Advice for 1950's Housewives

There is this program called Stumble. You go through a list of potential topics and check all those that are of interest to you. Click on the Stumble button and you are taken to a random website that interests you (hopefully). It's horribly addicting and you never know what you'll find.

The other day, I found this:

The Good Wives Guide

Have dinner ready.

Plan ahead, even the night before, to have a delicious meal ready on time for his return. This is a way of letting him know that you have been thinking about him and are concerned about his needs. Most men are hungry when they come home and the prospect of a good meal (especially his favourite dish) is part of the warm welcome needed.

Prepare yourself.

Take 15 minutes to rest so you'll be refreshed when he arrives. Touch up your make-up, put a ribbon in your hair and be fresh looking. He has just been with a lot of work-weary people. His boring day may need a lift and one of your duties is to provide it.

Clear away clutter.

Make one last trip through the main part of the house just before your husband arrives. Gather up schoolbooks, toys, papers, etc. and then run a dustcloth over the tables.

Over the winter months of the year you should prepare and light a fire for him to unwind by. Your husband will feel he has reached a haven of rest and order, and it will give you a lift too. After all, catering for his comfort will provide you with immense personal satisfaction.

Prepare the children.

Take a few minutes to wash the children's hands and faces, comb their hair, and if necessary change their clothes. They are little treasures and he would like to see them playing the part.

Minimise all noise.

At the time of his arrival, eliminate all noise of the washer, dryer or vacuum. Try to encourage the children to be quiet.

Be happy to see him.

Greet him with a warm smile and show sincerity in your desire to please him.

Listen to him.

You may have a dozen important things to tell him, but the moment of his arrival is not the right time. Let him talk first - remember, his topics of conversation are more important than yours.

Make the evening his.

Never complain if he comes home late or goes out to dinner, or other places of entertainment without you. Instead, try to understand his world of strain and pressure, and his real need to be at home and relax.

Your goal.

Try to make sure that your home is a place of peace and tranquility where your husband can renew himself in body and spirit.

Don't greet him with complaints and problems.

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 throught that day.

Make him comfortable.

Have him lean back in a comfortable chair or have him lie down in the bedroom. Have a cool or a warm drink ready for him. 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 judgement or integrity. Remember, he is master of the house and as such, will always excercise his will with fairness and truthfulness.

You have no right to question him.
A good wife knows her place

http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~pjbk/humour/goodwife.html

It made me chuckle. Clearly, it's a little sexist in the way it's presented. Statements like "he is master of the house", and "Don't complain if he's late home for dinner or even if he stays out all night" just get to me riled up. They describe a world where the man is worth more than the woman and clearly I don't agree with that.

But there's more to it than that. This is the person you love and want to spend your life with in fairy tale like happiness. In a relationship where the man and the woman are equal, this is decent advice. Do what you can to show your partner you love him. Cook him a meal. Make him a drink. Don't bitch at him the moment he gets in the door. Give yourselves a chance to focus on each other by having the other things taken care of. But here's where I differ from the advice: Not because you have to, but because you want to. And if you're lucky enough to have a pretty equal relationship, you might get it in return. That's one of the great things about doing things for love. It feels really nice when it gets done for you in return.

DIY Mail Sorter

I like things organized.

It doesn't always happen.

The Husband and I have been in our house for 5 years now and I just now (finally) figured out to do with our mail situation.

Prior to this, it has ended up in a pile in one of three places: The kitchen counter (and boy, is The Husband grumpy when he needs to move the mail to get to his coffee in the morning), the dining room table (it's the dumping ground for just about everything and it just looks messy), or the kitchen table (the one we actually sit at to eat and work on the computer and stuff, so that makes me the grumpy bear). Not only is dumping the mail in piles just messy but things get lost. Just a couple of weeks ago I received a phone call from a doctor's office that I haven't been to for over a year. They were letting me know that I had a credit on my account, that they had cut me a check, and that it still wasn't cashed. They were trying to be sure I got it. I might have (as in actually received it). I might not have. Who knows? My mail was such a mess. Luckily, most of the bills are handled through the internet so it's not like we had debt collectors knocking at our doors. But still....

I set out to find a mail organizer that would hang on the wall in the 18" of space I have behind my door. We had a mail sorter prior to this but it was a counter too one and it was trying to share a home on our 10 linear feet of counter top with the knife block, the utensil crock, the canister set, the cable box, the coffee pot, the compost container, the tissue box and this list actually includes the kitchen sink! It just wasn't effective and I hate that my counter tops have stuff over every inch of them that touches the wall. If I had my druthers, I'd take most of the stuff off. But there is good reason for most of it being there (we could be a little better about using the compost container....but after last year's fruit fly incident, we're a little gun shy).

