Fallen From Grace
Rachel Mawson, Eng 105, 9:00
“What until now has been considered a "normal" family, made up of a father, a mother, and a number of children, has in recent years increasingly begun to be viewed as one among several options, which can no longer claim to be the only or even superior form of ordering human relationships.”
-Andreas J. Kostenberger, from
God, Marriage, and Family
America is seen as a melting pot society of many different cultures and traditions. That melting pot theory can describe every community in America, no matter the size. Meet Avery. She attends a small high school in the middle of a mining town, with a total of almost 350 students in grades 9-12. Avery’s circle of friends is the perfect sampling of this melting pot. There’s Ryne and his two older sisters, whose parents are first-generation immigrants from India. Abby’s parents were born in Africa, but they immigrated to United States. Once here, they had four children, and then her father left, leaving her mother to raise four children on her own.
Jenyfer was born when her mother was in high school and has never met her father. She lives with her mother, two half-siblings and bum step father. Ciara has a child of her own. Add that to her drug-addicted father and a non-existent mother and she becomes the head of the household. Avery has a huge family, eight children, all biologically from the same two parents. Her father is Mexican and her mother is Caucasian. Mind you, this is just a sampling of the different modern families that you can find spread across America. How does the family from the 50s fit into this picture – if they fit at all – and where did that family go?
Perched upon the Pedestal
It’s a pretty safe bet that none of us were alive in the 1950s to observe the daily lives of the families of that time. How, then, could we know what the family was like? The answer lies in the television set sitting in your home. Thanks to the gift of modern technology, we are able to watch reruns of the family sitcoms that were on television in those days. Those black-and-white episodes were all meant to be comedies, but to the watchful eye they can reveal some ideas of the make-up of the American family of that time as well as give us a glimpse into the roles and responsibilities of each member of those families.
Take the well-known Cleavers from Leave it to Beaver. When we first meet the Cleaver family in the episode “Ward’s Problem,” they are sitting around a fresh breakfast at the kitchen table, enjoying not just the morning meal but also the morning conversations. As the boys finish their breakfast and get ready to head off to school, June stands up to make sure they don’t forget the lunches that she lovingly packs for them every morning. The boys each kiss their mom on the way out the door and head off to school. Shortly thereafter, Ward finishes his coffee and perusal of the morning paper, kisses his wife, and heads off to work.
When we rejoin the family after school, we see June baking fresh cookies just in time for the boys to walk in the door and we find Ward working in a place where he is accessible to his children. Throughout all the other episodes, we see the same pattern: Ward always dressed in a business suit, June in her pearls, skirt, and matching heels, the boys dressed in slacks and a nice button down shirt, and Wally often wearing his letterman’s jacket (mostly in the later episodes when he was older). Ward is shown as a capable and caring provider for his family and as a fountain of free wisdom, from which his boys eagerly drink.
June is the ultimate housewife: home cooked meals on the table at the same time every day, spotless house, perfect appearance, cupboards stocked and ever-happy children. She can always be found doing something inside the home; she doesn’t have a job outside the home. How could she have time to work outside the home when dinner didn’t come out of the freezer, laundry must be hung outside to dry, school supplies couldn’t be ordered over the internet, and the vacuum didn’t push itself?
The boys are just children. They go to school during the day and play with their friends all afternoon. Of course, they check in often and seek their parents’ advice and permission before doing anything. If something goes wrong or they find that there is something they need, all they have to do is ask and their parents will help them out. It would seem they don’t have a care in the world beyond figuring out their algebra homework and deciding who to take to the school dance.
There is a similar family pattern in the Andersons from Father Knows Best and the Stones from The Donna Reed Show. We can also see that there is a definite hierarchy in this era’s family. Children defer to their parents on all matters; if Father says something it is regarded as law, and he only has to ask once. Husbands may consult their wives but hold the ultimate decision-making powers. With these shows we also get a little more of a glimpse into the ways that the fathers provide for their children. The only thing we are ever told about Ward Cleaver’s occupation is that he is a white-collar professional, but we learn quickly that Jim Anderson is an insurance salesman while Alex Stone is a pediatrician.
Fathers also work hard to be good role models for their children. In the Leave it to Beaver episode “Ward’s Problem,” Ward has to choose between taking Wally on a fishing trip that keeps getting postponed and taking the Beaver to his class picnic. While he would love to do both, he realizes that he can’t. When he finally sits down and tells Wally that there’s not going to be a fishing trip that weekend, Wally gets upset. Ward patiently explains that a man must learn to prioritize and then demonstrates his point by asking Wally what he would do if he were in Ward’s situation.
Wives lie somewhere in between the children and the fathers. They make many of the decisions around the home, such as decorating, grocery shopping, and meal planning. They are kind and caring and do what they can to support their husbands, as we can see when Donna agrees to go out of her way to pick up some X-rays for her husband in the episode “The Ideal Wife” or when Margaret makes dinner for some family friends in “The Promised Playhouse”. Donna even gets involved in the work at the hospital when she helps to throw the Christmas party for the children’s ward.
