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It has become fashionable to portray outdated societal behaviors and attitudes — ones we now consider desperately wrongheaded — to be worse than they really were as a way of making a point about how much we've improved. When we despair over the human condition and feel the need for a little pat on the back, a few startling comparisons between us modern enlightened folks and those terrible neanderthals of yesteryear give us that. We go away from such readings a bit proud of how we've pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps and with our halos a bit more brightly burnished. The juxtaposition of wonderful modernity with a tawdry past also serves to reinforce the 'rightness' of current societal stances by making any other positions appear ludicrous. It reminds folks of the importance of holding on to these newer ways of thinking and to caution them against falling back into older patterns which may be more comfortable but less socially desirable. Such reinforcement works on the principle that if you won't do a good thing just for its own sake, you'll surely do it to avoid being laughed at and looked down upon by your peers. A typical vessel for this sort of comparison is the fabricated or misrepresented bit of text from the olden days, some document that purportedly demonstrates how our ancestors endured difficult lives amidst people who once held truly despicable beliefs. Want to prove that American slaveholders were even more vile than we could possibly imagine? Just point people to the apocryphal Slave Consultant's Narrative. Remind someone what easy lives we lead these days by showing him an alleged list of rules for teachers from 1872. Or poke fun at Victorian sexual attitudes (or modern day feminism) by trotting out a piece of Advice to Young Brides. Yet another piece of olden days text, typically titled How to Be a Good Wife or The Good Wife's Guide, is said to have originated with a 1950s-era home economics textbook. Is it real, or is it yet another of those look how far we've come fabrications? We know the graphic reproduced above (supposedly from the 13 May 1955 edition of a magazine called Housekeeping Monthly) is a fabrication: It didn't first appear until well after the How to Be a Good Wife list had begun circulating via e-mail, and it's clearly a mock-up produced by adding the text of the e-mail around an image taken from a 1957 cover of John Bull magazine. (The image itself even bears an Advertising Archives legend along its side, indicating its source.) As for the text itself, nobody has turned up the infamous textbook that supposedly included these ten steps. The list is often attributed to Helen B. Andelin's book Fascinating Womanhood, first published in 1963 to provide instruction in The Art of Winning a Man's Complete Love, but no such list appears in that work. However, before we head off to go dancing in the streets over this, safe and secure in our knowledge that this list of housewifely tips was just a bit of cooked-up nonsense, we'd better take another look at the wife's role in the 1950s. And before we entirely write off Fascinating Womanhood as the source of the piece now in circulation, let's take a peek between its covers, because it certainly contains plenty to make everyone from the diehard feminist to the start the revolution without me matron shudder, including these entries from a list of DO's and DON'TS: We don't want to believe any woman, even half a century ago, was willing to submit herself to a life of servitude in order to be considered successful at her most important role in life, that of the wife. And we certainly don't want to believe our schools were used to inculcate young women with these skewed notions of the proper role for women. Yet we'd be wrong on both counts: Women did, and young gals were. Whether the piece at hand is a genuine excerpt from a yet-undiscovered home economics textbook, it is nonetheless a relatively accurate reflection of the mainstream vision of a woman's appointed role in post-war America, as evinced by such educational training films as The Home Economics Story (made familiar to a whole new generation of youngsters through its spoofing on the popular Mystery Science Theater 3000 program). We needn't paint a mental picture of those times as being one of master and slave, his every whim a command, his every utterance golden, because they weren't. But it is true in those days a woman's province was understood to be the home. To her fell the housework and the childrearing, tasks considered her indisputable purpose in life, her highest calling; not something voluntarily undertaken. It was seen as only right and proper that the wife should keep the home running smoothly, making it a quiet haven of peace and joy for her husband, the breadwinner. Her role in the marriage, though still important, was simply not considered to be on the same level as his. Certainly, the tribulations of running a home were never to be openly compared with a man's daily travails. He earned money, she didn't; thus his work was important. So, given all that, how to view this ten-point list which supposedly came from a 1950s home economics textbook? After having leafed through Fascinating Womanhood, I want to see it as a condensation of the worst of this particular joy through subservience era, a precipitate that showcased only the most servile aspects of what women were led to believe was their right and proper function (all the parts that didn't portray them as handmaidens to the lord and master having been discarded to make the story better). Call it an exaggeration with a point, if you will. SIGHTINGS: The 2000 Larry Elder book, 10 Things You Can't Say in America, reproduces the text of the example, with How to be a good wife, a home economics high school textbook, 1954 offered as its source.
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