Seven Vintage Tips on How to Keep Your Man As the literature referenced below, written throughout th

Seven Vintage Tips on How to Keep Your Man

As the literature referenced below, written throughout the early to mid-20th-century tells us, your man is one cold meal short of leaving you. Read the hilariously old tips for keeping your man happy in and out of bed. However, some tips still ring true today. How times haven’t changed much.

1. Don’t Talk

Refer to the first four commandments on “How to be a Good Wife” in Edward Podolsky’s 1943 book Sex Today in Wedded Life:

Be a good listener. Let him tell you his troubles; yours will seem trivial in comparison.

Remember your most important job is to build up and maintain his ego (which gets bruised plenty in business). Morale is a woman’s business.

Let him relax before dinner. Discuss family problems after the inner man has been satisfied.

In his 1951 book, Sex Satisfaction and Happy Marriage, Reverend Alfred Henry Tyrer has more to add to that. Asking for things is “nagging”:

I verily believe that the happiness of homes is destroyed more frequently by the habit of nagging than by any other one. A man may stand that sort of thing (nagging) for a long time, but the chances are against his standing it permanently. If he needs peace to make life bearable, he will have to look for it elsewhere than in his own house. And it is quite likely that he will look.

2. Bad Cooking Will Drive Your Man to Seedy Saloons

Reverend Tyrer states further:

A social service meeting, an afternoon tea, a matinee, a what-not, is no excuse for there being no dinner ready when a husband comes home from a hard day’s work.

Housekeeping accomplishments and cooking ability are, of course, positive essentials in any true home, and every wife should take a reasonable pride in her skill. Happiness does not flourish in an atmosphere of dyspepsia.

3. Be the Hot Steak, Not the Pork Chop

Speaking of cooking, Reverend Tyrer has a metaphor for you.  

Picture a woman preparing a fine meal for her husband. “She remembered his choice of meat and was careful to get an extra-fine cut…her best cutlery and dishes and finest linen are all in evidence, and a little colorful decoration has been tastefully displayed….and as he comes into the house she greets him with a smile of welcome and a touch of manifest love.”  

But say that same wife “is constantly setting him down to indigestible meals, cold and unappetizing, with nothing properly cooked, set out on a kitchen table with a dirty cloth, she need not be surprised if her husband frequently telephones from the office that business will prevent him from being home for dinner." 

4. Don’t Be a Sexual Vampire or a Frigid Franny

Dr. William Josephus Robinson, one of the earliest sexologists and advocate of birth control, tells us in his book Woman, Her Sex and Love Life in 1927 warns us of the lures of women becoming “sexual vampires”, sucking the life force right out of your husband:

Just as the vampire sucks the blood of its victims in their sleep while they are alive, so does the woman vampire suck the life and exhaust the vitality of her male partner—or "victim.”

Now, if you are one of those frigid or sexually anesthetic women, don’t be in a hurry to inform your husband about it. To the man it makes no difference in the pleasurableness of the act whether you are frigid or not unless he knows that you are frigid. And he won’t know unless you tell him, and what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him. Heed this advice. It has saved thousands of women from trouble.

5. Pink Panties are a Must

That the underwear should be spotlessly clean goes without saying, but every woman should wear the best quality underwear that she can afford. And the color should be preferably pink. And lace and ruffles, I am sorry to say, add to the attractiveness of underwear, and are liked by the average man.

6. Let Him Have Some Fun Now and Then

Dr. Robinson says that ultimately, a wife will react to infidelity as her heart dictates:

But in case of an occasional lapse on the part of the husband—there a bit of advice may prove acceptable. And my advice would be: forgive and forget. Or still better—make believe that you know nothing. An occasional lapse from the straight path does not mean that he has ceased to love you. He may love you as much; he may love you a good deal more.

7. Your Husband is the Boss of You

It is fitting to close with the most opposed belief by the women’s movement written by renowned eugenicist Professor B.G. Jefferis, in his 1921 book Searchlights on Health, The Science of Eugenics:

The Number One Rule. Reverence Your Husband.—He sustains by God’s order a position of dignity as head of a family, head of the woman. Any breaking down of this order indicates a mistake in the union, or a digression from duty.

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