TV Moms, Part Six: Aunt Bee: Wholesome and Homecooked Mom-In-Effect

If there's one thing that can be learned from television, it's that there is more than one way to portray a family.

And sometimes, in these television families, the mother is absent.

Single dads aren't rare on TV. Phillip Drummond from Diff'rent Strokes, Russell Lawrence from Gidget, and even Full House's Danny Tanner and Arrested Development's Michael Bluth have been part of the television single-father tradition.

But one of the most famous TV single dads, who appeared on CBS from October of 1960 to April of 1968, was the sheriff of a a small town called Mayberry and still runs in syndication over fifty years after its cancellation.

Widower Andy Taylor and his son, Opie, though they had lost their wife and mother respectively, were not without a mother figure, even before the series began.

 The first episode of The Andy Griffith Show had Andy's housekeeper, Rose, moving out to get married and Opie being reluctant to accept a new mother figure into their house and his life.

And the woman that is brought in (brought back in, in Andy's case) into the Taylor boys' lives is Beatrice Taylor, or, as Mayberry and American came to know her, Aunt Bee.

Frances Bavier's Aunt Bee was the never-married sister of Andy's father. Though it's never explored very deeply in the series, it is stated flat out that Bee raised Andy and implied that she had raised a few other Taylors, also, though she never married or had children of her own (another tidbit that is never really explored in the show).

Aunt Bee is a very interesting character to me, especially when considered through the scope of her time and in the context of the modern audiences exposed to the show.

When The Andy Griffith Show first aired in the early sixties, the social stigma for unmarried women and the fact that the Feminist Movement of the 1960s was still in its infancy limited what they could do--working as housekeepers and in other "pink-collar" (or traditionally female) jobs such as teaching and nursing. And a woman never having been married was rare enough (check this pdf if you're interested in detailed 1960s marriage statistics). Even though Aunt Bee was established as an unmarried woman, her romantic life played a fairly large part in her storylines in the show. Though her actual life track is unusual for a woman on television in that time, Aunt Bee is very much like the other television mothers of her time--working inside the home and in the community by way of her church and being responsible for the care and upbringing of a child. The only differences Aunt Bee and mothers like June Cleaver are that Bee isn't married, and she didn't give birth to Opie.

There's something very encouraging, I think, in the fact that even in what was a considerably more conservative time, the idea that there are many different kinds of mothers-- Aunt Bee didn't physically carry or give birth to Opie, but there's no denying that she is a mother to Opie. Today, more people are considering adoption that in the 1960s, and it's interesting to me that, even fifty years ago, there was a postivie role model for people that are parents that didn't give birth themselves.

Though there are many ways in which Aunt Bee is relatable to modern audiences, there are, of course, things about the character that date her. While Bee lives with her nephew Andy during the series and, after Andy marries Helen Crump at the end of the series, with another widowed father, Sam Jones as part of the exposition for the spin-off series, Mayberry, R.F.D, in 2012, more single women are choosing to live alone than ever before. And, while Aunt Bee worked mostly in the home (though later in the series she did open a restaurant and record a cooking show), more women are working outside the home now than then, juggling work and parenthood.


Mayberry may have been a simpler time and place on the whole, and The Andy Griffith Show certainly portrayed more conservative values than many television shows today, it's interesting to see the modern thinking that got slipped into the narrative by way of Aunt Bee's unique representation of motherhood.

In the coming weeks, we'll start taking a look at single mothers and blended families with Brett Butler's Grace Under Fire and one of television's most famous mother, Florence Henderson's Carol Brady.


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Part Five

TV Moms, Part Five: "Now, What Would You Like In Your Coffee?"

While Roseanne and The Golden Girls both saw a great deal of success in the '80s and early '90s, one 1980s sitcom seems to outshine them all.

You can probably guess which show I'm talking about.

