Practical Perfection? The Nanny Negotiates Gender, Class, and Family Contradictions in 1960s Popular Culture

This essay examines the popular 1960s films Mary Poppins (Stevenson 1964) and The Sound of Music (Wise 1965) which, despite their foreign settings and stars and their historical timeframes, are seen in the light of their relevance to social and political concerns of the United States in the 1960s. The films set about addressing anxieties surrounding masculinity, motherhood, domestic gender roles, and the constitution of the family that were current at the time. The films are seen as a response to the burgeoning women's movement of the mid-1960s and rising levels of recognition of women's changing place in society, as well as what was considered men's loosening grip on patriarchal power in the family. In both films, the character of the nanny, a threshold figure and family interloper, is the person responsible for reinstalling the father, whose domestic role as head of the intact, patriotic family was thought to be in jeopardy, by ensuring that his familial relations are modernized.