I shopped all over the internet and couldn't find a thing. So I went to the place where dreams come true, www.etsy.com. That place makes me drool every time I go there. People are so darned creative! I love to see what they come up with. But alas, Etsy failed me. There were some 'almosts' but nothing made me shriek: "That's it!"

Etsy did leave me with ideas. With a little from column A, a little from column B, and a little from off the map, I designed the above mail sorter. I had clothes pins, a board, and some paint (guaranteed to match 'cause it's the color inside my china cabinet in the adjacent kitchen!). The Husband was nice enough to visit the Big Orange Box and get me some of those metal pieces. Then, after borrowing the hot glue gun from my parents, I was able to slap it all together.

It's got a 'his' slot, a 'hers' slot and an outgoing mail slot. I've always clipped coupons to my back door with a magnet to remind me to use them (I'm not a very frequent coupon user) but I wanted the coupons on the mail sorter, hence the clothes pins at the bottom. So far I'm liking it, but I haven't gotten much but junk mail for the last several days so I haven't really been able to try it out. But I'm really excited to!

Hello!

I'd make a great 1950's housewife. I love cooking, cleaning, sewing, and gardening (when the cold, northern midwestern weather permits it). I get such fulfillment from having a great supper ready and waiting when my husband, The Husband, gets home from work. We love entertaining our friends in our home. I even live in a 1950's house. Rewind time by 60 years and I'd fit right in.

But there are three main problems with me emulating a 1950's housewife:

1) I work full time as a manager in a retail store. It's hard to be a perfect housewife when you're out of the house for over 40 hours each week. I also run my own photography company on the side. Most housewives weren't entrepreneurs. Working full times means sometimes we get to eat something that had its beginnings in a box. That's not how I like to cook for quality and health reasons, but sometimes I'm just to tired to make something more.

2) I don't have kids, unless you count my four furbabies, the loves of my life:


Riley has been with us now for three years and he's about 3 1/2 years old. We aren't really sure what he's a mix of, as he was born on the island of St Croix down in the Caribbean. The feral dogs down there don't exactly check pedigrees before they decide to get it on. We used to think he was part sheltie and part dachshund with some other things mixed in, but now I'm not so sure. His tail curls up over his body which doesn't happen with either of those two breeds. Who knows what he is. As my brother said, "You wanted a mutt, you got a mutt. What does it matter what breeds he might be?" Because of his tropical heritage we call him a Coconut Mutt. He's about 22 pounds. He's a pretty darned good dog and was our perfect first dog. We got him through a local rescue that takes dogs from the islands where their chance of being adopted is quite low. Most people in the Caribbean have a much different attitude about dogs than we do here. They rely on people flying back and forth between the islands and the mainland to transport the dogs to participating shelters. That's how our Coconut Mutt came to live in the snowy tundra.


We decided Riley needed a little sister last November so we found Josie. We know she's part Corgi because we met her brother and he was definitely part Corgi. But she definitely has some other things mixed in as Corgi's are typically around 30 pounds and this little kid is only around 16 pounds. Josie might be the happiest dog on the planet. She's one of those dogs that when her tail wags, it starts at her shoulders and works its way down to her tail. She gets away with things because she's cute and I think she knows it. She came from a shelter in Kentucky with a 98% kill rate. A local shelter partners with the shelter in Kentucky and brings very adoptable dogs north where they have a much higher chance of being adopted and getting a chance at life. We liked her when looking for pups of Petfinder.com because she looked like Riley. We fell in love with her because she was sweet and cute.

We also have 2 rabbits, Hank and Gretchen that live in the basement, but I couldn't find a picture for you today. They can get out of their cage when we're around to watch them. They are litter box trained so they aren't messy. They're the senior residents of the house as we'd had Hank for a year before we got Gretchen and then it was another 3 years before we got Riley. Hank was actually how we knew Riley was the dog for us. We brought Hank along on our puppy date with Riley. We liked Riley so we brought Hank out to see how he'd respond to something small, fuzzy and fast. Riley licked Hank's head, lay down on the ground, looked at us and wagged his tail. We were sold.

And frankly, I don't know if we'll have kids. We love the life we have now and don't feel a huge need to change it. We don't feel a huge gap in our hearts that can only be filled with children. So if we don't really want them, should we really have them? Just because society says we should?

3) As you might have guessed by my last paragraph, I don't believe is submitting to your husband and letting him control the relationship. I'm sure that not all 1950's relationships were like that, but that's certainly the stereotype. Yes, I said I get fulfillment out of making The Husband a superb dinner. But it's only because I choose to cook him a great meal. If I had to do it, he'd get spaghetti out of the jar every night. It's because I have the freedom to do all of this that I enjoy doing it.

But I enjoy many things of the stereotypical 1950's housewife and I want to share how these are important facets of my life even though I work full time. I want to share the things I cook, the things I sew, the other things I make. I also want to share my thoughts on this crazy life.