"Mother Knows Best"

By Gail Marshall on October 24, 2006 12:51 PM

The recent story on the death of Jane Wyatt,laury.JPG /> the always good-tempered mother on the TV series "Father Knows Best," brings up lots of memories. The Anderson family stories were a constant thread through my childhood.

"Father Knows Best" was a TV series that was highly popular in my childhood, then it became heavily criticized in my teens and early 20s, as the women's movement heated up. There was a lot of discussion over the roles of women at that time and the TV show became a common ground for discussion. There were many sides to this debate and I'll bet the neighborhood dinner parties were really lively when this topic came up. I remember hearing various sides to this argument:

* The Anderson family should be every family's ideal.
* Margaret Anderson is a shell of a woman, devoid of complexity.
* Every man wants to marry a woman like Margaret Anderson.
* The Anderson family is a plot to subjugate women.
* Margaret Anderson should be every woman's role model.
* Margaret Anderson is a fictional TV character, who cleans up after her three children wearing high heels for Pete's sake. Why are we even talking about her?

The interesting thing is that men didn't seem to compare themselves to Jim Anderson, he of perfect wisdom, patient temperament, steady income and impeccable grooming.

In my childhood, I looked at the Anderson house much as Wyatt herself did -- as the ideal family life. "We all thought it was life -- as we wanted it to be," she said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times in 1986. I was sure that all the other families were like theirs and we were just weird. What a relief to find out years later that real mothers had bad hair days, cleaned house in their jeans, swatted their kids on their butts if they were naughty and had husbands who yelled. And it was definitely very obvious that fathers didn't always know best.

Hanging on the wall in my bedroom is a photo of a wonderful appliqué stitchery by one of my all-time favorite artists and social commentators: Jean Ray Laury. It's in bright yellow, orange and gold, and it says "MOTHER KNOWS BEST." I asked Jean about it yesterday and she said she designed this piece after visiting a farm sale in Sanger. The farmhouse had a primitive, dreadful kitchen -- yet when you walked into the living room, there was a beautiful satin stitchery on the wall that said "Mother." She was struck by the sharp contrast between the status of the mother implied by the elegant stitchery, and the reality of the respect she really was given, starkly reflected in that dreary kitchen. So she went home and stitched her own opinion, with her typical humor and wit.

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