A Defense of June Cleaver

By Barbara Groark

Our early childhoods and grade school years were spent during the 1950s, a time much maligned as white-bread, vanilla, flavorless, and naïve, a time personified by the Leave It to Beaver television show, featuring the Cleaver family (Ward, June, Wally, and Theodore [the Beaver] – why do we remember these things?). The later feminists and student protesters had a field day excoriating the lies, yes all lies, promoted in family shows like Donna Reed, Father Knows Best, My Three Sons, I Love Lucy, Ozzie and Harriet.

OK, maybe they could have shown some variety in family life. There seemed to be only one race of people. There was a sameness to the ‘problems’ to be solved by the end of the show. These were the some of the shows that babysat us while our mothers were making dinner or doing laundry. The shows and their themes were considered safe for children.

The ‘bland’ reputation of the fifties has been passed on by people our age to the next generation of high school and college kids. I suppose if you do not delve too deeply you could stay with that opinion. But if we look back as adults at the political and cultural events, let alone TV shows, of that time, the fifties look pretty noisy and lively. Come on - they had Tennessee Williams on Broadway (A Streetcar Named Desire and others), Brown vs. the Board of Education in Arkansas and Rosa Parks in Alabama, the struggles of the McCarthy House Un-American Activities Committee and the Cold War, Nazi-hunters, crazy artists like Jackson Pollock, movies like Picnic, and rock-and-roll and Elvis. What kind of blandness is that? But when you are seven or eight, you don’t know these things.

Baby boomers of course had to grow up and distance themselves from their own childhoods, as is normal for everyone. I guess there were so many of us and we were so noisy that we were like bulldozers over everything we didn’t like at the same time. Childhood was just not cool, and it was so damned sheltered. Annoying.

However, now we have Nickelodeon and TV Land cable channels, and they give us the opportunity, boys and girls, to reexamine some old opinions. Some time in the last 10 years or so I came across an old Leave it to Beaver show, and I watched the whole thing instead of continuing to ‘surf.’ I came away with an astonishing discovery, now that I had studied literary criticism and read a lot of books of lots of different kinds.

Leave It to Beaver was one of the most sophisticated, subtle portrayals of childhood ever. It was all done from the point of view of the seven-year-old in the family, and when you are seven years old, your Mom is beautiful and wise (most often seen in a shirtwaist dress with pearls and high heels, hair perfect – if she’s doing some work around the house, she is wearing a ruffled apron), your Dad is kind and wise (changing when he gets home from his suit jacket to his cardigan sweater and fixing his pipe) and someone you can talk to anytime and anyplace, and your older brother is just amazing in general. Some of the subtlest interaction is wordless among the adults or older kids, which we can interpret better now that we are adults instead of the same age as the character Beaver.

In one scene of the episode I saw, the Beav was walking to school with one of the boys from his block past the white picket fences (the same environment as our first and second grade readers). From their conversation, it was clear that this boy’s family was not as happy as the Cleavers. From what was said and not said, and from the childlike interpretation by the kids, you could tell that there was maybe alcoholism and maybe beating of wife and kids going on, or at least a lot of yelling. But the sunny disposition and logic of the kids kept all that in the background of the story. Only an adult viewer would guess what may have been really going on. The writing is worthy of Mark Twain possibly.

So I’d like to defend the much-maligned June Cleaver and her family. They are probably not really the dimwitted, small-town ‘fifties’ nonentities as remembered by embarrassed former fans in later decades. They are the idealized products of a sunny seven-year-old’s mind, not complete maybe, but not completely unrealistic as they are.

If you think you need a refresher, here is an article from Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_Cleaver