Back at the start of February my friend Christy (of saved the puppy fame) forwarded an email entitled “The Care and Feeding of a Husband.” It was one I had seen before, and one which has become both laughable and notorious.
Why?
Well, in case you haven’t seen it, the article’s title is “The Good Wife’s Guide” and it suggests several specific ways to be a good wife. Below are a few of them:
• Have dinner ready. Plan ahead, even the night before, to have a delicious meal ready, on time for his return. This is a way of letting him know that you have been thinking about him and are concerned about his needs. Most men are hungry when they come home and the prospect of a good meal (especially his favourite dish) is part of the warm welcome needed.
• Prepare yourself. Take 15 minutes to rest so you’ll be refreshed when he arrives. Touch up your make-up, put a ribbon in your hair and be fresh-looking. He has just been with a lot of work-weary people.
• Be a little gay and a little more interesting for him. His boring day may need a lift and one of your duties is to provide it.
• Greet him with a warm smile and show sincerity in your desire to please him.
• Listen to him. You may have a dozen important things to tell him, but the moment of his arrival is not the time. Let him talk first – remember, his topics of conversation are more important than yours.
• Don’t complain if he’s late home for dinner or even if he stays out all night. Count this as minor compared to what he might have gone through that day.
• A good wife always knows her place.
I picked some of the more provocative suggestions, because they’re both the most maddening and shock-arousing. But the whole article is along the same vein: think only of him and his needs, attend to them, for go your own.
Was it really like this back in the fifties? Did wives really think this way? Try to act this way? And who wrote this article? A woman or a man? Because there’s no mention of that.
That’s what got me wondering: is this another one of those viral emails of the hoax variety?
The article looks real enough upon first glance. Like someone scanned it out of a real magazine. Speaking of that, it’s often attributed to Good Housekeeping. However, if you look closely at the top it was supposedly published by Housekeeping Monthly on May 13, 1955.
I say “supposedly” because after doing some snooping using Snopes, this article may be a fake. Snopes’s jury is still out on that, but they do know the picture accompanying it never appeared with any real article. It was taken from a 1957 cover of another magazine.
But the text may be based on a passage from a home ec textbook circa that era. One that hasn’t turned up yet. (Snopes hasn’t found one with this specific list, but they’ve found some with similar themes. That’s why they’re not ruling out it may have come from a yet unrevealed textbook and why they’ve labeled the truth status of this article “undertermined.”)
One thing they do admit is real is the “attitude” conveyed in the article -–to an extent. (I liked their term for it: the “joy through subservience era.”)
If a woman chose to marry, then she chose for her place to be in the home tending to hearth and kidlets. Her work was viewed as important, just not as important as her bread-winning husband’s. That’s how it was. Everyone accepted it.
Times are different now –or are they? What attitudes do we currently hold that might seem laughable come 50 years from now? I can think of a few, What about you?
Courtney Mroch writes about animals great and small in Pets and the harmony and strife that encompasses married life in Marriage. For a full listing of her articles click here.
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