Rosita Boland: Want to keep your husband alive? Stop demanding new sofas

For the week that is in it, you know, Valentine’s Day and all, I dug out a special book. A friend gave it to me a year or so ago, but I hadn’t got round to reading it yet, and this was to be the week. She had found the 1962 American paperback edition of Help Your Husband Stay Alive! when clearing out a relative’s house. The subtitle was “How to keep your mate from literally working himself to death”.

It was published by a company called Collier Books, and it was only this morning when I took it down off the shelf that I realised two things. One, it appeared to be part of a series: “Collier Guides to Good Health”. The other, and not unrelated, was that, being part of a health series, it was meant to be read as a serious book. I had assumed it was some kind of parody on married life.

Was I ever wrong. Hannah Lees’s book is a deadly serious 249-page tome about making one’s husband as happy as possible, so that he and men like him would be less likely to expire early, leaving a generation of youngish American widows behind.

There were approving review quotes from respected newspapers. The Chicago Tribune said: “Should be compulsory reading for every married or about-to-be married woman.” “The sort of book you men might discreetly leave around the house for your helpmate to discover,” opined the San Francisco Chronicle.

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I took to my couch with smelling salts and a pencil, to mark the passages that had become more egregious in the intervening 60 years, but there were so many, I gave up. Let us begin at the beginning of Help Your Husband Stay Alive!

In a nutshell, Lees tells her readers that American men are dying early in the 1960s because they are working too hard and too many long hours to provide for their selfish, jobless wives and children. They are working all hours, she says, to buy their wives jewellery and new furniture and mink coats, that wives (but not Lees) apparently demand to have, because it is wives who have financial power in the marriage, not their husbands.

By example, she gives us this. “If a wife says, ‘Dear, we simply must redecorate the living room,’, often enough and plaintively enough, he is likely to revise the budget so as to get the living room redecorated. This is just one proof of how much power we have.”

Women are, Lees says, second class citizens by choice, and it's a choice they are happy to make. They don't actually want careers or jobs, or success, or power

This “power”, Lees scolds, is part of what is killing men, by women placing “constant new burdens” on men to buy them things they want but don’t need. You want a new living room, woman reader of my book, she asks? The cost might well be a heart attack for your husband, because he’ll have to work extra hard to afford it. You murdered your husband because you wanted a new sofa, b***h. This is her theory and she is sticking to it.

There is more, much more. A wife must never nag or whine, or else your husband might get tired of you, and look elsewhere for some loving. “Work can be a fine refuge to a man whose wife is a whiner or a nagger or just plain no fun to be around. A wife who is a terrible housekeeper can make a man think longingly of his efficient secretary. One of the surest ways to make the office look more attractive is to greet your husband with all your troubles as he comes in the door. Women think they want to keep men in touch with their lives, but aren’t they really just being dependent little girls?”

Cue an anecdote about a man she knows who dumped his “nagging wife” and married his “dumb little” 19-year-old secretary.

Women are, Lees says, second class citizens by choice, and it’s a choice they are happy to make. They don’t actually want careers or jobs, or success, or power. Basically, they just want their men to look after them, because it’s the only thing that men know how to do. “We are in second place when it comes to running the world. We always have been and we always will be. We have made this choice again and again through the ages with instinctual wisdom.” Why does Lees think women have made this “choice”?

It was a good thing I was already prone on the couch reading this mumbo jumbo because my head was aching so much I would have needed a lie down anyway. Wait, what? I read some more. She suggests that women are all in on some historical in-joke. That women were choosing not to be in positions of power and influence because their poor weak husbands wouldn’t be able to cope with being “subordinates”.

“Men have been on top through most of history, not because women are incapable of taking large responsibilities and using great powers, but because men are incapable of surviving in a subordinate role and women know it.”

Curious, I then googled Hannah Lees. Turns out this was a pseudonym for one Elizabeth Head Fetter, based in Philadelphia, who usually wrote murder mystery novels. She died in 1973, and in a short death notice, the New York Times described Help Your Husband Stay Alive, as a “nonfiction do-it-yourself book”.

Nonfiction do-it-yourself. I’d never heard of this clunky description before, but clearly it was a precursor of the self-help genre of literature. Knowing she wrote murder mysteries, I found myself wondering if the whole book was indeed, parody, and Lees/Head Fetter had had the last in-joke on us all, including me.