Gypsy Creams
Mary Marryat on Fatherhood
Woman's Weekly / 11th March 1967
Oh dear. I’m pretty sure Mary meant well, but advising a worn-out and demotivated young mother to expend even more energy trying to keep her spoilt brat of a husband happy? Sounds like a sure-fire recipe for depression to me. Woe betide that the husband actually *help* with the baby that he helped create and grow the fuck up, eh?
Also, we have another one of the mysterious replies without the original letter! No prizes for guessing what the ‘habit’ might be…
Tags: blatant sexism, dodgy advice, marriage, Mary Marryat, pregnancy, problem page, social history, teenagers
4 Comments
Tanya Jones on 26 May 2010 @ 6pm
I wish we could revisit these as well, especially the poor young women who fell pregnant and had to endure a finger-wagging lecture from this old hag. As if they didn’t have enough problems!
Beelzebub on 27 May 2010 @ 2pm
“I expect there are quite a few nappies flapping around…” A woman I worked with told me that she had to run round the house and pull down all the airing nappies before her husband came home from work in case he *saw them*.
Tanya Jones on 27 May 2010 @ 3pm
I think we should lock any young woman who slags off feminism in a room and make them read this stuff until they cry. Every time I encounter an anecdote like this, I breathe a sigh of relief that I was born when I was. However, I did have a father who wouldn’t really have called himself a feminist or liberal, but he was the one who inspired me to achieve things: my mum had scarily low expectations of me, presumably reflecting her own childhood, sadly. The more I read these magazines, the more I realise that my parents were slightly ahead of the curve with their partnership of a marriage, even though they wouldn’t have thought so.
Estelle on 26 May 2010 @ 12pm
“Editress” is a word I have never seen before!
Gobsmacked at the advice for the young mother who sounds knackered and at the end of her tether – her husband needs to be babied too, poor soul.
I wish there was some way of getting updates on all these ancient problems.