 

In the eight seasons The Cosby Show spent on NBC from 1984 to 1992, it's Nielsen ratings never fell out of the top twenty shows, and it spent five of those seasons in the number one spot. It's often given credit for paving the way for shows like In Living Color and The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.

The Cosby Show was unique in many ways: the show was filmed in New York instead of Los Angeles, Bill Cosby had an unusual amount of creative control over the show, and, in spite of its predominantly African American cast, it very rarely dealt with the subject of race (though it did promote African and African American music and culture, and it did spawn a spin off that dealt with race issues more frequently). The show is also both praised for breaking stereotypes in portrayals of African Americans--both parents of the Huxtable clan are professionals with college degrees and prestigious jobs--and criticized for only representing a certain portion of the African American community.

But aside from its significance in the context of NBC's sitcom history and in the context of shows with predominantly African American casts, The Cosby Show is remembered for one more contribution to television history.

Clair Huxtable is arguably the most memorable mother that's ever been on television. She consistently makes the top ten in lists of greatest television mothers, and understandably so: she's the "power woman": five kids, a full-time job as an attorney.

Where June Cleaver may be the ideal for the stay-at-home mother, Clair Huxtable is the working mom that has it all together.  She not only had a job, she had a job that was equal in prestige to her husband's--something that, even today, when there is no shortage of working women and even working mothers on television, is rare (the only other example I can think of off the top of my head is NBC's current sitcom Up All Night, which is not enjoying anywhere near the same level of success). She was undeniably present in her children's lives--who remembers the episode where she catches son Theo trying to cut corners on studying MacBeth? She wrote her own test for him! She got her kids to school and made dinner, even making a scrambled eggs supper for Rudy's friend who had just been to the dentist in one episode. And, while she varied from the pearls-and-heels ensembles of Mrs. Cleaver, Clair was always stylish and professional.

It's interesting to note, also, that, while early television mothers like June Cleaver and Harriet Nelson seem dated to modern audiences, Clair remains relatable. This could, certainly, be because 1984 is not nearly so removed from 2012 as 1957 is, but with more women going to college than ever and more women in the workforce, it's likely that viewers in 2012 are more able to see themselves in Clair Huxtable than 1984 viewers.

And, in a time where women's issues are making news, Clair is as relatable as ever.

Yeah, Clair's enduring popularity makes sense. She serves as a great model of a strong woman and is one of the most positive portrayals of working mothers television has seen.

In the coming weeks, we'll take a look some non-traditional mothers, including single mothers like Grace Kelly from Grace Under Fire and non-mother maternal figures like The Andy Griffith Show's Aunt Bee.

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TV Moms, Part Four: "Thank You For Being a Friend"

Just before ABC brought Roseanne to the screen, NBC gave us insight in to the lives of four older women living in Miami. This 1985 to 1992 sitcom, like others of its time, took on social issues in addition to showing the viewership the characters' shenanigans, and touched on groups that were otherwise largely ignored by television-- particularly the elderly and the LGBT community. The Golden Girls was immediately a hit, raking in 11 Emmy Awards and staying in the top 10 of Nielsen rankings for six of its seven seasons.

But wait, you're thinking, the women on The Golden Girls weren't moms. There were no kids in the main cast.

Plenty of sitcoms showcased the traditional nuclear family--Mom, Dad, school-aged children with maybe an aunt or grandparent thrown in to spice things up. The Golden Girls, though, took a look at a different and generally ignored demographic: women "of a certain age," whose husbands were either dead or otherwise out of the picture, and whose children were grown.

Blanche Devereaux, Rose Nylund, Sophia Petrillo, and Dorothy Zbornak may not have lived with their children, but parent-child interaction was a pretty significant theme of the show.

Rose deals with the her boyfriend's grown daughter telling her stay away, and we see Rose's oldest daughter struggling with accepting the other three women as her mother's chosen family. Blanche's daughter deals with extreme weight gain, a verbally abusive partner, artificial insemination (which turns out to be more of an issue for Blanche than the daughter), and being a mother on her own. We also learn about Blanche's regrets: on more than one occasion, she mentions wishing that she had been more involved in the lives of her children, citing that even in their twenties, her kids felt more attached to their nanny than they did to her; in fact, Blanche spends most of the series trying to make amends with her children.

