Women: Judging The Shit Out Of Each Other Since The Dawn Of Time

From the March 1950 issue of Chatelaine, "Housewives Are A Sorry Lot" by Beverly Gray:

Get mad all you like. But somewhere in this article there's a truth for every one of us.

Beverly Gray, a business girl, looks over her married friends, shudders, takes reef in her girdle and strikes out these observations:

• Marriage brings about a full stop in mental development.
• As soon as the wedding is over a woman drops phoney interests in such things as sports, politics, and world events.
• Her life channels into a narrow domestic little tunnel.
• A girl expects her husband to be a combination of Ronald Coleman, Gregory Peck, and Humphrey Bogart.
• Chat with any housewife and she's sure to bring the conversation round to how terribly frustrated she is.
• If the individual housewife is a saddening sight, housewives in the mass are appalling. 

I want to know what kind of day Beverly Gray had that made her plunk her ass down at the typewriter and write this all out.

I don't know why I love this so much - it's got to be the bluntness and the how-dare-she'ness of it all. It, of course, only gets better from there:

And it goes on and on ... basically labelling housewives as lazy bags who let their looks and minds melt to mush on account of their obsessions with crap like soap operas, romance magazines, and running a home. Throughout the article, Gray has no sympathy for the women who put themselves into this position, but rather, she feels bad for the husbands who have to come home to these griping "militant matrons":

Brilliant!

She gives no advice on how women can become happier creatures - that's not the point of the article; the point is: Beverly Gray has an opinion and a rabid need for attention. Why else publish something like this?

But, oh, how I love it. Her opinions are so unapologetically out there; wild, swinging, untethered punches to the face and stomach, as if they were Lindsay Lohan's boobs on the way to a courtroom. I think I adore it (the article, not Lohan's rack. Well, maybe Lohan's rack, too) because it's so ridiculous.

We, of course, still judge each other all the time, but do we really care that much about how other people live? Do we really feel that strongly about it? It's so easy today to get online and barf an opinion out about anything, but does that really reflect how we feel about each other most of the time (presuming we really spend that much time thinking about others at all)? And do we really care what other, totally random people think of us? Do you?

According the June 1950 issue of Chatelaine, over 500 housewives wrote in to comment on the article. I'll pop some of those entertaining replies in the next post!