The Good Wife’s Guide

by Jill on 11.18.2006 · 14 comments

I believe we’ve posted this before, but just in case you all missed it, an article from a 1955 edition of Housekeeping Monthly.

via Tatiana, my pushy broad of a best friend, whose husband sent this to her all the way from Iraq (because Tatiana would make the Housekeeping Monthly ladies keel over in horror). Posted below the fold because it’s big.

UPDATE: It’s totally fake. Oh well. Good times anyway.

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{ 14 comments }

1 KnifeGhost 11.18.2006 at 9:01 pm: Hate to spoil the fun, but…
2 Heraclitus 11.18.2006 at 9:15 pm: Yeah, that is funny, but I’ve also heard it’s a fake. It says “Housekeeping Monthly,” but is dated to a specific day. Apparently the “advertising archive” credit also doesn’t ring true for the time.
3 kate 11.18.2006 at 9:29 pm: My daughter sent this to me a while back, was circulating around the net at the time. I don’t know if its an actual copy, but the words ring true as the common expectation of every good wife even up to my childhood in the seventies.

Let us not be so numb to forget that women still to this day, in this country, are beaten for lesser offenses against the Man of the House than failing all of these stipulations.
4 Arianna 11.18.2006 at 9:57 pm: Eh… this gets circulated around my office pretty much constantly, or some version thereof anyway.
5 Delta 11.18.2006 at 10:38 pm: Be a little gay and more interesting for him.

Oh so being a good wife, means setting up that threesome for him…
6 Bill 11.19.2006 at 12:22 am: I wouldn’t be surprised if there were guides similar to this back in the day. It’s a hoot.
7 lisa 11.19.2006 at 7:42 am: This one’ s real though:

http://www.snopes.com/language/document/hiringwomen.asp

A Guide to Hiring Women from 1943
8 galnoir 11.19.2006 at 11:58 am: Pink Think: Becoming a Woman in Many Uneasy Lessons, by Lynn Peril, is packed with plenty of real exampls of this sort of thing. The most hair-raising, in my opinion: an ad for Lysol touting its use for “feminine hygiene.”
9 Freeman 11.19.2006 at 1:52 pm: *blinks* Lysol?

*Smacks lips uneasily, grimaces*

That’s not just disgusting, it’s potentially dangerous. It has to be.

Ew.
10 Blair 11.19.2006 at 9:17 pm: Oh yeah, it was. You can find a fantastically horrifying ad about it here. (You have to scroll down a bit to see it) A quick google search didn’t turn up any stats, but I’ve heard before there were cases of women dying because of it.

When these devices (referring to birth control devices) were declared illegal, the flourishing trade simply began selling them as “hygiene” products. For example, vaginal sponges were sold to protect women from “germs” instead of sperm. This led to misleading if not downright fraudulent advertising. From 1930 until 1960, the most popular female contraceptive was Lysol disinfectant — advertised as a feminine hygiene product in ads featuring testimonials from prominent European “doctors.” Later investigation by the American Medical Association showed that these experts did not exist.

“The fraud of the Lysol douche was a byproduct of illegality,” Tone says. “Because birth control couldn’t be advertised openly, manufacturers would use euphemisms to refer to birth control. They took advantage of consumers’ hopes.”

More on that here
Here’s to Griswold v. Connecticut!
11 Maud 11.20.2006 at 1:46 am: Here’s a direct link to the post with the Lysol ad. Unbelievable, no?
12 bmc90 11.20.2006 at 3:37 pm: Actually I love this list even though it’s fake. When it gets trotted out, as it usually does every so often, I sigh and say, “Yep, this is what I wish my husband would do before I get home.” What is sad is that if you read Get to Work and the studies it was based on, what’s on this list more or less remains the expectation for women in a lot of households.
13 Vincent 11.21.2006 at 10:59 pm: I don’t know this kind of thing is looking pretty good to some women, after all did you see MP Dunleavey’s MSN Money article entitled “Secret Lives of Breadwinner Wives”. Seems MP and her Women in Red are kind of not liking the traditional male role of primary breadwinner. I
14 Vincent 11.21.2006 at 10:59 pm: I don’t know this kind of thing is looking pretty good to some women, after all did you see MP Dunleavey’s MSN Money article entitled “Secret Lives of Breadwinner Wives”. Seems MP and her Women in Red are kind of not liking the traditional male role of primary breadwinner.