Running for five successful seasons on all three American broadcast networks, Bachelor Father took a somewhat novel (for the late 1950s) approach to the traditional family television comedy. Starring John Forsythe, Sammee Tong, and Noreen Corcoran, Bachelor Father mined humor from its unconventional family unit. The premise of the show was that Bentley Gregg was raising his niece Kelly, age 13, after her mother (Bentley’s sister) died. His partner of sorts in parenting Kelly was his “houseboy,” an older Chinese man named Peter. The absence of a maternal figure, outside the racistly feminized Peter, resulted in narrative and situations that both reinforced and complicated the expected moralizing message of 1950s television sitcoms regarding the performance of gender and sexuality.
In this paper, I will examine the construction of the teenage daughter archetype within the context of an nontraditional nuclear family. How would a male parental figure raise a “nice, average teenage girl” to be a “nice, average wife and mother” without a female model of domesticity in the home? (Bachelor Father, S01, E09) What ideals and messages about women were communicated to home viewers through the contrast between Bentley’s treatment of his niece and the rotating single women that he romanced on a weekly basis? How does the performance of gender in Bachelor Father compare to that of other contemporary sitcoms like Father Knows Best, The Donna Reed Show, and Angel?
About the presenterSarah Trembanis
Sarah earned a bachelor’s in History from Duke & a master’s and PhD from William and Mary. Her book,The SetUp Men: Race, Culture, and Resistance in Black Baseball, was published in July 2014. Sarah spent the 2014-2015 year on sabbatical at the University of Ferrara, Italy, working on what she hopes will be book two (tentatively titled: Effortlessly Perfect: Teenage girls in 1950s Sitcoms), drinking all the cappuccino, and trying to improve her Italian.