There is no denying that the housewife, who can cook like a chef and look like a model, is an icon of the 1950s; most of the iconic women of this period were housewives. A famous example is Lucille Ball as Lucy Ricardo in I Love Lucy. The obsession with the housewife is also reflected in Nabokov's film Lolita, set in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Through a conversation with Miss Pratt, the headmistress of the Beardsley School for girls, Humbert Humbert frames the American education system as simply a means of preparing girls to become housewives. In America's sexist society, women are raised and educated, even in formal institutions, to be housewives. In just two pages, the sexist past of girls' education is laid bare in a simple interview between a stepfather and a school principal. Before the main dialogue even begins, Humbert recalls a Beardsley teacher revealing the school's primary mission when he said that "girls are taught, as he put it with a stranger's love of such things: 'not to write much good, but to smell very good”” (Nabokov 177). This idiom, unfortunately, expr...