"A young boy and his father were in a car accident. Both were injured and rushed to the hospital. They were wheeled into separate operating rooms and two doctors prepared to work on them, one doctor for each patient.
"The doctor operating on the father got started right away, but the doctor assigned to the young boy stared at him in surprise. 'I can't operate on him,' the doctor told the staff. 'That child is my son.'
"How can that be?"
The riddle
Good television is many things.
Mostly, I suppose, it is a reflection of its time. Watching an episode of a classic TV series is often like looking into a window to the past. Sometimes it reflects the reality that the writers and producers may have wished was so — but wasn't really. Other times, though, it can be brutally, unflinchingly honest.
And an episode of All in the Family that first aired on this night in 1972 — "Gloria and the Riddle" — holds up a mirror in 2017 to show just how far America has come (and how far it has yet to go) in its attitudes about certain things. In this case sexism.
Forty–five years ago, Gloria (Sally Struthers) had her family stumped by a riddle she had picked up while working with a friend of hers for what was known at the time as women's lib. You can see the riddle at the top of this post.
The answer to the riddle — that the surgeon who couldn't operate on the injured boy was the child's mother — seems to leap out at you in 2017, doesn't it? But it wasn't so obvious in 1972. I recently saw a survey of schoolchildren who were told the riddle, and a majority identified the surgeon as being the boy's mother. I doubt that the results of such a survey would have been anywhere close to that in 1972.
And the answer that most of the remaining children gave definitely wouldn't have been given by many (if any) respondents in 1972 — that the boy had two fathers.
Certainly sexism still exists today, but it is also beyond dispute that doors that were closed to women in 1972 are no longer closed to them in 2017.
In 1972 there weren't many positive role models for young women outside of the traditional ones. Well, successful ones, that is. The women's liberation movement promoted the idea of women achieving in previously male–dominated fields, but that idea really hadn't taken root in American thinking yet.
Girls and young women, for example, could admire and be proud of the achievements of the space program, but it would be more than a decade before Sally Ride became the first American woman in space.
In the years that have passed since that time, many women have flown on space missions, and some have died there.
Any American could (and still can) take pride in Supreme Court decisions and opinions, but until Sandra Day O'Connor was nominated to replace Potter Stewart in 1981, only males could realistically dream of occupying a seat on the highest court in the land and writing legal opinions that would influence millions of lives.
Today women occupy three of the nine seats on the Supreme Court.
And, in 1972, no woman had ever been on a major political party's national ticket. There have been three since — Geraldine Ferraro and Sarah Palin were their parties' first female nominees for vice president, and Hillary Clinton was the Democrats' first female presidential nominee last year.
No woman has been elected president or vice president — but that will change eventually, just as it did for Catholics and blacks.
Change comes slowly sometimes, and it depends upon many variables — not the least of which is the messenger.
On this night in 1972 All in the Family was the messenger.
