Sunday, November 20, 2005

Sunday Advice Blogging: AJ Chesswass edition

For the last little bit I have been posting extracts from an American text book called Teen Guide to Homemaking. Now it's NZ's turn, because I also own "Towards Tomorrow: A Guide fo the New Zealand Homemaker", published in 1969. This is a litle more down to earth than the American book, and has less information on how to accessorise to emphasise your figure. But it's just as fantastic. Today I'm sharing the discussion questions from the end of the Responsible Relationships chapter.

3. You have not been able to find employment in your own town and have had to go to another larger centre. Having found yourself in a flat with others wose standards are very different to your own, what should you do?

Get a cleaning roster, but they might be talking about sex, in which case a cleaning roster won't really help (well possibly it'd help if people were having sex in the kitchen).

5. A girl who married at seventeen has had two children by the time she is twenty. She complains that she is tried of being tied to the house, to debts, to children's washing and to dishes. Discuss why she may be feeling this way when she could be loving and enjoying her young family. Suggest what she might do to overcome her loneliness and boredom.

Patriarchy, alienation, capitalism.

Get a copy of Sisterhood is Powerful and find a consciousness raising group.

7. You are a nurse with one year to finish your training. You are friendly with a fine young man who asks you to marry him. Discuss whether you should finish your training fist. Give reasons for your decision.

Ok this one I can't even make fun of, I can just say huh? This was an actual question written in actual text book less than ten years before I was born. The world is a very scary place.

9. Early marriages can be extremely happy and lasting. But it is a quite wrong basis for marriage to consider you are a failure if you haven't a ring on your finger by the time you are twenty? Why? Is it wrong that some girls prefer to continue a career?

Do you hear that, quite wrong to consider yourself a failure if you're not married by twenty. Don't you feel betrayed that none of your school text books informed you of this fact.

1 comment:

  1. I have a copy of Towards Tomorrow too - only for me it's nostalgic, because I was only a few years behind the girls getting it as a textbook. If it's any consolation, by the time I was a teenager in the mid-70s, those questions would already have seemed bizarre, hardly 5 years after the book came out. Things were moving pretty quick then. If you were born around 1979, that's the year I met the woman I'm now married to. She never for a moment imagined marrying young, not finishing a degree and having a career, not fucking whoever she felt like, or various other things that had been absolutely self-evident to her mother. And this was in Blenheim, not exactly the forefront of sophistication and radical thinking in NZ. I think textbooks tend to lag behind what people are actually doing, even more so in times of social change - which is one reason they really shouldn't make textbooks like that...

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