., and to demand sex of (i.e., rape) your wife. The status of hitting your wife was also a legally gray zone – though technically assault, the police were often reluctant to get involved in “private family conflicts.” It was finally during the 1960s and into the 1970s that these things were massively challenged by women and their allies.
To show just how socially acceptable crudely sexist media was as recently as the 1960s, look at this gem from 1967, an ad for Eastern Airlines solely featuring young women who are supposedly “the losers,” I.E. not good enough to be hired as stewardesses by them (immature, married, wears glasses, not conventionally feminine…) Furthermore, a print ad from the same “Presenting the Losers” campaign features a cluster of young models, including some of the most attractive ones of the time, like Ali McGraw. And that’s more than a decade after “Father Knows Best.”
But to get back to sitcoms: one that seems not to have been mentioned upthread is “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” which debuted in 1961. This show, while still showing the conventional family model of a father who brings home the bacon and a mother who is a homemaker, had a younger and in some ways slightly more progressive flair to it. Here is an interesting fact: The mother, Laura Petrie, wears slacks around the house. On one hand, this reflected real housewives at the time. On the other hand, it caused some controversy in production. IIRC, they wanted Moore’s character to wear house dresses all the time like Lucy Arnaz and June Cleaver, but Moore insisted on her slacks because, as already stated, real housewives were already wearing them at the time on a normal day at home.
Since the title of the thread is “The great 1950s, as depicted in “Father Knows Best””, there might be a reason why a show that started in the 60s might not have been mentioned before.
Point taken. But I think it’s worth mentioning the show in the context of the thread, seeing as it comes from 1961, that is, early in the decade. Nothing happened at midnight on 1 January 1960 that would change society’s mores and ethos (the same can be said of the start of any calendar decade), and the early 1960s were still culturally very much in the 1950s. Sure, there may have been some first swallows of the change that was to come, but most people still behaved according to the confirmist, gendered, racialized, church-going norms of the previous decade. I would suggest – and someone correct me if I’m wrong – that the “cultural decade” of the 1960s began in 1963 (as said above, the start of 2nd-wave feminism, and then the Kennedy assassination, which sparked the onset of distrust in the government), plus or minus a year (the Beatles, who were very influential, were already a thing in Britain in 1962 but only crossed the Pond in 1964), and ended in 1973 with the end of the Vietnam War, which made the protest and hippie movements less relevant and by which time the trends of the previous decade had exerted influence on mainstream fashion.
Can you think of a certain person that may have influenced the character of “Laura Petrie” in October 3 of 1961 (The actual start date of the show, and not January 1 of 1960)? As the influence of Jackie Kennedy rose, the more her modernism rose in the character that was somewhat modeled after her. This is why the character of Laura is a bad example to use when talking about the families of the fictional fifties.
True and to be clear, I actually wouldn’t knock that. I was a government worker rather than corporate. But otherwise, while it’s definitely nothing to brag about, my biggest achievement in life probably does boil down to me having been a functional cog in society.
There are worse things.
Like that there were almost no cogs available for your sex, race or age.
We’ve been talking about the shows, but the real power was with the audiences.
Shows were all white because stations in the South - still mostly defined as the Confederate states - would not run an episode with a black, non-servile, character. Individual stations, outside of a handful owned by the networks, are independent affiliates. They can choose to not run anything the network sends down.
Networks poked back cautiously. Nat King Cole had an hour variety show on NBC for six months in 1957. It never picked up a national sponsor. Brands didn’t want southern audiences to associate them with a black host.
Most shows in the 1950s had a single sponsor. The sponsor had near total control over the content. Performers incorporated ads into programs (like Lucy and Desi smoking in bed after, presumably, wonderful unshown sex). Advertisers hate controversy. Nothing political, sexual, religious (except Christmas), racial, or critical of American wonderfulness was allowed into shows. Of course programs were flattened into the most anodyne vision: they were the joyous, smiling people in the backdrop of every print ad in every magazine brought to 3-D life.
And that gave Pat Weaver, the head of NBC, his industry-changing idea. Instead of finding one advertiser to spend a season’s worth of money and then taking command, why not imitate magazines? Sell blocks of commercial time to a variety of advertisers who were never mentioned in the show itself. The so-called magazine style was slowly rolled out in the mid-to-late 1950s and took over the industry by around 1960. Advertisers still had plenty of power, but not total control.
Other changes happened around the same time, Civil Rights and Sputnik upended American views of themselves, e.g., making the 60s were subtly different even pre-Beatles, so television changed as well, mostly for the better.
When asking why things were like they were once, ask who had the power to stop change. They’re usually in the background, lurking and dangling their strings.
Note that women made up about a third of the total workforce in the 1950s, towards the end was the highest of course. But still, working wives were not rare.
Working women (on television, the topic of this thread) earning anything remotely near what men earned and doing what men usually do?
Damn rare.
Working women working while the husband stayed home?
Right. 
The top five careers for women in the 50s were teacher, nurse, stewardess, secretary and librarian, which pretty much matched the careers of the few women that worked on tv shows back then.
I didnt post about that but even in the 50s, some families had only a Mother, with the Father dead or gone.
Are there any shows at all in the fifties that represented this aspect?
A single major sponsor, quite true. There were also secondary sponsors, but you’re quite correct, the Big Guy ran the show. In the case of I Love Lucy it was Philip Morris, hence the prevalence of cigarettes in the show and, as I mentioned before, Desi Arnaz’s appeal to the chairman of Philip Morris about the pregnancy controversy. This followed the tradition of radio where even the show’s name included the sponsor’s name. I Love Lucy always opened with a pitch for the sponsor. The “heart on satin” opening that most of us have seen was designed later specifically for syndication.
Father Knows Best seemed less commercially infested. Its primary sponsor was the Scott paper company, and briefly in its first year by Kent cigarettes and later by Lever Brothers as a co-sponsor. There was no blatant product placement unless you count the paper towel roll plainly visible in the Anderson kitchen. I Love Lucy was more blatant – besides the constant smoking, when one or two of the characters were shown at a diner counter, there would be a “Call for Philip Morris” sign behind them, and mentions of Lilt home permanent and Ford were often embedded in the credits. Some shows, time permitting, ended with Lucy and Desi shilling for one or the other.