Betty Jo learns that it's not whether you win or lose at horseshoes, it's how you throw them as "The Ringer" when the youngest of Kate Bradley's daughters enters the Hooterville Valley's annual horseshoe-throwing tournament in this middling effort that could have been tossed off as a throwaway episode highlighting life at "Petticoat Junction" when it first aired but, thanks to the ravages of time, now looks like Exhibit A in the case proving why this gentle, well-meaning sitcom set in a mythical Rural America would ultimately wind up being replaced by none other than "The Mary Tyler Moore Show."
Scripted by Richard Baer, "The Ringer" is, narratively, little more than a slice of life as Kate's Shady Rest Hotel hosts the tournament, a boon for business even though it's practically a foregone conclusion that it will be won, yet again, by Pixley Fats (Henry Calvin), who, similar to his Minnesota billiards-playing namesake, looks like an even more rotund Jackie Gleason but dresses like the tycoon caricature from the Monopoly board game as he arrives carrying his own custom-made horseshoes in his gloved hand.
Pixley, you see, lives for this annual tournament, but when Betty Jo, the valley's resident tomboy who is better than most of the boys at other sports, proves she can toss a mean horseshoe as well, inevitably winding up in the final against the Big Man from Pixley, that's when Kate, prior to the match, gently takes Betty Jo aside and gently reminds her that poor Pixley, fixated on one thing, doesn't have the love and family and social graces that she has and--could you imagine Kate taking Uncle Joe, or any other man, aside and dropping such a leaden hint to throw the match?
Published nearly nine months before "The Ringer" first aired, Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique" became a feminist manifesto as Friedan illustrated how women, even and especially white, middle-class, college-educated women, remained unhappy and unfulfilled as being merely housewives and mothers while aspiring to achieve what men had achieved. Thus, "The Ringer" only heightens the irony that "Petticoat Junction" was canceled in 1970 to make room for a sitcom that became a runaway critical and commercial success by featuring a liberated single working woman making it in a man's world.
Oh, "Petticoat Junction" would eventually have both Billie Jo and Bobbie Jo flirt with feminism before folding. And, to be sure, many women criticized Friedan's thesis at the time it appeared, and subsequently. In the late 1970s, a woman, right-wing firebrand Phyllis Schlafly, led the charge to defeat ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution (just as "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" was ending its run), which would have guaranteed women's equality. And even after revelations in 2016 that then-presidential candidate Donald Trump felt entitled to grab women by their private parts, that didn't stop well over 24 million women from casting their vote for Trump, who ran against a female Democratic candidate.
Like men, women need not be shoehorned into strictly defined categories, but even when "The Ringer" first aired, it really deserved to have been titled "The Feminine Mistake" even before the season-six episode with that same title eventually aired.