Do you remember being a kid and daydreaming about what the future might look like? For me, I imagined it would be like a real life version of The Jetsons. Robotic machines would brush and floss our teeth, cars would zip through super freeways in the air before folding up into a briefcase for easy storage, and household pets would not only be nuclear powered but mess and hassle free.
I know we’ve made some really cool technological advancements over the past several decades; one being a mobile phone that no longer resembles apiece of carry-on luggage and can locate, within 60 seconds or less, the nearest wine bar and William Sonoma. I’m still holding out for the Ultra Sonic Shower where you can take a 10 second waterless shower with your clothes on and a pill that morphs into a full serving of meatloaf and mashed potatoes just by adding water.
Somehow though, when I actually think about the show now, it appears strange that such a forward thinking futuristic utopia set high in a ultra-modern pad in the sky would still paint Jane Jetson, the matriarch of the family, as the “spacion” wagon driving, dutiful housework fretting woman of the new millennium. Seems like an oxymoron, don’t you think? It’s as if, no matter how far we’ve come, even in the technicolored animated TV series about the future, a woman’s role remains stuck in the past.
I was thinking about this the other day when a friend of mine sent me an old Housekeeping Monthly article from May 13, 1955 titled “The Good Wife’s Guide.” Suddenly, for a brief second, I found myself a little wary of the future and the risk that we might finally figure out time travel and could end up being trapped in this particular decade forever and ever. Here are some highlights of the wifely advice from the 1950’s shared in “The Good Wife’s 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.
• Prepare yourself. Take fifteen 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.
•Clear away the clutter. Make one last trip through the main part of the house just before your husband arrives.
•Make him comfortable. Have him lean back in a comfortable chair….Arrange his pillow and take of his shoes. Have a drink ready for him.
•Don’t complain if he’s home late for dinner or even if he stays out all night. Count this as minor compared to what he might have gone through that day.
•A good wife always remembers her place.
Here are the more realistic highlights of a typical evening some 57 years into the future. -- that’s right, in what we now call “the present”:
•Dinner is “ready” because someone else cooked it, then delivered from down the road a piece, it in a couple of Styrofoam boxes along with some really big watered-down iced teas. The wife’s way of letting her spouse know she’s thinking about him is to leave directions on how to pre-heat the oven when he finally gets home, seeing as he always seem to forget.
• The wife “prepares” herself by staying in the exercise clothes she donned early in the morning, even though she might not have exercised in the first place, but simply may have run out of clean “ordinary” clothes. There is really no reason for her to wear something nice because she still never knows when she’ll have to crawl under the car to retrieve a missing soccer ball or spray some really nasty chemicals into a wasps’ nest glued to the front door. Now, 15 minutes of rest, by the way, means 15 minutes of blissful silence in the carpool line before being terrorized again by the very children to whom you are attached to for eternity. Oh yeah, and grown women don’t wear ribbons.
•Cleaning the clutter at my house in the 21st century means kicking all the shoes and the never-ending collection of cheap plastic toys from the middle of the room underneath the couch. This, by the way, is not to make a path for husband, but because “clutter” really hurts when you step directly on it in your bare feet.
•If the husband falls asleep in chair before dinner is ready, homework is done, or light bulbs are changed, a wife must suppress the urge to dump his bourbon on his lap and then smother him with a pillow. This is not so much “looking out for the maximum amount of comfort for your spouse,” but because murder by suffocation is still illegal in most parts of the world.
•If the husband stays out late, no biggie. That’ll be one less mouth to feed. If he stays out all night without advance notice, a wife should simply change the locks, hijack his Xbox, and hire a detective from the discretionary household fund.
•Oh, a good wife always knows when to drop the name of a good divorce lawyer.
All joking aside, it does seem a little incredible that a woman had to put her needs behind those of her husband. Maybe all of those men who didn’t want women to have the right to vote before the ‘20’s were really afraid of what would happen if we opened Pandora’s Box, so to speak. Lucky for everyone, all hell did not break loose, multiple volcanos did not erupt, and locusts did not cover the earth. Men actually just had to learn to hang up their own towel for a change and take off their own shoes. I’d hardly call that the fall of mankind!
It does seem, however, that in our ever-changing world, some things do stay the same. We’ll always look to the past for a way to make things better, the future for inspiration to do things we never thought possible, and the present as the opportunity to get us where we need to go.
Speaking of looking back, this issue will be the one year anniversary of my first column in Coastal Illustrated. I have learned so much and have had tons of fun in the process. I just want to thank Buff Leavy for allowing me the space, Bob Swinehart for letting me be me, and Kathi Williams for helping me actually make sense. Oh, and last but not least, my husband’s childhood friend, Mary Butin: I’m not sure what you said to him about finally changing the light bulb in my closet, but whatever it was, it worked. When we finally meet, I’ll thank you in person and my clothes will actually match.
So on to the future. I’m really excited about my upcoming website, www.lauraleighpackard.com. It’ll be a place where you can tell some funny stories of your own, blog, and read over my articles from the past year. Thanks for reading and I can’t wait to hear from you soon!
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