The Donna Reed Show

4. Teen Culture and The Donna Reed Show

Chapter 4 Teen Culture and The Donna Reed Show 95 The Donna Reed Show was somewhat unusual in that the Stone children, Mary and Jeff, were already teenagers when the show went on the air in 1958. This was a strategic choice, since Donna Reed had a one-year-old daughter at the time that the show began. She explained in an interview that “There are plenty of women my age who look no older than I do and they have teenage children. In Hollywood it just wasn’t done. So we did it!” (“The Farmer’s Daughter Who Went to Town” 1961, 13). At the start of the eight-year series, Jeff was fourteen and Mary sixteen, and so the show took place in the context of the postwar phenomenon of the baby boom generation and the development of teen culture. Although many writers suggest that the teenager as a social category is a post–World War II phenomenon, teen culture developed as early as the 1920s through “the celebration of youth, the evolution of commercial leisure and consumer culture, and the steady rise in high school enrollment” (Schrum 2004, 15). However, the importance of the teen became heightened in the postwar period as the baby boomers born in the late 1940s and early 1950s began to reach adolescence and marketers became aware of the buying power of the teen demographic. By the early 1960s, millions of young 01 Morreale text.indd 95 8/24/12 10:13 AM 96 Chapter 4 Americans were entering puberty. According to Douglas (1994, 61), the growth rate of this population took off at four times the average of all the other age groups, and forty-six million Americans entered their teens in this decade. Jeff and Mary Stone were the classic baby boomers. They entered puberty in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and like The Donna Reed Show itself, they were representative of the transition from the conservative 1950s to the more liberal 1960s. The Donna Reed Show negotiated the cultural shift toward more permissive parenting that was part of larger debates around the national character in the wake of World War II. According to Spigel (2001, 224–25), in both intellectual and popular culture , critics worried that an autocratic style of parenting, as opposed to one that was nurturing and egalitarian, would develop the kinds of personalities that were unsuited for the basic goals of the free world. Child-rearing experts such as Dr. Benjamin Spock, who advocated a liberal and permissive approach to parenting, articulated the cultural discourse around parenting that circulated in the culture. Jenkins (n.d.) writes that “By the 1950s, permissiveness, although not without its detractors, had become the dominant discourse about childhood within postwar American society, promoted by a seemingly endless flood of childcare books, prescriptive articles in women’s magazines, and advertisements; its implications were explored by learned sociologists, psychologists and anthropologists but also pervaded popular culture, shaping the comic books, television, films, records, and children’s books of the period.” In many ways, The Donna Reed Show is a primer on the boundaries and tensions of permissive parenting. The show negotiates the new terrain of a generation in which children were often indulged and had more free time and money than in the past and in which a more democratic style—with all of its advantages and disadvantages—had replaced the more autocratic tenets of previous generations. Donna Reed’s position on permissive parenting was mirrored in Donna Stone (or vice versa). 01 Morreale text.indd 96 8/24/12 10:13 AM 97 Teen Culture and The Donna Reed Show Donna Reed gave parenting advice in popular magazines that illuminated the permissively directive style of her character. In “Donna Reed: She Puts The Family First,” she advocates giving children allowances but only for doing chores and also advocates helping them with their problems without being obtrusive about it (Lewis 1964, 44). Her behavior with the child actors on the set is described similarly: “Without showing any muscle, Donna has quietly worked to shape Paul’s tastes and attitudes” (Anderson 1965). The feminism that was later attributed to Donna Reed also comes through in her stated belief that young girls work before marriage “to get away from the idea of becoming wife and mother and nothing else” (Lewis 1964, 43). Overall, just like in the television show, Donna Reed promoted the...