Unlike children, mothers could argue with their husbands and we often see the wives arguing on behalf of their children, such as in the Father Knows Best episode “The Promised Playhouse,” where we see Margaret pointing out that maybe it would be okay for Betty to back out of just this one date, that maybe it’s a good idea for Bud to have a job, or that her husband did, indeed, make all those promises to Kathy. She points out that her husband must keep his own promises, just as he had just finished telling his kids they must do.
The children are obedient to their parents. They do not mouth off and they really do try to stay out of trouble. That doesn’t mean they’re perfect. They are known to slip in the occasional snide remark or retort. Like in the “The Promised Playhouse,” we can see that the children want to argue with their father but know better. That is, until their mother has argued their point already. Once she has stated her opinions the kids seem to feel safer in helping to remind their father of thesesame things, though they do it in a sarcastic manner.
In a way, the television families of that era were the Dream Team of families. They were watched and idolized by an entire nation, probably by a couple other nations as well. The way they were portrayed on television made it seem that if a family wanted to succeed and be happy, they just had to assume the duties and roles of their television counterparts: fathers needed to work outside the home, mothers needed to stay at home, both parents needed to be guides in their childrens’ lives, and children should be free to be children.
Faltering of the Figureheads
While we can observe similar qualities in the Ricardo family, there are many differences between those early sitcoms and I Love Lucy. By the time the Ricardo family hit the scene, the idea of a family in America had already begun to change. Probably the biggest and most noticeable of the differences is the fact that Ricky and Lucy are different nationalities – Ricky is Cuban and Lucy is an all-American redhead. All the other couples we have come across have been of the same nationality. In the early episodes, Lucy and Ricky do not have any children. Instead, we get to watch them evolve from newlyweds into the happy parents of Little Ricky. We were introduced to the other families what they already had two or three school-aged children.
Where the other fathers were portrayed as white-collar professionals with nine-to-five jobs, Ricky is a singer and a bandleader. His work sometimes takes him away from the home in the evenings when he plays his shows. Like the other fathers, he tries to be patient with his wife and his son, but we often see one of them (usually Lucy) push him past his breaking point. Throughout the duration of the show, there are several times where Ricky bends Lucy over his knee and spanks her as a form of punishment. Not once in any of the other episodes we watched did one father ever lose his temper and use spanking as a form of punishment, not to mention spanking his wife.
If June was the perfect harmony to Ward’s tune, Lucy is the broken string on Ricky’s guitar. Lucy is quite clumsy and not as prim and proper as her predecessors. Who can forget the iconic episode “Job Switching” where she and her neighbor, Ethel, are frantically trying to get rid of all the chocolates off the assembly line? (What? Did I just imply that Lucy had a job outside the home?) While we constantly watch as Lucy’s exploits seem to just make Ricky’s life harder, we saw June Cleaver, Donna Stone, and Margaret Anderson doing everything in their power to make life easier for their husbands.
To make matters worse, Lucy’s usually not alone in her antics. She is more often than not shown running around and causing trouble with Ethel, her neighbor and friend. We hear of June, Donna, and Margaret making references to talking to Mrs. So-and-So at the market but never meet any of these friends in person.
Stability and Sanctuary
Lucy and Ricky’s lifestyle, though probably not that abnormal by today’s television standards, was very different from the society that was portrayed on the television in that era. The show was just different enough to help it stand out but still conformed enough to the ideas of what kind of family should be on television at the time to be accepted by the audiences. The families that people wanted to watch during that era had to be funny and entertaining, but the humor had to be limited to the cleanest and simplest of jokes and plenty of sarcasm.
The one thing we can’t say about that family of the fifties is that they were unstable. Sure, there may have been some fighting and squabbles, but divorce was not an accepted solution. There was always a stable, two-parent support system for each kid, and the children always came first. For example, in “The Promised Playhouse” we watch as Jim Anderson gives up the company of his dinner guests to keep his promises to Kathy about the back yard. The most foreign part of that concept is that his dinner guests didn’t at all become offended.
The family of the fifties was truly picture perfect, or so it seemed to be on the television. It seems that the changes started by the Ricardo family have continued to snowball change for American television. Writers have continued to push the boundaries of television farther and farther. Now, we see couples who choose to raise their children outside the bonds of wedlock. There are also many more single-parent homes on TV. We see teenage parents, families who have adopted, orphans and foster children, but we still consider all these to be a type of family.
You probably have at least one friend or acquaintance that is part of a blended family, with a couple step-siblings or half-siblings. We know multi-racial couples raising multi-racial children and single-race parents raising children from all over the world. We even extend the word family out to other support groups in our lives, like athletic teams, congregations, clubs, friendships, and work associates. It would seem that the term has come to mean any group with a fierce bond to each other that offers safety, stability, and sanctuary to each of its members.
So, then, would it be too much of a stretch to imagine running into Wally, Beaver or one of the Anderson children at school? I’m willing to bet you can picture someone in your life that fits that description right now. You can probably think of someone you know whose mother acted like June, Donna or Margaret and a father who is comparable to Ward, Alex or Jim. There’s also a pretty good chance that you can think of at least one couple who is multi-racial or maybe a little unconventional. So, has that family of the 50s really disappeared or has it just become another ingredient in America’s melting pot?