It could be real, I’ve seen similar things from books and women’s magazines from around the same time period. But I do see what you mean about being a little over the top – most lists I’ve read along those lines have less volatile items mixed in. If I had to guess, I would say it’s real items taken from a variety of sources and combined into one kooky list.
I think the disconnect (at least in how I’ve seen that list presented in emails) is that the reader is led to believe that most women in the 1950s followed those guidelines. There’s a whole school of thought that asserts there was a huge gulf between what those magazine articles said and what women were actually doing in their homes and marriages. It was put out as an <i>ideal</i>, and the theory goes that such pieces contributed to a lot of stress and guilt – I guess akin to these days when so many models are super skinny, and an average-sized woman might look at these ads and think “that’s how I’m supposed to look, and yikes, I am really far away from looking like that.”
Imagine 50 years from now reading Cosmo, and thinking that the average woman came home from her executive office wearing her power business suit and stripped down at the front door to reveal sexy lingerie before demonstrating 50 new ways to please her lover. On a routine basis, I mean, not just on Steak and BJ day.
Work for inner happiness – sounds good to me.
Seek to understand its rules – try to understand what brings inner happiness, no problem there.
Don’t have a lot of preconceived ideas of what you want out of life – i.e. be flexible and take happiness where you find it instead of being dissatisfied if you don’t have what you once thought you should.
Sounds a lot like a chunk of my personal philosophy.
You’re right that it doesn’t sound bad from one perspective. But if you read a little closer, the phrase “seek to understand [life’s] rules” and the entire “Don’t” seem to mean “be happy with your lot and don’t act up and try to change things.”
I don’t know if those were actually printed in a Home Ec. book in the 1950’s, but that is what we were taught to do and be. The only false note on the list was about not complaining. We were encouraged to communicate our concerns, but to choose a good time to do it.
Most of what we learned wasn’t actually in textbooks. We saw those hokey black and white films and got little booklets with suggestions. Our mothers gave us advice and certainly the magazines and movies told us what would be expected. All the girls also belonged to FHA – Future Homemakers of America. You joined when you were twelve. Everyone did. It was automatic.
You have to understand that we were brainwashed from birth to think that way. There were exceptions, of course. But this was the norm until the women’s movement began.
And our country still seems to feel uncomfortable having women sharing equally in public life. Take a look at the next Senate or House Committee hearing. How many of the people testifying are women? How many people doing the questioning are women? How many news photographers and reporters are women? Look at the movies on HBO. Are the main characters male or female? Do a tally.
There’s “soccer” and there’s “women’s soccer.” In high school the men’s team will be the Tigers and the women’s team will be called the Lady Tigers. Huh? What kind of message is that?
People will look back at 2006 and think that we are terribly biased against women.
My mother-in-law (83 years old) expressed some dissatisfaction when I told her I don’t cook for Mr. K every night. Come to think of it, so did HE! He’s the only son and there were, shall we say, expectations that I was not willing to meet. Everyone survived my decision to be a household slacker.
I also clicked on the link to find other reviews by the same person. The only other book she had reviewed was one about historical rifles. Found that amusing myself.
I have in my possession a newspaper from the 1870s which has a very similar article in it. (I know that it is an authentic newspaper-- I work in a museum, and it was given to me by them because we had multiple copies of the same issue.)
It’s not cut into bullet points as the OP’s article is, but it gives very similar advice. It ends with the advice that when a woman feels like complaining, she should instead thank God she managed to get herself a husband.
That’s not how I interpret that sentence. I think it’s encouraging flexibility, insight and self-examination rather than resignation to one’s fate. For instance, let’s say I once wanted to be an astronaut. Life and my abilities didn’t lead me down that path, but I do have a happy life with a fair number of significant acheivements. Should I be bitter and unhappy because I’m not an astronaut?
I do have a problem with it if you read it your way.
I understand that, and it’s not bad advice. But in the context of the rest of the advice [Do: Recognize his superior strength and ability; Don’t: Don’t try to excel him in anything which requires masculine ability.], I think my interpretation might be closer to what they meant.
I have in front of me Betty Crocker’s New Picture Cook Book, copyright 1961 General Mills Inc, first edition, sixth printing.
Page five, “Kitchen Know-How.”
From the section titled “Refresh Your Spirits”–
"Every morning before breakfast, comb hair, apply makeup and a dash of cologne. Does wonders for your morale and your family’s, too!
“Think pleasant thoughts while working and a chore will become a ‘labor of love.’”
There’s more along these lines. It reads kinda silly and backward now, but as others have said the things we tell each other to deal with today’s stupid stresses will be just as silly and backward a few decades in the future.
You guys think this is bad. I had a Hygiene book–I think it was called “Modern Hygiene,” copyright date in the 1930s, a textbook for high-school (or maybe junior high) health classes, where it suggested that the proper interval for a girl to wash her hair was at least every three weeks!
Oh, man!
There was also a whole list of stuff not to do during your period. Riding horseback was a big no-no, riding a bicycle, swimming, bathing(!) (I think by that they meant washing, ewww), washing your hair ('course you only did that once every three weeks so it wouldn’t be too hard to schedule), and there were a couple of other really weird ones (like churning milk–or something on that order) that would seem to me to have been outdated even in the '30s.
I found this book in my high school library (in the late '60s) and my friends and I read it and just howled at how backwards people were in the '30s. I thought this book was so funny that I bought it at a library cleaning-out-the-books sale, I think for 10 cents, which was 10 cents more than it was worth.
BTW somebody asked about dishwashers in the '50s. A lot of houses had them–houses built after the war seemed to have them pretty routinely. However, just some anecdotal stuff here, none of the people in my family used them as dishwashers, but did use them as storage. I’m assuming that’s because they just didn’t work that well. The houses of my family members were more likely to have a dishwasher than a dryer.
It was believed in earlier days that the presence of a menstruating woman would cause food to act in weird ways: dough wouldn’t rise if kneaded by a menstruating woman, cream wouldn’t churn into butter, and food would spoil quicker.
You’re right, though, that those ideas should have been passe by the 1930s. Churning itself wasn’t-- some women in rural areas made their own butter until around the 1950s.
And some of us were still churning butter in the 1950’s. It flat wore my arms out whenever I visited by aunt’s farm.
My aunt killed a chicken by wringing its neck too.
In Home Ec. we were taught to kill chickens by hanging them up by their feet and running a knife up through the roofs of their mouths and piercing their brains. Then we let them flap around while the blood drained out and they died.
But when we served fried chicken, we were pretty and smelled good.
A good friend of mine swears that a woman cannot make fudge while menstruating. She says it won’t set. I myself am kitchen illiterate and have never tried making fudge so I have no experience with this, but I callbullshit.
Oh and she is not from the old school. We are both 37.
