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Journal of Women's History 13.3 (2001) 160-163



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If Not Ward Cleaver, Then Who?

Robert L. Griswold


The immediate postwar years witnessed a great debate about women's and the family's place in American society. While "domestic containment" may have been the dominant discourse, Jane Levey's fine addition to the Not June Cleaver school of post-World War II family historiography helps us understand the range of alternatives. 1 Levey's thoughtful exploration shows how both The Egg and I and Cheaper by the Dozen, coming as they did in the wake of wartime disruptions, offered men and women a way to reimagine, reenvision, and reinvent domestic life during a time of cultural instability and anxiety. 2

It strikes me that the popularity of The Egg and I owed not only to its subversive message about womanhood--a subject Levey ably discusses--but also to its implicit critique of manhood. Analyses of male incompetence were part of the cultural landscape of the 1930s and 1940s. In silly and tragic portraits alike--from Dagwood Bumstead in the comics to Willy Loman on the New York City stage--doubts and confusion about manhood and masculinity appeared in many quarters. Worries about "momism," conformity, sex role identity, "other-directed" personalities, and the like quickly became entangled with general anxieties about men's place in a postwar culture characterized by the baby boom, suburbanization, and rising standards of living. 3 What did it mean to be a man in such a setting? How could one balance breadwinning and affective obligations?

Whatever the answer, it surely did not involve subsistence chicken farming on an isolated homestead in the Northwest. Neither wives nor children should be expected to embrace a harebrained scheme so contrary to the increasing material comfort of middle-class family life. Betty MacDonald had married not a companion and soul mate but an economic flop who defied the conventions of modern marriage and masculine identity. Television's Ward Cleaver might have been boring, but he was solid and substantial. He knew that children, not chickens, needed care and nurture. Bob MacDonald's chicken escapade not only legitimated Betty's rebellion but also virtually demanded it. In defying the postwar conventions of masculinity, this misguided chicken farmer had turned his wife into a rebel, but a rebel with a good cause.

Frank and Lillian Gilbreth were rebels of a different sort. With their twelve children, they were a demographic throwback. With their efforts to meld scientific management to democratic child rearing, they tried to fuse big business values with those of enlightened child guidance. What was good for American capitalism, they reasoned, was good for family [End Page 160] life. It was their hope that families would become more efficient and simultaneously more democratic. Their children would learn French in the bathroom and vote on garbage duties in family council. Surely part of the appeal of this book was the Gilbreths' efforts to combine these twin goals of efficiency and democracy into an oddly appealing view of family life. Most Americans celebrated rationalization, organization, and efficiency, and America's wartime success only confirmed the worth of these values. In a society beset by anxieties about juvenile delinquency, homosexuality, divorce, and teen sexuality, how comforting it was to see a family that wore uniforms, stood at attention, and responded instantly to parental commands. Here was order in the midst of disorder.

Frank Gilbreth's clever effort to convert his family into Ford Motors represents one impulse of masculine identity. Frank Sr. was the "Captain," the "commander-in-chief," the efficiency expert, the time-saver--the family man as businessman (138). But he also answered another impulse. He was deeply involved in his children's lives, from their personal hygiene to their behavior on dates. He was a hands-on father but in a way that confirmed rather than undermined masculine identity. From this perspective, Frank Sr. answered the call of the "new fatherhood" without sacrificing his allegiance to the masculine values of the business world. 4 He could be a stopwatch...

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