Father Knows Best starred Robert Young (Jim, father, insurance salesman), Jane Wyatt (Margaret, mother, housewife), Elinor Donahue (Betty, teenage daughter), Billy Gray (Bud, teenage son) and Lauren Chapin (Kathy, young daughter). I especially identified with Kathy as Lauren was almost exactly my age.
I always wished my family would have been more like the Andersons. Margaret, my mother's name, was the "voice of reason" who didn't hit her children like my mother, while Jim made time to be with and talk to his children, unlike my father.
Of the 203 episodes of Father Knows Best, the one I remember the most aired on Wednesday, April 11, 1956 (when I was 10 years-old), Betty, Girl Engineer, written by Roswell Rogers, with guest actor Roger Smith, who later starred in the series 77 Sunset Strip (1958-1964) and then was married to Ann-Margret (1967-2017).
The story: darling Betty signs up for a vocational program at her high school. Lots of girls are signing up for their chosen careers, and the counselor helps each of them write down "secretary". But Betty writes down "engineer" because she's good at math and did well on aptitude tests... and that's where the chaos begins!
She's assigned to work with a surveying crew for a week. Her family panics and tries to speak some "sense" into her. Her brother asks if she'll need chewing tobacco, her mother worries that she won't know whether to hang up "his" or "hers" towels in the bathroom, her father worries that he's losing his daughter.
At Betty's worksite her boss, Doyle Hobbs (Roger Smith), is an intolerant jerk. Doyle is a young upstart engineer who can't stop asking her what she's running from, or whether she's doing this to get back at her boyfriend. She challenges him, explaining that times change, women can vote now! And he says voting is just fine as long as you're home in time to cook supper, or something like that, and continues belittling her until she gives up and walks home.
To smooth things over, Doyle comes to Betty's house later with a box of chocolates. He apologizes to her father that Betty seems like a nice girl, but boys want to be engineers so they can work hard and come home to girls that remind them of their mothers, and if girls start becoming engineers then what's the point? Betty overhears this, runs upstairs, puts on a dress, and comes down to visit Doyle and agrees to go on a date with him. And the whole family has a good laugh about how "silly" it would be for Betty to be an engineer.
As a ten year-old, this episode made me think. Should girls be engineers? That was a man's job...wasn't it? Girls should be teachers, nurses, secretaries...right?
Gender stereotypes are hard to eradicate. In the 1950s, there was a Society of Women Engineers. Today, only about 13% of engineers in the USA are women, although in Brazil the number is closer to 50%.
I remember as an accounting major at Penn, my classmates were all male...or almost all. One of my professors commented how cute it was that three of us were women. What they must have felt?
When I started out my career as an accountant 53 years ago, there were almost no women accountants. Today, 62% of accountants are female, while 50% of the full time staff at CPA firms are women. That's progress!
A female friend from high school told me how difficult it was for her to become a doctor 50 years ago. Today, 36% of doctors are women.
When the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg entered Harvard Law School 64 years ago, she was one of 9 women out of a class of 500. When my daughter went to the University of Pennsylvania Law School 23 years ago, women made up about half the class. More progress.
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