Father Knows Best Dbq

Stephanie Coontz is a professor of Family History at the Evergreen State College in Olympia Washington. She is a nationally recognized expert on the family and an award winning writer. In her 1997 book “The Way We Really Are: Coming to Terms with America’s Changing Families”, Stephanie Coontz wrote an essay entitled “What We Really Miss about the 1950s”. In Stephanie Coontz’s “What We Really Miss about the 1950s”, she argues that we as a country collectively remember the 1950s with a nostalgic tone, but we are not remembering this era in its entirety, nor are we completely accurate. She explains that the family and economic life that we remember and long for does not represent

The perfect American family was given to us in a form of a photo, an inspiring photograph dating back to the 1950’s gives us light to the perfect portrayal of the American Family. The media painted them as a middle class, white family standing in front of their perfect suburban home. Neatly trimmed grass lined with a white picket fence, husband and wife holding their infant child. In the twenty-first century the nuclear family is not the only type of family around, on a daily basis we see same sex couples, single parents, and blended households all raising families. The traditional American family is no longer traditional, what’s normal and accepted today still causes eye brows to be raised, the family template we have created as a culture

When one thinks of the myth of the model family, the shows of the past come vividly into our minds. During the 1950’s alone, television was inundated with images of the “perfect” family. Shows like “Father Knows Best”, “Leave it to Beaver”, and The Ozzie and Harriet Show” showed how wonderful it was to be an ideal family. The myth itself is the ideal that a model family consists of a married couple; man and woman, with two children. This family lives a wonderful suburban home and for the most part there is no major conflict in their lives. In the myth, dad is the money maker and mom stays at home tending to the household. Even though the example of the model family that the 50’s made so popular, it does not exist. Even though the truth is out, the myth stills is in existence today even with all the new definitions of family that are evident today. Of course it still holds on; it is still apart of the American Dream. The dream that having the

The position of women throughout American society changed vastly throughout 1940-1975. The 1940s saw women change from predominant homemakers to working woman to support the war effort. However, the 1950s forced women back inside the kitchen by using mass media and propaganda to make them believe they were inferior to men. The portrayal of women in the fifties gave women the idea that they could do nothing more than be wives and mothers. Although the idea of feminism was pretty much non-existent in the 1950s, women still had a feeling they were supposed to do something more with their lives than be housewives.

This new consumer culture resulted in lifestyle changes for the American family. Therefore, the Cold War shaped the ideals about family life in America-especially the lives of Caucasian women-through the use of enforcing gender roles, increasing time spent together amongst family, increasing

Doherty begins his book, The Intentional Family, by telling the reader that this century has witnessed a revolution in the structures and expectations of family life. He states that we have reinvented family life away from the traditional family, or how he terms it, the “Institutional Family,” a family based on kinship, children, community ties, economics and the father’s authority. Children are now growing up in single-parent homes or living with a step-family, and an adult is likely to cohabitate, marry, divorce and remarry. The Institutional Family was suited to a world of family farms, small family businesses and tight communities bound together by a common religion. It began to give way during the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century, when individual freedom and the pursuit of personal happiness and achievement began to be more important than kinship obligations, and when small farms and villages started to give way to more impersonal cities. A new family began to emerge – the “Psychological Family” – replacing the Institutional Family of the past. This new kind of family was based on personal achievement and happiness more than on family obligations and tight community bonds. Doherty believes that in the early twentieth century, Americans turned a corner in family life, never to go back.

Think about one of your favorite childhood memories. Is it when you first learned to ride a bike with the help of your dad? Or is it the time you and your siblings built a fort in the backyard and camped out overnight? Odds are that the memory that came to mind had something to do with your family. The family is such a tremendous part of our life. We learn vital skills that help us become better people and ultimately help us function in a society. That’s why the American Dream in the 1950s was entered around the family unit. People’s main goal was to nurture the family they had. Sixty years later, however, that dream has long been tainted and even lost. But why? Why has the dream that so many had changed?