While the stories about Rose's and Blanche's relationships with their children are told with care and deal with some interesting issues that are specific to mothers with adult children, there's one mother-daughter pair that gets more attention on the show than any other.

In the pilot episode, Blanche, Rose, and Dorothy are already living together in Blanche's house in Miami (with a not-unstereotypical gay cook character who vanishes by the time the second episode rolls around), when Sophia, Dorothy's mother, shows up at their door saying that Shady Pines, the rest home she'd been living in, had burned down. Because it's television (and because Sophia's pretty much the most entertaining character in the show--or maybe that's just my opinion), Dorothy's other housemates immediately welcome Sophia and invite her to live with them.

Dorothy and Sophia have a relationship that is not often seen in sitcoms. Mothers of adults are rarely seen outside of the bothersome mother-in-law role in television comedies, but in The Golden Girls, Sophia broke that archetype.

Through the show's seven seasons, we see how Sophia and Dorothy's relationship has changed now that Dorothy is an adult and Sophia is elderly. Role-reversal is frequently apparent: we see the traditional "My roof, my rules" discussion with Sophia on the receiving end, Dorothy enforces a curfew for Sophia and worries about her when she goes out with her friends--even following her out after Sophia has a fight with her friend at the beach, and Sophia is constantly asking Dorothy about her allowance and to borrow the car or some money. And it's done with banter, outrageous stories ( Sophia's stories always begin in basically the same way: "Picture it. Sicily--1920"), and no small amount of snark.

But more than just showing this reversal, Dorothy reacts to it. "When did I become my parents' age?" she wonders in one episode. More than once, Dorothy is forced to face Sophia's mortality and has to confront the idea that she will be an orphan--even though Dorothy is over sixty.

Dorothy and Sophia, though they fight and call each other names ("deceitful Sicilian gecko" is one of my personal favorites), manage to cope with the transition from parent and child to friends.

What's most interesting about this to me is that it almost didn't happen. Sophia fits the trope of the Ascended Extra: the creators had intended her to be only a recurring guest on the show, but because of the overwhelmingly positive response to her first appearance, she was written into the main cast, allowing a world of viewers who, perhaps, hadn't given much though to women in their fifties and sixties--much less to the mothers of women in their fifties and sixties--insight into the relationships between mothers and the adults they raised.

Adding in Sophia officially was a great call. Aside from being widely acknowledged as the show's breakout star and becoming one-half of a fantastic comedy duo, as Dorothy's actress Bea Arthur said of Estelle Getty's Sophia following Getty's death in 2008, Sophia opened the door for a different type of mother-daughter relationship to be explored on the small screen.

Check back in the coming weeks. We'll be taking a look at Phylicia Rashad's Claire Huxtable from The Cosby Show and at Brett Butler's Grace Kelly from Grace Under Fire.

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TV Moms, Part Three: "What Doesn't Kill Us is Making Us Stronger."

In the late 1980s, the United States experienced a stock collapse even greater than the famous one of 1929 that is recognized as the spark of The Great Depression. Families in the middle and lower classes found it harder and harder to make ends meet.

There was, in this time, no place in the world for the likes of June Cleaver.  She and the Cleavers were no longer representations of the average American family, and their quaint life was viewed less as the striven-for ideal.

Many American TV viewers of this time sought a fictional family that reflected their lives; they wanted to see people like themselves, struggling to make ends meet, dealing with rowdy kids and a dirty house, and trying to keep the delicate balance between busy lives and loving families.

And so, in October of 1988, ABC introduced Americans to the Conners.

