Core Post # 1 - Emotions v. conclusion in Father Knows Best (Week 3)

It was very painful to watch the Father Knows Best episode in which Betty go from elated, engineering-minded high school student to date-goer who accepts to go out with a guy who spent his morning putting her down. She accepts the date while wearing the dress her mother ordered for her ­­–– so she can play the game of womanhood­­ which, according to her mother, is to wear the right dress to trap a man into buying you a lifetime supply of dresses. In other words, Betty went from aspirational to approvingly oppressed and consumeristic. Gitlin might describe this as an instance of  TV with “appeal to a kind of populism and rebelliousness, usually of a routine and vapid sort, but [which] then close off the possibilities of effective opposition” (262).

Yet this episode does contain the oppositional view. Newcomb and Hirsh contend that “television does not present firm ideological conclusions –– despite its formal conclusions–– so much as it comments on ideological problems” (566). Whether the viewer is a 2020 feminist or a 1956 traditionalist, the episode is designed for audiences to side with Betty emotionally. Given the emotional arc, maybe 1956 viewers were made uneasy by the conclusion? The question of the place of women in the professional world was a salient one in the post-WWII era when women were being wooed into domestic suburbia lifestyles, as dictated by the US’s ambitious, post-war consumerist economic policies. TV was a strong arm hard at work to propagate this idea with a positive outlook. This episode is an example of that with an unequivocal conclusion. Gitlin might qualify it as an example of cultural hegemony operating through solutions proposed via the main character, leaving the rest of society untouched, even though the plot problem at hand reflects a problem located deep within society (262).

If the role of TV is to “focus on our most prevalent concerns, our deepest dilemmas” (Newcomb and Hirsh 564), ­­then, as uncomfortable as this episode makes us 2020 viewers, it may in fact have created an opportunity for discussions of the question of women and the work place, setting tracks for new ideas to eventually be absorbed into “forms compatible with the core ideological structure” (Gitlin 263).