Father Knows Best

Father Knows Best was a domestic situation comedy (1954–63) set in a typical midwestern community called Springfield. The show revolved around the trials and tribulations of the Anderson family: father and insurance agent Jim (Robert Young), mother and homemaker Margaret (Jane Wyatt), and their three children, seventeen-year-old Betty (Elinor Donahue), fourteen-year-old Jim, Jr., (Billy Gray), and nine-year-old Kathy (Lauren Chapin). The male characters in Father Knows Best represent influential media images of a masculine ideal (white, middle-class, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant) shaped by emergent post–World War II and Cold War emphases on patriarchal domestic authority, family togetherness, suburban living, and conservatism.

The authoritative, self-assured masculinity of Jim Anderson (who “knew best”) was intended to provide assurance for Americans who, having moved from an economic depression to a world war to the Cold War, sought social stability and moral certainty in American institutions. The bases of Jim's male identity, including moral principle, a middle-class suburban lifestyle, and conventional definitions of gender and sexuality, also represent the foundations of an idealized America. Jim's occupation as an insurance agent not only provides financial stability, but also symbolizes “insurance” against the angst of postwar America. His wisdom and domestic involvement likewise protect his family against perceived threats to the social, moral, and domestic order (particularly a disrespectful wife, a homosexual son, and assertive, career-seeking daughters).

The female characters are crucial to the preservation of this model of manhood. Margaret Anderson reinforces Jim's patriarchal domestic authority and conventional gender definitions through self-effacement. She attends to her domestic duties efficiently yet modestly, defers praise to Jim, and minimizes her own contributions to the family. When Margaret does rebel against these domestic codes, as in episodes such as “Mother Goes to School” (1957) and “It's a Small World” (1959), she suffers embarrassment, humiliation, shame, and regret. Betty, Jim's oldest daughter, is likewise punished when she attempts to assume “masculine” roles. Episodes such as “Betty, Girl Engineer” (1956), “Betty, the Pioneer Woman” (1958), and “Betty's Career Problem” (1960) suggest that girls must learn to channel athletic and career pursuits into romantic ones.

Jim, Jr., embodies postwar American ideals concerning boyhood, adolescence, and emerging manhood. Nicknamed “Bud,” he is an adult male-in-training—a “budding” replica of [Page 165]his father. Like the boys in Leave It to Beaver (1957–63), Bud learns lessons in traits and values associated by postwar Americans with ideal manhood, including positive relationships with girls, hard work, thriftiness, responsibility, selflessness, and middle-class status. For example, episodes such as “Carnival” (1957) teach Bud about ideal fatherhood; “Big Shot Bud” (1959) and “Bud Lives It Up” (1960) examine middle-class lifestyle; “Bud and the Debutante” (1959) confirms Bud's dedication to middle-class status; “Bud, the Willing Worker” (1959) offers lessons about work, determination, and reward; and “Bud Takes Up the Dance” (1954) focuses on Bud's awkward relationship with girls.

This promotional portrait for the television series Father Knows Best conveys the Cold War social ideology emphasizing domestic patriarchy and the grounding of ideal middle-class male identity in family life. Clockwise from lower left: Billy Gray, Elinor Donahue, Robert Young, Jane Wyatt, and Lauren Chapin. (©

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