Roseanne, which premiered on October 18, 1988, was arguably the first time that a blue-collar family was the focus of a sitcom. And, while the Conners themselves may have had less money to burn and more mess and chaos in their home than the Cleavers did, they saw far more success in terms of ratings, hitting number one on the Nielsen rankings, and staying in the top twenty for eight of nine seasons (and anyone familiar with the show can probably guess which season didn't do so well).

While Roseanne wasn't the first sitcom presented from a female's perspective, but it's safe to say that no television family has had a matriarch quite like Roseanne Conner.

In the tradition of comedians who are given sitcoms, Roseanne (Barr Pentland Arnold Thomas) herself played the title character.

Roseanne Conner was as flawed as June Cleaver was perfect. She was loud and bossy; she wasn't a traditional beauty, and, though she kept her house running, it was almost constantly a mess and the Conner children got up to shenanigans that would astonish even Wally Cleaver's friend Eddie Haskell.

In spite of her imperfection, Roseanne was strong. Until the last season (oh, that last season), Roseanne worked outside the home in a number of less-than glamorous jobs. In eight seasons, she worked as a line worker in a plastics factory, selling magazines over the phone, a secretary for her husband's boss, a bartender, a cashier at a fast food restaurant, a floor sweeper/shampoo girl at a hair salon, a waitress at a restaurant in a department store, part-time worker at the Conner's bike shop, and as a waitress and co-owner of the the Lanford Lunchbox. She struggled to make time to get to parent-teacher conferences--and there were a lot of them, between younger daughter Darlene barking in class, older daughter Becky allegedly flipping the bird during class pictures, and son DJ bringing "obscene reading material" to school.  She provided emotional, and sometimes financial, support to her sister, Jackie.

And Roseanne struggled with her and Dan's relationships to their parents--both of them promising to provide their kids with a more loving home than either of them grew up in.

Though it often seemed that Roseanne held the reigns in the Conner family, and, in fact, Dan is sometimes shown to rail against Roseanne's apparent authority, at the heart of their relationship, Dan and Roseanne are partners. Their combined income keeps the family afloat, true, but more than that, they are shown to share parenting duties and take equal part in the lives of their children.

Roseanne and the Conners, over-the-top as they often were, worked through problems that their viewers were able to relate to, which is probably no small part of why Roseanne was, and still is, such a popular show. While Roseanne may not have perfectly reflected the life of the average mother in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the ins and outs of her daily life were something to which everyday American families could relate in a way that they no longer could with the Cleavers. Shows like Roseanne provided not the escapism that Leave It To Beaver offered, but a reflection of life in art.

Roseanne, of course, was hardly the only major television mother in the 1980s and 90s. In the next several posts, we'll take a look at other television families of this time and their particular representations of motherhood.

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TV Moms, Part Two: "You Look Lovely, Mrs. Cleaver"

The period of American history that followed World War II is rife with images that, even now, Americans associate with ideal family life: white picket fences, cookie-cutter houses with neat green lawns, Mom and Dad with two kids (two-point-five, if you want to go with the statistics, but I sorta find the notion of half a child to be disconcerting).

These images of idealized life were reflected in the television families of the time. They were reflected through the fictional families of Donna Reed and Harriet Nelson.

But perhaps the most lasting ideal family of the time was the Cleavers.

Leave it to Beaver first aired on CBS in October of 1957 before moving to ABC in its second season and running until its cancellation in 1963. The show was moderately successful, never achieving number-one ratings or winning big awards, but never being in danger of cancellation due to low numbers once it made it to ABC. Ward, June, Wally, and Theodore (or "the Beaver"), in spite of experiencing only middle-of-the-road success, became one of the most memorable families on television--to the point that viewers even fifty-five years after the first episode aired know the show, the characters, and the style.

And even in 2012, women are still pointed to the prim and coiffed Mrs.Cleaver as an example of motherly perfection. She cooked, she cleaned, she catered to her husband and children, and she looked great doing it.

