Thanks to going to a production of Guys and Dolls, I’ve been thinking about the advice given to women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. There is a scene where one of the women, Adelaide, is reading from a psychology text, which is as amusing as it is archaic. The text suggests that women will get physically sick if they remain unmarried. So I decided to dwell a little on the advice once given to young ladies. I will begin with my own experience, though I was not alive in the early twentieth century. I came to it through my grandmother, primarily, though my mother indulged in her fair share of archaic advice.
Read More“Well-behaved women seldom make history.”