The Good Wife’s Guide

This is how women were advised to behave as a perfect spouse in 1955.

The Good Wife's Guide (1955) (Flickr)
  • 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.
  • 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 for dinner or even if he stays out all night. Count this as minor compared to what he might have gone through at work.
  • Don’t ask him questions about his actions or question his judgment or integrity. Remember, he is the master of the house and as such will always exercise his will with fairness and truthfulness. You have no right to question him.
  • A good wife always knows her place.

Actually, this is probably a fake ad. One guy claims he found the actual Housekeeping Monthly article and posted a ‘scanned’ picture on Flickr too, but since it is an image copy (with identical underlining) of the images that circulate everywhere, it’s not really credible. Both Snopes and Wikipedia suspect that it’s a fake. I think it’s too much over the top too: “his topics of conversation are more important than yours”, “A good wife always knows her place”, that’s clearly written by a man to disturb women. Maybe someone at an advertising agency with too much free time on his hands?

Best soundtrack to this article: Daan’s Housewife

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