Good Housekeeping: Every Executive Needs a Perfect Wife, 1956
Tomorrow your husband gets his big break. He’s going to be interviewed for a key position that will be the turning point in his career—if he gets the job.
To be sure, the decision will be based primarily on your husband’s personality and qualifications. But more and more these days the decision also hinges on what the boss-to-be thinks of you, the man’s wife.
We employers realize how often the wrong wife can break the right man….
If a man has a peevish, nagging wife, if she is jealous and possessive, if she is lazy or overambitious or extravagant, that man is going to be unhappy. And his unhappiness will interfere with his concentration…
What do we look for in a wife? Here are six qualities that impress us most. And how a wife rates on these goes a long way in determining whether her husband gets that job…
- A good wife is friendly. She smiles easily and she is pleasant to be with. She has many friends, whom she entertains within her means, but she is careful to prevent social activities from interfering with her husband’s rest, health, and efficiency….
- A good wife is part of her community. She is interested in town planning, local government, school conditions, church activities. In her community, she is a good-will ambassador for her husband….
- A good wife’s primary interest is her husband, her home, and her children. There may be many successful and happily married women doctors, lawyers, artists, musicians, writers, and the like, but I believe that being the wife of an executive is a full-time job in itself….
Of course it isn’t possible to discover whether or not a woman has all these plus qualities in just one meeting. If we must make an immediate decision, we do the best we can…. Real troublemakers are fairly easy to spot. Here are the main types:
- The complaining woman. The weather’s bad, the child was cranky tonight, the waiter is sloppy, the food is cold: I know immediately that she is a nag…. The complaining woman can toss a cloud over the brightest of days—and the brightest of men.
- The dominating woman. She knows it all—from what a man should eat to how he should run his business. Her unwanted advice is offered free of charge for everything and anything….
- The wife-in-a-rut. This pathetic little creature is just out of her element. She is self-conscious, nervous, and awkward. Her taste in clothes is usually pretty bad; her conversation centers on babies….
It hurts to discover that a good man has married the wrong woman, but he still deserves a chance. I might be more cautious about the position I give him… but if he can keep his wife successfully under control, he can keep his job.
WHAT YOUR POST SHOULD ADDRESS:-
Source:
Where: in which parts (two parts at least) of Grade 11 materials are you using the primary source?
How: section
Challenge: contradict: bring other information; perspective
Assignment design
- Question or two
- Students do or work through
- Outcome: create
Here is the chapter introduction of “The Post-War “Boom”: Affluence and Anxiety” for more information about the primary source:
After World War II, everything about America seemed to get bigger: families, towns, highways, shopping centers, corporations, and government. Individual wealth grew along with the economy, and American power expanded with the Cold War. After the ordeals of the depression and war, citizens reveled in normalcy. Passed by Congress in 1944, the G.I. Bill invested millions in former soldiers: paying them to go to college, lending them money to buy homes, financing their small businesses. The middle class boomed.
Although some thought President Dwight Eisenhower bland, more embraced the cheerful Republican slogan “I Like Ike.” Patriotism soared along with belief in the superiority of the so-called American Way. With confidence high, consumers fueled a spectacular economic expansion. Middle-class families could afford to purchase most of the conveniences offered by mass production, including tract homes in sprawling new suburbs. They had more babies than their parents’ generation to fill these homes, and prosperity allowed many women to stay home to raise this special “baby boom.” Parents sought to give their children all the things they had not had during the Great Depression.
Unaccustomed affluence sparked some anxiety, however, as did the Cold War. Critics asserted that the United States was becoming too complacent, its citizens coddled. Parents worried about the effect of abundance on children’s character development and about the subversive influence of comic books and rock ’n’ roll. Novelists and social commentators harped on the emergence of a new phenomenon called “juvenile delinquency.” Blockbuster films such as Rebel without a Cause, West Side Story, Splendor in the Grass, and Blackboard Jungle portrayed a generation run wild. Sophisticated, but lost.
Adult roles also provoked commentary. The fifties witnessed an ongoing preoccupation with the lack of creative or “manly” jobs for males in mass society, and the proper place of women in the nuclear family. Some social critics asserted that women who sought fulfillment in anything other than childrearing or housekeeping were abnormal and neurotic. The prominent psychologist Marynia Farnham called modern career women “the lost sex.”
Paradoxically, television contributed both to rebellion and conformity. At the start of the decade, only a small fraction of the population (roughly three million Americans) owned the new technology. By 1960, 50 million households had TV sets. More Americans had TVs than running water and indoor toilets. Television allowed people to connect with the rest of America. Fifty million households laughed at the same jokes and pratfalls. Coal miners in rural Appalachia heard the bubbling Cuban accent of Desi Arnaz on I Love Lucy. Schoolchildren in southern California learned to recognize the nasal twang of the Boston Irish in the appearances of John Kennedy. Regional speech patterns diminished as a new generation of performers and announcers set the norm for “middle America.” Because the content of many sitcoms focused on optimistic, happy portrayals of suburban life, these shows also helped set a standard—rarely attainable—of the ideal postwar family. And, by establishing an ideal, television offered viewers a chance to compare their own lives with those of others, creating an anxiety about why they might not match the model, and if they were truly normal. People who did not meet social expectations, such as homosexuals, experienced outright persecution. They didn’t conform to “the American Way.” Television revealed America’s failings, especially its poor treatment of minorities, while broadcasting new kinds of music far and wide.
Although traditional by reputation, the fifties were a time of enormous flux. Broadcast imagery, booming suburbs, growing incomes, and seditious rock ’n’ roll dramatically changed how Americans lived and what they thought about it.
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