Today’s post is my contribution to Thrilling Days of Yesteryear’s Dick Van Dyke blogathon, in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of “The Dick Van Dyke Show.” A round-up of the other participants can be found here.
When I think of “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” I think of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Not because of anything on the show (although hey, food on the show could be a whole other blog post), but because whenever I watched it as a kid, it was because my father had made us lunch and put it on. Dick Van Dyke, whole wheat bread, and grape jam: a whole new taste sensation.
I don’t think being introduced to old television by someone who watched it the first time around is particularly unique, but it sticks in my head because of how incongruous, at first glance, showing “The Dick Van Dyke Show” to his daughters would have been for my father. After all, this is the dad who signed us up for t-ball (miserable failure) and gave us tool sets for Christmas (I and several rounds of my flatpack furniture thank you for that one, Dad-o), who raised his three daughters to be the unapologetic feminists we are today—but there we were lined up in front of the tv, watching a husband return home to his doting housewife and perfect little bubble of domesticity. What was he thinking?!
In fact, when I told my dad I was thinking about writing about being a feminist who loves “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” he immediately started bringing up all the reasons why it isn’t a particularly forward-looking show. Laura having given up a dancing career to be a stay-at-home mother. The way Sally is allowed to be a working girl, but only as long as her desperate search for a man is regularly played for laughs. He finished by sputtering his impression of Rob’s speech on the plane in “Washington vs. the Bunny,” an episode from the first season—which is as good a case study as any for what I’m talking about, so it’s what I’m going to focus on.
In the episode, Rob has to decide between going on a business trip or staying home to watch Richie be a bunny in his school play. The decision isn’t just about being a good worker or being a good father; it’s about whether Rob should give in to his wife’s opinion (she wants him to stay home), and whether letting her lay down the law would make him less of a man. There’s a dream sequence where Rob is literally a puppet to Laura’s whims, and Laura introduces his appearance as such by announcing (while dressed as what looks remarkably like a Playboy bunny, natch) “Ladies and gentlemen, presenting a man who gave up a trip to Washington, simple because…I ordered him to!” Rob ends up going on the trip (which turns out to be wasted anyway, since the talent he went out to see had laryngitis, and the replacement quartet was rubbish), and on his flight back concludes a rant to his seatmate with this paeon to masculine independence:
A man is a man, even if he is a husband, and that at no time as a man or as a husband should he ever be his wife’s puppet. I’m gonna tell her that I had to do what I think is right. A man shouldn’t sacrifice his self-respect just to keep peace in the home. All right, a woman’s opinion should be weighed and considered, but in the final analysis, a man has to do what he thinks is right or he is no man!
If you’ll excuse me just one moment, I’ve got a drawerful of lingerie to burn.
The thing is, though, after Rob makes that speech, he arrives home ready to lay down the law…and it’s completely played for laughs. We know going into it that he isn’t for a minute going to actually dictate household policy to his wife…and it turns out, neither of them really want him to. Laura reveals that she understands Rob’s duty to his career, and rather than being angry at him, she’s angry at herself for not being supportive. In fact, they end up kissing and making up after a conversation where they communicate like…well, equals. True, equals where one is ostensibly the man of the house, but compared to the vacuuming-in-pearls trope the show was emerging from, it’s an enormous step forward. (And speaking of that particular fashion trope, Mary Tyler Moore famously pushed to put her character in the cigarette pants that became her hallmark because a housewife would never actually do the cleaning and cooking in an enormous full-skirted dress that was the typical television-housewife’s wardrobe. Her character may have been a stay-at-home mother, but she was an honest portrayal of one.)
Okay, so if you’re looking for boundary-pushing questioning of gender roles, you aren’t going to find it with Rob and Laura Petrie. But looking back, I think “The Dick Van Dyke Show” was portraying a more conservative (with a small-c) brand of feminism—one where the couple at the heart of the show struggles between how their culture tells them they should each behave, and how their marriage actually works. Rob might be worried about being seen as a puppet, but fundamentally he’s someone who respects his wife and her opinions as much as his boss’s…which is, after all, what feminism is all about.
My dad may not have intended “The Dick Van Dyke Show” as a life lesson for his daughters, but it looks like it might not have been a bad one anyway. I doubt I’ll be strapping on bunny ears anytime soon, but if I end up with a marriage as based in honest communication as the Petrie’s, I think I’ll have done all right.
Now pass the peanut butter.
