FORGOTTEN Skills Every 1950's Woman Had To Master Before Marriage
Modern life runs on a tap of the thumb: dinner arrives in a bag, torn clothes go in the trash, and a broken anything means a new anything. But step into a frame house in Des Moines, Iowa in 1954, and you'd find a twenty-year-old bride who needed none of it. She could bring Sunday dinner from the backyard to the table, sew her own wedding dress from a thirty-nine-cent paper pattern, bake bread entirely by feel, can sixty quarts of summer into glass jars, and nurse a fever through the night with a Red Cross certificate to prove she knew how. Her high school graded her on it, a national exam scored her on it, and her hope chest held four years of evidence in embroidered linen. In this video, we count down the twenty forgotten skills every 1950s American woman mastered before marriage, told through Ruth, who was given an empty Lane cedar chest on her sixteenth birthday and four words from her mother: "You have four years." Discover the Betty Crocker Homemaker of Tomorrow exam that half a million senior girls sat every year, the feed sack dresses that flour mills printed florals for on purpose, the invisible darning that made socks outlive the decade, the wringer wash days and icebox window cards, the trousseau tea where a bride's handiwork went on public display, and the astonishing true story of the "practice babies": real infants that American universities placed in home economics houses so students could practice motherhood, a program that continued at Cornell until 1969. Resources Finding Betty Crocker: The Secret Life of America's First Lady of Food by Susan Marks, Simon & Schuster (2005), including the Betty Crocker Search for the American Homemaker of Tomorrow: Internet Archive "Domecon Babies," from What Was Home Economics?, Cornell University Library exhibition on the practice baby program: rmc.library.cornell.edu The Ball Blue Book of Canning and Preserving, Ball Brothers Company (first published 1909, continuously revised): ballmasonjars.com Feed Sacks: The Colourful History of a Frugal Fabric by Linzee Kull McCray, Uppercase Publishing (2016): uppercasemagazine.com American Red Cross Home Nursing Textbook, American Red Cross (1942 and postwar editions), and the Red Cross home care training history: redcross.org
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