The 1939 Good Wife Guide

[Karl/Pa.]

The good wife guide: From 1939, a chap's charter (and no chilly toes, please)
By David Derbyshire
Last updated at 1:10 PM on 15th May 2008

She'd never wear red nail polish or buy anything big without asking first. And she'd always keep her chilly toes on her side of the bed.

This is apparently the perfect wife, to a man in 1939.

Such attributes were all big scorers on a questionnaire compiled by a leading
marriage counsellor of the time.

The Marital Rating Scale allowed men to gauge whether they'd chosen a superior or very poor partner, by giving plus and minus points for different types of behaviours.

In many ways, mens' desires do not seem to have changed that much over the past 70 years.

The good wife does NOT wear soiled or ragged dresses and aprons around the house

Conjugal relations feature high on the list … with a wife losing points if she is too slow in coming to bed, or delays it until her husband is almost asleep.

And full stomachs were just as important then, as a wife won points for putting meals on the table on time.

Other things you'd expect on the plus side were a good sense of humour, being neat and letting a husband sleep in on Sundays.

And some of the negative traits that would still cause problems in a marriage are flirting with others and being suspicious or jealous. But some of the other items might not be so important to the modern husband.

He might not care, for instance, whether his wife has crooked seams in her hose. Or whether she can darn his socks … as he can easily go out and buy another pair.

And he might not mind so much if she turns up to the breakfast table in a dressing gown.

He also might have trouble finding some of the positive attributes in a modern woman. Many a girl would laugh, for instance, at the idea that she ask her husbands opinion before making important purchases.

The test was designed by Dr George Crane, an academic who wrote an agony-aunt style newspaper column called The Worry Clinic. He also ran a matchmaking service, which used the wife test as a guide to measure how compatible single men and women were.

The test is published in a paper in Monitor Online, the Journal of the American Psychological Association.

The paper's authors, Nick Joyce and David Baker, said: 'Most people who read the test today find it humorous and obviously dated. 'Of course, gender relations have come a long way since Crane's work, but many of his methods are still used for matchmaking today. 'People still rate their partners' characteristics as positive or negative, though the standards have changed.

'There appears to have been no equivalent test to rate husbands. However, women were allowed to fill in the wife questionnaire themselves to see how they could improve themselves.'