Families lie at the core of every society in history- they allow culture, history, and material possessions to be passed down through the ages. Without them, civilizations would fall quickly. This seems to be the level of importance Harriet Beecher Stowe places on families in her novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which is a part of American society’s cultural backbone. Families can fix any problem, no matter how big or how small, and they should be treated as such. Conversely, Henry James’ Washington Square, another icon of American literature, poses a more clinical argument: families are not nearly important as society makes them out to be. They are simply convenient ways to pass down material goods and nothing more. Harriet Wilson provides a

After World War 2 American society faced different changes because of the war. For example because men were gone off to war women had to join the work force and even after the war they wanted to stay in it. Women stayed in the workforce even after their husbands came home. The role of men stayed the same because they were expected to be masculine and the head of the home. They were expected to be the sole provider of the household. In suburbia all houses looked the same. During the 1950s in the United States, the role of women, suburbia and

At that time, TV shows such as Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best were very popular not because these sitcoms portrayed the way families really were but because they reflect what people think the families supposed to be—a male breadwinner, a female housekeeper, several children with the chance to get higher education. However, this view of nuclear family is strictly referred to white, Christian male who receives high education and has a decent job because discrimination against racism and minority were not vanished back then. Women were unable to find a job or were being repelled from former occupation so they became housewife without a second choice; the norm that women can never be better than men creates huge stress for women that many of them “ended up abusing alcohol or tranquilizers over the course of the decade (32).” The image of Model family only looks happy and harmonious superficially whereas the conflicts and struggles were hidden below the surface. “It can seem that they surely do not experience conflicts.

Throughout our country’s past, it has been important for the government to safeguard the American family ideal. This ideal is of the perfect, nuclear family where everybody gets what they want and there is no worry of debt. The “American family” has set a standard of living that is not currently feasible for most in America, which leaves many striving for something they can not obtain instead of appreciating what they have. The satirization of the American family ideal in the film Little Miss Sunshine is the director’s way of telling their audience what really matters in a family, not the “perfect life”, but the support for eachother. We, as a society, see the nuclear family as “perfect”, however Little Miss Sunshine shows us that a family doesn’t have to be “perfect” to be good.

The Post-War during the 1950s brought a lot booms such as booming of the economy, the rise of suburbia, and the baby boom. The post war era also brought a lot of conformity in different aspects such as political, social, and cultural. After the end of WWII, the gender roles changed for men and women. Traditional roles were reaffirmed. Men were expected to be the breadwinners and the strong one in a relationship. Women were expected to be caring mothers, obedient wives, and take care of the children and house. The social ideal of the perfect American family and devotion to family brought on a lot dissatisfaction from women who wanted a more fulfilling life.

In the 1950’s, the ideal family was a nuclear family. A nuclear family consists of a working father and a domestic mother (Conley, 289). Women were expected to stay home with the children, cook, and clean. Women were supposed to maintain a specific role in society to

The way the author constructed the issue of families was characterization so you get the idea of each member of the family so that helps show the difference between the stereotypical families in the past and the present. Families in the past were different to the one’s in the present because the father was the most dominate because they were the ones that earn the money and they were the ones who were portrayed as being brave. The mother was

First of all, most sitcoms in the 1950’s showed families as a traditional family structure. It was referred to as a nuclear family, two parents and their children. Divorce was not common. In the sitcom, Leave It to Beaver about a a caucasian family in the late fifties, the father was the dominant figure of the household and the decision maker of the family. In the 1950’s, a woman usually did not make any important decisions and was expected to have meals ready when her husband got home. The entire family sat down together for dinner. Manners were important. This was shown in Leave It To Beaver when children asked politely to be excused from the table. Respect for adults was important. Wally replied that, “Older people do not need a reason to be mean”. It was understood that older people deserve respect despite their behavior. The children were portrayed as well behaved. They were expected to tell parents everything. The show emphasized the