Thirty Days of Perfection

What happens when a wife and mother in 2010 turns the clock back fifty-five years and attempts to become the perfect housewife for thirty days? Rose Senese Watson sets out in search of the answer in 30 Days of Perfection: One Woman's Domestic Time Warp, a nonfiction first-hand account of her trip back in time. Newly married, immediately pregnant, and suddenly on leave from teaching, Rose had so many dreams and expectations for her new career as stay-at-home spouse. Without the everyday grind, she would become the new June Cleaver, the perfect homemaker for the twenty-first century. Soon after she gave birth, however, reality set in. She was a failure at a job women have been doing since the beginning of time. Rose decided to conduct an action-research project, a tool often used by teachers to improve their practice as educators, to improve her practice as homemaker and write herself out of the rut she was in. She used The Good Wife Guide: 19 Rules for Keeping a Happy Husband, published by Cider Mill Press in 2007, a book she discovered as she searched online for a "housekeeping for dummies" manual. It is a compilation of rules that were originally printed in the mid-1950s in the Ladies Homemaker Monthly. Rose followed these rules for thirty days and kept a detailed journal. This is her story.