Rainy Day Women #12 & 35

Stylish, economical, and practical, too! What’s not to love about this head-to-literally-toe rain gear? This feature appeared in the April 1953 issue of Woman’s Day, which includes instructions for making just about everything for yourself, your family, and your home with your own two hands and some cheap and/or recycled materials except a fallout shelter.

A woman self-reliant and thrifty enough to make a raincoat for herself and her shoes and purse out of plastic wrap would probably scoff at the notion of having a separate room in one’s house devoted to artistic scrapbooking. Honestly, though, would anyone actually leave the house draped in a shower curtain liner?

I didn’t check to see if the instructions included adding a suffocation warning label, since these fashions long predate the warning label era, but if I were any of these ladies, especially the French Foreign Legionnaire, I would make sure not to put my rain hat on backwards.

This fashion guide must have been a page-filler to complete this particular issue’s how-to quota, because for the cost of one of those fetching sou’westers, you could buy four clear pleated plastic rain bonnets at the dime store, and still have one cent left over from your pin money

No matter how hard I try...

I cannot come up with a coherent post to accompany these jarring images.

Despite the differences in their stations in life that are meant to be obvious to the early fifties white middle-class housewifely consumer, the proud, trim Mrs. A, in her stylish shirtwaist (which I'll just bet she made herself! She makes her own clothes, too, don't you know) and elegant 'do, is partnering with the humbly beaming do-ragged Aunt Jemima (no competition, style-wise, to Mrs. America - AJem's dress is made from a leftover tablecloth), to serve Mrs. A's pancake-consuming machine of a husband, "salesman" Bob Schenk.

(I guess the fact that Mr. Schenk had an occupation other than entering his wife in beauty contests needed to be pointed out.)

Mrs. A is practically dislocating her shoulder in her haste to slap that next golden stack on the table. AJem, needless to say, stands at the rear.

Even for the fifties, this is one ad that is just trying too, too hard.