According to Andrea Smith’s article, Dismantling Hierarchy, Queering Society,
she defines heteropatriarchy as the way our society is fundamentally based on
male dominance. The title, Father Knows Best, is the first clue to
the patriarchal household created in this series.
The father’s character, Jim, is that of a traditional father who offers sage advice
that is accepted as fact whenever one or more of his children has a problem. He is
the head of the house and he knows best.
Although the mother’s character, Margaret, has a reasonable voice, she always
submissively defers to Jim. The Andersons are an idealized family, the sort that viewers of the era
could relate to and emulate. The series
had become ingrained into American pop culture as its idyllic presentation of
family life in the 1950’s.
In the episode, Betty,
Girl Engineer, it is interesting to note that when Betty comes home from
school excited to tell her family about her desire to pursue engineering, a male-dominated career choice, not only is she not taken seriously, she is
ignored and interrupted by everyone else who enters the scene. Margaret continues to show Betty a dress she
recently purchased for her while Betty continues to ignore her mother; neither wants to hear the other’s point of
view. Margaret wants her daughter to
fulfill her own expectations of the female binary, while Betty seeks to
override them. Jim and Margaret
desperately try to talk Betty out of her career choice, claiming it is not for
a girl; a girl should be interested in ballet, music and literature.
In The Social
Construction of Gender, Judith Lober writes, “as a process, gender creates
the social differences that define woman
and man. In social interaction throughout their lives,
individuals learn what is expected, act and react in expected ways and thus
simultaneously construct and maintain the gender order.” Betty rebels against the standards as she
attempts, through a school sponsored work-study program, to pursue her dream of
entering the male-dominated profession of engineering. In order to do this, however, she changes her
name to BJ and changes her gender
expression for the part by dressing like a boy and hopes no one will notice
she’s a ‘girl’.
As hard as she may try,
when the site supervisor, Doyle Hobbs, realizes BJ is a female, he admonishes
her, telling her this is no place for a girl and to go home where little girls
belong, that a man has his job and a woman has hers.
In the final scene, we find Doyle Hobbs dressed in a
suit, carrying a box of chocolates, and ringing the Anderson’s doorbell in
search of Betty. He offers his opinion
of how he likes someone in a pretty dress and believes a man should come home
after work to a nice pretty wife, something to look forward to after a long day
of work. The next thing we see is Betty
in her new dress, demure and flirtatious, hoping for a Saturday night date with
Hobbs.
Ultimately, gender expectations win and Betty trades her thoughts of becoming an engineer for the
role of girlie girl. Betty was her own
hero until she fell into the boy meets girl trap. It would have been refreshing to see her
follow through on her dreams but that is not how this story ends. It would have pleased feminist ideals if
Betty would have followed her dreams but that was not the way it was back then.