MRA’S WET DREAM: Awful ’50s Marriage Advice Shows What Our Mothers and Grandmothers Were Up Against
A long-running Ladies’ Home Journal column that started in 1953, called “Can This Marriage Be Saved?,” features real-life couples and the juicy details of their marital issues.
The columns were split into three parts: a wife’s perspective, her husband’s take and then final judgment by a counselor from the American Institute of Family Relations. AIFR was a successful, but now defunct, center founded in the 1930s by “Dr.” Popenoe. He wasn’t actually a doctor or a psychologist but a eugenicist with an honorary degree. Very often, Popenoe’s counselors found a way to pin problems on the wives, calling them “childish,” “juvenile,” “emotionally immature” and “frigid,” for example.
Early “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” columns, which continue today at Divine Caroline without the sexist overtones, show us how far women’s equality has come — but also how far we have to go. Here are five horrifying pieces of advice from the magazine.
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Yet Sylvia was advised to “change her personality and deeply rooted attitudes” against her husband, the counselor wrote, because she’d “deeply wounded his masculine pride.” Being too “fast” with boys in her past had left the 31-year-old “almost as emotionally immature as a child of four or five … driving her husband out of his home to the corner bar and into the arms of other women.” The counselor found ways to blame Sylvia in every aspect of the couple’s marital woes, from Everett’s drinking to Everett’s probable infidelity, while Everett himself merely “modified” his drinking and philandering.
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