Word: wifehood
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Perhaps the most appealing-though on reflection disquieting- glimpses that TV reruns give us are of wifehood, motherhood and family life, back when those alone were supposed to make a woman happy. Even before Little Ricky's birth, for example, Lucy Ricardo stayed home as a housewife. Her urge to take a job and fulfill ambitions of her own was considered one of the wackier aspects of her humor. Lucy's contemporary Peg Riley (in William Bendix's The Life of Riley, 1953-58) stayed home too, despite the constant money worries stemming from Riley...
...when Stephanie marries Paul and settles into an American country wifehood that the teasing promise of her intricate and highly individual childhood declines toward case history, and static, predictable domestic woe. Stephanie's cries rise to heaven like those of De Sade's Justine, a girl, one recollects, with far more justification for complaint. Paul, Stephanie grants, is a splendid lover, a fine husband, a kind man, a devoted father-as handsome, she reports, as Jimmy Stewart. But he doesn't want to live in the city. And he doesn't talk to Stephanie enough...
Abigail Quigley McCarthy, Litt.D. For her efforts in the cause of women's rights while voluntarily accepting for herself a "life defined by others-by wifehood and motherhood...
...deeply religious man, Pyle declared himself "unalterably opposed to the wicked theory that every maturing child should be forced into multiple wifehood with the sole purpose of producing more children to become more chattels of this totally lawless enterprise." Possibly the Governor was thoroughly astounded by the fact that a three year old Short Creek boy was the great-great-grand-uncle of a three year old neighbor. Whether or not the tots liked the idea, the women were certainly happy. When informed that they were to live with only their legal husbands, seventy-five of them fled to Utah...
...What makes his truism noteworthy is his insistence on applying it to women's education. After all, says he, 72% of all women ultimately marry. As president of Missouri's Stephens College (for women), Dr. Wood has trained 2,000 young women in the arts & sciences of wifehood, motherhood and homemaking. Even the college's psychology, literature and economics courses are, as he says, "geared . . . to its homemaking objective." He seems to be on the right track, for at last count 85% of the Stephens "Susies" land a man within five years of graduation...