I came across these “Tips to Look After Your Husband” in a recent Facebook post. It came out of a 1950 Home Economics Book, and everyone on Facebook had a laugh about it with laugh emojis and “how absurd!” comments.

Yet, when my own marriage began to unravel, my mother told me to do these exact things that are on this page. She said “just try them!–they work.”  So I started clearing the clutter before my husband came home, and having dinner ready (the chore!).  I stopped complaining (mostly), and listened to him complain while nodding in sympathy. He did get a lot happier. He was delighted, in fact. We barely fought anymore. I, on the other hand, had become more miserable than ever. Almost nothing of myself seemed to remain, let alone my once strong aspirations of running for Congress. I was turning into a Stepford Wife. I even lived in Connecticut! To not have to endure another stressful evening, I once fantasized about him getting crushed by scaffolding on his way to Grand Central Station.

I wondered then, and still wonder now: is there a “happy medium” between it being my husband’s job to make me happy (how I’d seen it before), or my job to make him happy? I admit there must be some mutual fantasy behind being a Stepford Wife, otherwise the show Mad Men would not have been so bloody popular. But can any Stepford-ish wife ever be happy (other than role playing as one in bed)? Can a woman be content if she subverts herself for the supposed health of her marriage? Is she “being” a person at all? 

I remembered coming across this actual Stepford wife website back in 2013. I had clicked through it with my mouth open and my eyes tearing up from lack of blinking. I still don’t know exactly who’s behind this ongoing site (other than the “organization”), but it has given content to magazines, for example for the article, “Is The Stepford Wife the Secret to A Long Lasting Marriage?” (Emirates Woman Article Nov 2012, see picture here of Jennifer Lopez on the cover!).

The Stepford Wife website is still live, and its blog continues to post!

Whether or not the “Tips to Look After Your Husband” above comes directly from a Good Wife book that the Stepford Wife website discusses is an uncertainty, but the Stepford Wife blog confirmed that the principles from the 1950 Home Economics book are perfectly in line with its ideology, and directed readers to the Stepford Wife bible, Helen Andelin’s Fascinating Womanhood, to learn more. While these suggestions would probably keep a woman safely in her unhappy marriage instead of on the outskirts in divorce, I can say from experience that such terms are miserable to abide by. If only it weren’t so.

Just when I thought its website and organization could not get any more grim, I noticed its welcome letter to President Trump that harked back to the “golden decade” of the 1950s–the good old days of home economics books.  Could any of these women actually be happy?

I was not yet born in the 1950s, but I do remember reading that women were depressed back then en masse. This was either because they cleaned all day (in between dealing with their cranky husbands each morning and evening), or because their kitchens were yellow, which apparently causes depression–either or.

Or, because they spent their days pushing themselves through a meaningless existence; because they did not have happily married parents of their own to be role models; because they could never be their true selves–the list goes on.

But the splinter in my mind is this: exactly how much has changed since the 1950s? When I preordered copies of Debora Spar’s Wonder Women: Sex, Power, and the Quest for Perfection in 2013, my married-with-children friends quickly started a book club around it just so we could talk about our collective malaise: the Stepford unease, the careers dashed by glass ceilings and miserable “Me Too” experiences, the fruitlessness of so many years of education with nothing to show for it, the stressed out husbands, the primary burden of child rearing–shock after shock after shock. The common thread was a lack of fulfillment, an emptiness, a meaninglessness, a yellow kitchen.

For those of you women who’ve miraculously found that happy medium in and among marriage, motherhood and career–the proverbial needles in the haystack that not even Anne Marie Slaughter seemed able to find, try as she might—pray tell.