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In the old days, nearly all the working mothers were no longer married, and they were figures of pity. How was a woman to cope without a husband? They tended to be widows, not divorcees. Who could be expected to admire a woman who failed to hold her man? Even as recently as the early '70s, when Maude blossomed as a divorced-and-remarried woman, she was presented as a squawking caricature: a klaxon-voiced termagant making life tough for husband No. 4. Moreover, CBS refused to let the pioneering Mary Richards of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-77) be a divorcee. The first episode set the tone: Mary merely broke off an affair. Not until One Day at a Time (since 1975) did sitcoms deal with a divorcee who is at once loving, a free spirit and the essence of responsibility.
Nowadays macho is often a term of derision, and the submissive, clinging-vine woman scarcely survives even as a comic stereotype. Probably no modern producer would consider a show title as explicitly steeped in male chauvinism—however mockingly at times—as Father Knows Best (1954-63) or portray, in similarly straightforward terms, a family in which the wife and children are seemingly so deferential to even such a benign dictator. Certainly wife-beating is unthinkable as a subject for comedy; it is a staple of intensely self-serious drama. Yet enough lingers of bygone sexual roles that children learn to laugh when The Honeymooners' Ralph Kramden threatens his wife with "One of these days, Alice, pow! Right in the kisser!"
Reruns still permit us to glimpse patriarchal conviction when, in The Real McCoys (1957-63), Grandpappy Amos' flinty eyes blaze and he snaps: "Doggone it. It ain't people. It's a woman! And no McCoy ever crawled to a man, let alone a woman." In this era of men's consciousness-raising, children and, it may be argued, adults still absorb lessons about stoic silence by watching Fred MacMurray, the widowed father in My Three Sons (1960-72), avert his face and lower his voice when his sons have gratified him. He falls mute, he explains later, because "I'm liable to say something corny."
My Three Sons embodies another enduring message of reruns from the 1950s and 1960s, at odds with the feminism and sexual egalitarianism that seep through TV today: that men by nature find themselves at a loss when rearing children. The bachelor father prompted recurring jests then (one series even had that title); invariably he recruited help, sometimes from a matronly woman, more often from another man. Because child care was women's work, the male helper was usually treated as desexualized, either by age (William Frawley and William Demarest in My Three Sons) or race (Sammee Tong as the beleaguered Japanese houseboy in Bachelor Father, 1957-62) or mere girth (Sebastian Cabot in Family Affair, 1966-71).