Francine Smith

Francine Smith (née Ling; formerly Dawson) is a fictional character on the animated television series American Dad!. She is the wife of the title character Stan Smith and the mother of Hayley and Steve. Francine is voiced by Wendy Schaal.

Fictional character biography

Francine was born to a wealthy couple in South Carolina, Nicholas and Cassandra Dawson. She was abandoned by her birth parents because they were forbidden to bring their baby into first class with them, and so they selfishly left her at the airport.

She spent her early childhood in a Roman Catholic orphanage. She is naturally left-handed but this was literally beaten out of her, with a side of beef (or a mackerel on Fridays), by the nuns working there who saw lefties as "the devil's minions." As a result she took to using her right hand and was conditioned to hate left-handed people. This was made evident in later life when she forcibly asked Steve's science partner to leave the house (at first the family thought she was a racist because Steve's science partner was an African American girl). But in recent episodes, she has adapted to being left-handed; she uses her left as her more dominant hand.