from Snopes.com...
Quote:
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The question here is whether the piece quoted above really came from a home economics textbook. Is it real, or is it yet another of those "look how far we've come" fabrications? We know the graphic reproduced above (supposedly from the 13 May 1955 edition of a magazine called Housekeeping Monthly) is a fabrication: It didn't first appeal until well after the "How to Be a Good Wife" list had begun circulating via e-mail, and it's clearly a mock-up produced by adding the text of the e-mail around an image taken from a 1957 cover of John Bull magazine. (The image itself even bears an "Advertising Archives" legend along its side, indicating its source.) As for the text itself, nobody has turned up the infamous textbook that supposedly included these ten steps.
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Note: I didn't search it to debunk it, this is a really old, widely-circulated piece of internet lore.
While it may not be real, it definitely paints a fairly accurate picture of the attitudes of the past with regard to "a woman's duties".
I think making people do anything based on preset "roles" is wrong- especially when it obviously places one person as a subservient of the other. The ideas themselves aren't bad, but should be done out of sincerity and not obligation- and by either the woman OR the man. Example: There's nothing wrong with WANTING to have a good meal prepared for your partner when they return home (regardless of sexes), but the old ideas were that it was expected- indeed, required.
I'm glad that we have greater equality now, and such ideas are no longer "the norm", by any means.