Are you a good 1930's wife?

I recently came across this website and a post about "Marital Rating Scales" from the 1930s. I spent a year in college doing research on marital satisfaction in the Psyc department, so I find stuff like this amazingly interesting. Basically, you can go through and check boxes about your spouse and give them a score, which corresponds to a rating from "Very Poor" to "Very Superior."

Click to enlarge.

Click to enlarge.

Some of my favorites...
Wives get merits for:

• Let's husband sleep late on Sundays and holidays
• Writes to husband's parents regularly
• Gives husband shampoo or manicure

And they get demerits for...

• Walks around house in stocking feet
• Fails to wash top of milk bottle before opening it
• Slows up card games with chatter or gossip
• Squeezes toothpaste at the top
• Wears red nail polish
• Goes to bed with curlers in her hair or much face cream

Husbands get merits for...

• Tries to keep wife equipped with modern labor-saving devices
• Holds wife's coat
• A fast and efficient worker - not the puttering sort

And they get demerits for...

• Eats onions, radishes, or garlic before going to bed
• Calls "Where is the ... ?" without first hunting for the object
• Writes on tablecloth with pencil

The best part of this survey is that it's not just from a magazine or something... it was actually made by a psychologist with a PhD and a MD. He went around and did a scholarly study asking people what they liked and didn't like about their spouse, and then he combined it into this survey.

So while it's kind of hilarious because it's horribly outdated (e.g. wives get negative points if the seams in their hose are "often crooked"), it's actually a really good representation of how you would have been perceived in the 1930s!

Each survey is four pages - you can see the whole thing here. It's really fun to look at... so many of the things that spouses do/don't like about each other haven't changed at all! And just in case you were wondering, Jeff scored one point shy of the "Very Superior" category - and that was only because we don't have kids and I couldn't give him points for all the children-related ones! Haha.

Go take a look and see what sort of 1930s wife you would have been. Oh, and don't forget to go write to your in-laws and give your husband his shampoo tonight! :o)