If the modern woman were to look to Zsa Zsa Gabor’s 1971 book How to Catch a Man for guidance on how to shed the burden of being single, she may be shocked at the advice given in this self-help book: “The best way to attract a man immediately is to have a magnificent bosom and a half-size brain and let both of them show.”

This is just one piece of prescriptive literature that you can find in Lynn Peril’s books—all of which are studies of how gender literature has outlined the ideal of the perfect woman. Peril studies and writes about a variety of sources of gender prescriptive literature, mainly that of etiquette books, self-help manuals, and other vintage relics such as toys and board games. Peril gets material from many sources—vintage advertisements, sex-ed films, and pamphlets—but what she favors most is etiquette books.

“Etiquette books specifically tell people how they should live (should live, mind you, not necessarily do live) which makes them more direct about things like gender values than pop music or even advertising—although those can be very telling as well,” she says.

Peril focuses on researching materials from the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s. Growing up in the ’60s and ’70s, Peril views this material with a sort of horrified nostalgia. But the literature she researches often reflects values that are up to date.
“What is so compelling to me about it is that, on the one hand, it is so ridiculous and old fashioned,” says Peril. “But on the other hand it makes me angry that that’s the way people thought of women. And even though things have changed greatly for women since then, there are still echoes from the past—more than we’d like to think sometimes.”

Peril has always been interested in gender, although she was not handed strong gender roles from her parents, who both worked at their family hardware store in a suburb close to her hometown of Milwaukee. At an early age, Peril was bothered by the way women were treated on certain TV shows, such as Bewitched and I Love Lucy.

“I Love Lucy made me mad because Ricky always treated Lucy like a child,” says Peril. As a kid, Peril was also enthralled by the best-selling board game of the 1960s—Mystery Date—not because of an unfair depiction of women, but because she thought it was just a cool toy to have. Mystery Date was a dating game for pubescent girls with the object of correctly preparing for a date with an unknown guy behind a plastic door in the middle of the game. Several examples of dates depicted are: the bowling date, the formal date (dressed in a white dinner jacket,) and, most famously, “the Dud, ” (the guy whose rugged looks and poor attire was supposed to make you lose the game).

“With Mystery Date, it was all about the plastic door,” says Peril. “Everyone wanted it because of the door.”

Although she never owned the game as a child, Peril remembers wanting the game dearly from seeing it in commercials, and she continued to search for the hard-to-find item throughout adulthood. In fact, getting the Mystery Date game as a present from her husband sparked her interest to write about gender prescriptive literature in a zine she did in the early 1990s that she also titled Mystery Date. Peril had wanted to do a zine for years, but didn’t know what to write about. When she received the Mystery Date game as a present, she realized that dating manuals, etiquette books and what she now calls “pink think” items and literature was what she wanted to write about, and continued the zine for several years.

What Peril terms as “pink think” is the constellation of thought and ideas of what it means to be a perfect woman, executed by advertising, pop culture, and etiquette books.

Peril came up with the term when she was working at a law office in 2000. She had been writing a proposal for her first book, which would cover material similar to that of the Mystery Date zine. She wanted something that would express what she was trying to say about how gender values are prescribed to women. The book would discuss how the American media has given gender values to women through etiquette books, advertising and other pop culture mediums, mostly from the period of 1940-1960. One day while walking down the hall at the office, the phrase suddenly popped into her head.

Peril titled her first book Pink Think: Becoming a Woman in Many Uneasy Lessons. Pink Think discusses how gender has been prescribed to women in pop culture from childhood through to adolescence, marriage, and adulthood. Beyond childhood games such as Mystery Date, Pink Think also discusses guidebooks that were meant to teach girls how to handle an interlude with the opposite sex.
“Girls were supposed to be responsible for controlling boy’s sexuality. Girls were not supposed to let boys get too excited,” Peril says of the approach to girl’s sex education of the ’40s through the ’60s. “You would never suggest going to the make-out lane. You would suggest [going] bowling or [to] some other sports-related activity.”

Peril’s research for Pink Think about women in work and education gave way to her next book, College Girls, which explores the different ways popular culture has viewed women in higher education. Peril’s research on the topic revealed that many ridiculous thoughts have been held about women who attend universities. One book from 1873 called Sex and Education, or a Fair Chance for the Girls that Peril cites in College Girls argues that women must take a break from studying during menstruation or endure dire physical consequences: “Girls who ignored their reproductive organs in favor of study “graduated from school or college excellent scholars, but with undeveloped ovaries. Later they married, and were sterile” or suffered from a variety of ailments, including “neuralgia, uterine disease, hysteria and other derangements of the nervous system.”

While these claims may seem ridiculous compared to today’s standards, Peril notes in the book that the sentiment has lasting value because it associates educated women as being masculine. If a book like Sex and Education did everything to declare the collegiate woman a feminine failure, then Ellen Richards, the first woman to graduate from MIT, did everything to try to reverse that ideology by creating home economics as a valid course of study. Richards thought domestic science should garner the same scholastic recognition as any other science; however, her efforts to sway academics or anyone else of her convictions fell by the wayside.

“People couldn’t see beyond the stereotypical images of women which devalued work in the home,” says Peril. While housework was put down as less than a science, another position considered certifiably female required both being a mom and a professional—the secretary.

Peril’s next book will explore the history of the secretary as a role of subservience to male authority figures where the expectation, no matter their standing, is to pump up the boss when he’s feeling low and do his dirty laundry typing. Peril’s inspiration for this project culminated from years of experience working in an office, as well as from encouragement from her editor. Whether she is writing about secretaries, college girls, or a simple advertisement, Peril tries to keep the same approach: to write material that is well researched, and written so general audiences can enjoy and think about the subject matter.

“I’ve always hated it when people try to over-theorize pop culture. At the same time, I want to make sure the history is solid. I don’t like pop culture books that don’t contextualize what was going on at the time,” she says. “Of course, this means that some academics think I’m 'fluffy' at the same time they commend the research. It’s a weird niche I fill.”

Personality quiz from Seventeen Magazine, February 1960
(Excerpt from Peril’s book Pink Think)