Awake!, “What Husbands Can Do”
“Your wife, too, may fall considerably short of measuring up to the “capable wife” described in the Bible. . . . Attention might tactfully be drawn to the poor impression created on others if the home is messy, or the family ill fed.”
The article advises husbands on marriage. In a section headed ‘Handling Other Problems’ it treats housekeeping and cooking as the wife’s part of the marriage and tells the husband how to prompt her to improve, while also telling him not to make nagging comparisons with other wives and to help with the dishes and the floors. The ellipsis in the quotation is not a small one: it stands for the end of one paragraph and the whole of the next, in which the magazine warns that husbands who ‘in a nagging way, draw comparisons with the well-kept homes and fine cooking of other wives’ will only cause resentment. All of it is on p. 12.
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Provenance and verification note for Awake!, What Husbands Can Do
Confidence note. The full article was fetched from the Watchtower Online Library on 19 September 2026 and read; the quoted sentences fall after the library's page marker for page 12. The citation code inside the document reads 'g74 4/22 pp. 9-12'.
Notes. The sentence most often quoted from this page — 'I would rather have a cleaner house and better fed kids than a wife who lets everything go so she can rest up for sack time' — is a husband's complaint that the magazine quotes, not the magazine's own wording. The magazine's own counsel around it includes: 'on your day off, or in the evening, why not give her a hand by washing the dishes and cleaning the rugs and floors?'
Accessed. 19 September 2026 · Source ID. src-wom-g-1974-0422-what-husbands-can-do