Don’t kill your husband!

Health and Safety, Ladies only! 18 comments

How Not to Kill Your Husband
Hutchin
1962

Ladies, your husband is a busy man and can’t be responsible to make good health decisions. Your inattention to his health could LITERALLY KILL HIM! Fortunately, this book will save you. This is a book for wives on how to properly monitor and care for your husband’s health through diet, exercise and stress reduction.

Written in the voice of the oh-so-knowledgeable doctor talking about those silly men that we ladies must take care of since they are just a bunch of giant babies. These delicate men need their wives to reduce the stress, cook healthy meals and evidently prevent him from doing stupid things that might hurt him. I guess it is time to add “babysit a grown man” to your list of chores. I am sure all the men out there will love the wife hounding them on everything they do. Naturally, if he chooses to ignore our awesome help and he dies, it will be our fault.

Where is the book for husbands on how not to be a burden and a selfish ingrate for your wife?

Mary

how not to kill your husband back cover

text on how to care for your husband

cartoon about men as domesticated animals

cartoon of husband and wife

men are fragile

18 comments

  1. This looks like it was at the time an interesting use of satire to point out how rigid gender roles hurt men. Especially in the way being socially pressured into expectations to “be a man” make marriage difficult for men.

  3. I wonder if the person who designed the Jurassic Park movie typography had a copy of this book… that’d be one hell of a story at every dinner party they hosted.

  4. The Jurassic Park font on the cover was misleading, and now I’m disappointed that there were no dino-centric scenarios involved in potentially killing the old man.

  7. Five cigarettes a day can keep him healthy? When did they start warning the public about smoking?

    1. 1964, about two years after this was published. Or, rather, that was when the medical profession began to warn against smoking. Previously, the anti-smoking arguments were moral, especially those directed at women.

  8. Some of the remarks about life expectancy seemed odd and search reveals Dr. Hutchins was a Briton who practiced in the suburbs north of London and wrote several books. The economic conditions and social milieu in Britain recovering even a decade or so after WWII were quite a bit different from the US; there was a numerical imbalance between the sexes of marriageable age so advice for how women could keep a man after catching one probably had a market.

  11. I think both the book cover font and the Jurassic Park font are variants or knockoffs of Neuland, a font created by a German typographer that, probably because to non-German eyes it looks “primitive”, has become practically ubiquitous on the covers of books about Africa and African-American culture

  12. I’m disturbed that the author believed the purpose of a woman’s life ended once her husband died. Even if he didn’t believe women had any role outside the home, surely a lot of 40 something widows would still have children to care for or grandchildren? I wonder if children are mentioned at all in this book – raising children alone is hard enough now and was probably harder in the 1960s unless a widow had family support, so surely that would be a big incentive to not ‘kill her husband’?

    1. and what about women who weren’t even married?

      P.S. I haven’t met widows at every party I ever went to….

  13. As always, I’m having trouble with the underlying premise.

    Men are like babies, and have to be tricked or cajoled into living healthfully. So, since they cannot be relied upon to look after their own well-being, the only thing they can be permitted to do … is have sole responsibility for making the decisions that affect the entire household, community or country.

    I’m confused.

  14. My own father doesn’t seem anything like this. He can take care of himself, and was able to take care of my brother and me when we were kids, whenever my mother has to go on a trip for a couple of days without, although he does miss her. 🙂 My mother even said that when he gets a cold it’s never the “man flu” or whatever they call it. She has to keep an eye on him, but not because he becomes a total baby, but because he tries to do everything normally and could end up seriously ill. And he has COPD from years of smoking. Five cigs a day are harmless, yeah right. Although reading that did give me a good chortle.

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