Wives
Artwork Khrushchev Probably Would Not Have Liked 36
"Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst with his sculpture, Capricorn, 1947"
Foto source.
Posted By: Paul - Tue Jul 13, 2021 -
Comments (1)
Category: Art, Avant Garde, Surrealism, Statues and Monuments, Husbands, Wives, 1940s
Dummy Divorce
Photo source: The Baltimore Sun Baltimore, Maryland 21 Aug 1953, Fri • Page 4
Text source: Los Angeles Evening Citizen News (Hollywood, California) 21 Aug 1953, Fri Page 11
Posted By: Paul - Sat Jun 19, 2021 -
Comments (0)
Category: Law, Puppets and Automatons, Husbands, Wives, Divorce
Follies of the Madmen #481
Isn't it the offending husband who is usually the spouse assigned to sleep in the tub?
Source.
Posted By: Paul - Fri Jun 26, 2020 -
Comments (2)
Category: Business, Advertising, Domestic, Excess, Overkill, Hyperbole and Too Much Is Not Enough, Husbands, Wives, 1960s
Safety Kisses
Throughout the 20th century, it seemed to be widely assumed that the mood of the husband was determined by the behavior of his wife at home. So, concluded the District of Columbia's traffic safety office in 1963, if a man was in a 'disgruntled disposition' and consequently got into a traffic accident, it must have been the fault of his wife who didn't cheer him up adequately when he left home with a goodbye kiss "as though she meant it."See also: Whose fault is it when your husband is cross at breakfast?
Minneapolis Star - Nov 12, 1963
Posted By: Alex - Wed May 20, 2020 -
Comments (2)
Category: Highways, Roads, Streets and Traffic, Gender, Husbands, Wives, 1960s
Matrimonial Delusions
Source.
Posted By: Paul - Mon Apr 27, 2020 -
Comments (2)
Category: Bad Habits, Neuroses and Psychoses, Money, Husbands, Wives, 1900s
She was boring her husband to death
This ad for Vivarin stimulant tablets ran in newspapers and magazines in 1971. It prompted a complaint from the FTC.
San Bernardino Sun - Mar 28, 1971
Ivan Preston provides more details in The Great American Blow-Up: Puffery in Advertising and Selling:
"One day it dawned on me that I was boring my husband to death. It was hard for me to admit it—but it was true…. Often by the time he came home at night I was feeling dull, tired and drowsy, and so Jim would look at television and, for the most part, act like I wasn’t even there. And I wasn’t. I decided that I had to do something. I had seen an advertisement for a tablet called Vivarin. It said that Vivarin was a non-habit forming stimulant tablet that would give me a quick lift. Last week… I took a Vivarin tablet… just about an hour before Jim came home, and I found time to pretty up a little, too. It worked. All of a sudden Jim was coming home to a more exciting woman, me… The other day—it wasn’t even my birthday—Jim sent me flowers with a note. The note began: ‘To my new wife…'"
All very nice, but but the contribution of Vivarin was to provide merely the amount of caffeine found in two cups of coffee. No miracle aphrodisiac, just good old caffeine at a premium price!
The major allegation of the FTC's complaint about Vivarin concerned this social-psychological misrepresentation... But the Vivarin ads were also alleged to be deceptive because they did not disclose caffeine to be the critical ingredient.
Posted By: Alex - Mon Apr 20, 2020 -
Comments (3)
Category: Drugs, Advertising, Wives, 1970s
Whose fault is it when your husband is cross at breakfast?
Answer (according to 1920's ad men): It's the wife's fault for serving him coffee or tea.Strange, because I'm pretty crabby in the morning if I don't have coffee.
The Helena Star - Oct 6, 1921
Posted By: Alex - Fri Feb 28, 2020 -
Comments (4)
Category: Advertising, Husbands, Wives, 1920s
The Radium Wedding
Much more exciting than Platinum.Article source.
Posted By: Paul - Thu Oct 03, 2019 -
Comments (1)
Category: Anniversary, Husbands, Wives, 1910s
Raising a Perfect Wife From Scratch
Sabrina Sidney, was a British foundling girl taken in when she was 12 by author Thomas Day, who wanted to mould her into his perfect wife. Day had been struggling to find a wife who would share his ideology and had been rejected by several women. Inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's book Emile, or On Education, he decided to educate two girls without any frivolities, using his own concepts.
In 1769, Day and his barrister friend, John Bicknell, chose Sidney and another girl, Lucretia, from orphanages, and falsely declared they would be indentured to Day's friend Richard Lovell Edgeworth. Day took the girls to France to begin Rousseau's methods of education in isolation. After a short time, he returned to Lichfield with only Sidney, having deemed Lucretia inappropriate for his experiment. He used unusual, eccentric, and sometimes cruel, techniques to try to increase her fortitude, such as firing blanks at her skirts, dripping hot wax on her arms, and having her wade into a lake fully dressed to test her resilience to cold water.
The full story here.
Posted By: Paul - Tue May 07, 2019 -
Comments (0)
Category: Eccentrics, Education, Husbands, Wives, Eighteenth Century, Nineteenth Century, Love & Romance
Follies of the Madmen #375
"You like your booze so much, why don't you marry her?"
"Thanks! I think I will!"
Original ad here.
Posted By: Paul - Sat Jul 21, 2018 -
Comments (6)
Category: Anthropomorphism, Business, Advertising, Wives, 1940s, Alcohol
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| Alex Boese Alex is the creator and curator of the Museum of Hoaxes. He's also the author of various weird, non-fiction, science-themed books such as Elephants on Acid and Psychedelic Apes. Paul Di Filippo Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1. Contact Us |