Oh, history, you are such a card, a regular tomato, a slap in the ol’ gobbler. (All words sound like 1930s slang.) TIME recently uncovered a photo series published in LIFE from 1937 that you’ve probably seen at every thrift store and garage sale you’ve ever been to of “How A Wife Should Undress.” Uppercase, theirs. Here’s what TIME had to say:
As a matter of fact, to take just one example of how things were hardly better or more civilized for a solid half of the adult population in America as recently as, say, 75 years ago, let’s take a quick look at a feature from a 1937 issue of LIFE magazine. Now, we’re hardly prudes, and we always get a good laugh out of something as over-the-top as this series of pictures illustrating how a wife should (and should not!) undress for her husband. But even we find it rather awful to consider a school devised to teach women — specifically, wives — how to disrobe, especially in light of the implication (see below) that wives with a faulty “disrobing methodology” are largely responsible for America’s outrageously high divorce rate. (Via)
We’ve come a long way. In 1937, I bet wives couldn’t even watch MTV’s Undressed. See more photos here.
(Via Getty Image) (Via)