How To Be A Pretty 1950's Housewife
The 1950's is a period of American history regarded with rose tinted glasses by many who yearn for the simpler time with the kind of fanatical yearning that can only be experienced by someone who wasn't actually there. However, I am all for regaining traditions lost, and also for learning how to become different people at different points in history. It will all pay off when my international trans spatial time traveling detective agency gets its start.
If you are more interested in the clothing and styles of the 1950's, you can skip all this terribly interesting historical context and pop over to the next article, how to dress like a 1950's housewife. But you'll never make it as a time traveling detective if you do.
Who doesn't want to capture the ingrained misogyny of the 1950's? Back then, men were men and women were real women and anyone who didn't fit neatly into society's boxes did the decent thing and hid their true desires under a layer of shame and guilt covered by a mask of outward propriety.
Nowadays everyone is running about the place 'being who they are' and the world is in a terrible state. If I see one more young person laughing out of turn and dancing to this newfangled 'electronic' music, I don't know what I'll do.
The first step to becoming a 1950's housewife is learning who your enemies were at that time. The war had just ended in 1945, so you would have been on a sort of permanent high of rampant reproduction and production. A great many children were born in the 1950's, and a great many pieces of machinery were made.
The Russians were a distant enemy that kept you on your toes but never actually did anything, not like the irritating enemies we have now who occasionally pop over, blow up buildings and railway stations and then run away again into caves, leaving us with no choice but to attack countries that look vaguely suspicious.
The Russians were also an enemy to be proud of. In 1957, they launched Sputnik, the first satellite to orbit the earth. They were technologically and socially advanced, unlike current enemies who depend on hiding in the aforementioned caves.
Stalin was still in power in the 1950's. Stalin! Now there's a recognizable name, unlike our current batch of nobodies. I'll give you Osama Bin Laden at a pinch, but he's no Stalin is he? Is he? Precisely.
So, as a 1950's housewife you are suspicious of Russia, eager to have plenty of children and you admire Elvis Presley, who is nearing the peak of his fame and is yet to become even remotely puffy about the eyes, let alone the entire body. You are rabidly anti-communist and probably support Senator McCarthy's investigations into alleged communists which will later prove analogous to witch hunts, prompting the play 'The Crucible', which school children around the world will read to learn the dangers of condemning people for suspected ideologies. For the moment however, suspected ideologies are all you have to go on.