It's understandable, from a certain perspective. June Cleaver is beautiful. Her clothes are stylish; her house is spotless. Her children are, for the most part, well-behaved, and when they're not, it only takes a stern look from her husband to put them back on track. June keeps the Cleaver home running smoothly and does it all wearing perfect makeup, kitten heels, and a string of pearls. She's the portrait of a successful woman.

June, like most mothers in the 1950s and early 60s, didn't work outside of the home, but she was forever busy. The pristine Cleaver home, after all, didn't become that way of its own accord. And someone had to make sure that Ward, Wally, and The Beaver were fed, clothed, and seen off to school and work.

While, admittedly, June Cleaver was never shown to have any kind of final authority in the home and she didn't seem to have a true place outside the Cleaver house, June is never played insignificant.

It's impossible to imagine June being absent from the Cleaver family.

June is a shining example of the functionality of the stay-at-home mother. She glamorized, yes, and far too perfect to ever be possible. But she is what keeps the Cleaver home running. In the days when she graced the televisions of America, she was an idealized version of the normal. Women lived lives like June Cleaver's all over the country, and they saw in her themselves perfected.

Between the Feminist Movement of the sixties, the economic changes in American society, and the changes in the availability and stigma of divorce, its easy to see why it's harder to relate to Mrs. Cleaver. Many women want to pursue a career in addition to motherhood, and the women who do want to be stay-at-home mothers frequently find it difficult to manage financially on one income. The definition of a successful woman doesn't necessarily jive with June Cleaver and the way of life she's come to represent.

June Cleaver may no longer reflect the majority of women--and whether that's good or bad could be debated until the end of time without a definitive answer ever being reached--but she did capture the essence of the post-War era and embody that time's ideal of female perfection. Her example of motherhood is a traditional one; her life and identity revolved around her family, leaving little time for her to pursue the outside activities that later television mothers, and real women, too, were able to explore.

Feminism and the working woman may have ended June Cleaver's era as a prime example of American motherhood, but they opened the door to a slew of different types of mother. Next week, we'll take a look at a television mom that's about as different from June Cleaver as it gets: the blue collar mother of the 1990s, Roseanne Conner.

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Series Premiere: TV Moms, Part One

Like most people my age, and more than a few in the generations prior, my life has had one pretty formative outside influence on it: television.

Television is great. Even when it's terrible, and it frequently is terrible, it's great.

Aside from the entertainment and aside from the escapism, television does something wonderful. It captures the time. And not just through nostalgia. Watching shows through the years, one can see how things have changed--fashion, writing, acting, social and political policies.

Families.

It's easy to think of the family as something that never changes, but a quick look through the history of television proves that wrong. The core unit may seem the same, but families evolve, just like the rest of society.

I mean, the Cleavers definitely aren't the Conners. And the Conners aren't the Dunphies or Pritchetts.

Though the television time capsule makes it easy to see how the family as a unit has changed in the fifty-plus years that TV's been around to document, there's one member of the family that's gone through something of a more visible change than the rest.

There was an episode in season seven of Roseanne where sitcom moms of the past paid a visit to the set of Roseanne to scold her for the way she was portraying motherhood. Apart from being pretty funny (I mean, the mom from Lassie laments being told that "June" was too long to be on a title card--and by "laments," I mean "calls the people who told her that 'those bastards'"), this episode is a pretty cool look at how TV moms have changed through time.

Moms changing on TV isn't an isolated event. TV writers are products of their times, so the changes in the worlds of our favorite television characters are reflections of the changes in our society at large.

Over the next several posts, I'm going to take a closer look at moms in television--how they reflect the thinking and politics of their time and what reactions and lessons can be gleaned from them in the present. I'm going to look at the different types of mothers and family situations that television has captured over the years--like June Cleaver and her idealized family, Roseanne and the Conners, Murphy Brown and Lorelai Gilmore as representations of single mothers. And even surrogate mothers like Phoebe from Friends.

It's gonna be an interesting ride; I hope you'll stop by.

Coming Saturday: June Cleaver and the "traditional family."

Part Two