Sue Nador updates 1950s wisdom from the “Good Wife’s Guide” for today’s husband or wife.
There’s a meme that’s been going around for years. It is an article purportedly from Housekeeping Monthly dated May 13, 1955 titled “The Good Wife’s Guide.” A photocopy has ended up on our fridge door. I don’t know who put it there, but I have my suspicions.
While this article appears to be a fabrication, it captures the ethos of married life fifty years ago. It was a time when women were expected to devote themselves selflessly to housework and child rearing. Their higher calling was to make their home a quiet haven for their husbands, unquestionably the more valuable person in the relationship.
Unsurprisingly given the article portrays married life a half century ago, there are several pieces of advice in this short guide that are obnoxious. These include helpful pointers to the stay at home wife such as:
- 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 though that day.
- Arrange his pillow and offer to take off his shoes. Speak in a low, soothing and pleasant voice.
- 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.
For the record, if my husband stayed out all night without explanation I’d be doing more than arranging his pillow and taking off his shoes; I’d be arranging for a divorce and taking off with his CD collection. (I like the sound of the “master” bit, though, but I digress).
Despite these howlers, the article makes some good points once suitably updated for the 21st century to include both stay at home wives and stay at home husbands. There are three pieces of advice from the 1955 “Good Wife Guide” that bear repeating, with my commentary:
Be happy to see him.
Totally agree. Whether it is a “him” or a “her” who returns home after a day in the salt mines, it is important to welcome them back in a way that reinforces their decision to come home. Home should be our warm haven where we are reunited with a warm hug and a kiss. Absence from our partners should make our hearts grow fonder.
Don’t greet him with complaints and problems.
True, even though it is easier said than done. Dealing with daily minutiae as a stay at home wife or husband can be frustrating. Because it is futile to complain to the kids or the dog about the sink backing up again, it is hard to resist complaining to a partner. Rather than complain or nag right off the bat, better results will probably be achieved once the partner has had a chance to relax and unwind, perhaps with a glass of wine. And a foot rub.
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.
This goes both ways. Both the partner that works outside the home and the stay at home partner may need a lift. It’s a good strategy to remain interesting to ourselves, and consequently to our partners. Stimulating conversation is important to the vitality of a relationship, so it is good to gather “material” throughout the day to share at night with our partners—perhaps something interesting we heard on the radio, some silly thing a colleague or neighbor did, or a juicy piece of office or neighborhood gossip.
It is fun to go back in time, and laugh about how our parents and grandparents related to each other. What is always interesting to me though is not how much has changed over the generations, but just how little has changed. Irrespective of who stays home, there are some good practices for greeting one’s partner at the end of the day that will determine how well the rest of the night unfolds.
Yup…yup…tried the Stepford wife robot thing,….doesn’t work….my husband never got to hear the authentic me…or thought that what he was doing was wrong….or understood how abusive his friend’s behavior was to me and our family….
Being smiling and charming and sweeping stuff under the carpet is no way to deal with a soon to be boiling kettle of feelings of discontent and betrayal….
“Be a little gay and a little more interesting for him. ”
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We’re all a little gay, really.