Time magazine recently ran a cover story on Marabel Morgan’s Total Woman philosophy. The article was about the “housewife blues” which the Time writers feel Mrs. Morgan helps alleviate by restoring to marriage and housewifery the dignity which allegedly has been undermined by the women’s movement.
The magazine smiles at Mrs. Morgan’s antics, which include greeting hubby each night in a wide array of brothel-style costumes. But after all, it’s much more comfortable to laugh at silly women than to be threatened by competent ones.
The article concludes by bemoaning the fact that marriage is no longer seen as a calling. This is caused by the “intensity of our impatience with barriers to self-realization.” The selves in the Time piece who want to be realized are the same villains who make house wives feel insignificant--feminists.
The posited solution a-la-Morgan is that women see marriage as a calling. Men obviously have callings that are unrelated to their marital status. Self-realization for men has always been seen as a worthy pursuit. But when sought by women, the same pursuit becomes a social problem.
Things would be better, the article insinuates, if we returned to the mentality of the 1950s, when housewifery was glorified. Woman should return to the bedroom and kitchen, and man should return to his historical prerogative to dominion over at least one poor creature.
The breakdown of American family life which Time blames on the women’s movement might just as easily be blamed on what the movement is reacting to--the paucity of shared experience in the fifties-style marriage.
The article charges that people today are afraid of commitment. But in Morgan’s book commitment to working out a marriage falls only to the wife. Furthermore, commitment is discussed only in terms of marriage. That unmarried people may also need commitment and that married people may need to make commitments beyond the nuclear family isn’t considered.
While watching a rerun of The Stepford Wives on television, it seemed to me that there was something familiar about the wives. They were all clean, smiling, well-groomed, obedient, abject keepers-of-the-house. They were perfect cogs in the plastic consumer society. Mary Hartman, sans neurosis. The mystery of the Stepford wives was revealed, finally, to be that the real, sometimes sweaty, sometimes overweight, sometimes disgruntled women had all been replaced by robots designed by the town’s leading misogynist, a former Disneyland employee.
These creatures are perfected versions of the Marabel Morgan training school graduate.
Marabel Morgan’s rules for marital bliss are called the “four A’s:”
1) Accept your husband just as he is.
2) Admire your husband every day.
3) Adapt to his way of life.
4) Appreciate all he does for you.
The four A’s aren’t bad in themselves. It wouldn’t hurt anyone’s morale to be accepted, admired, appreciated, and adapted to occasionally. But it’s not something that happens to anyone. It happens only to the husband whose wife is encouraged to “accept his friends, food, and life-style as your own.” But what becomes of the wife, the person who once had her own friends, lifestyle and food preferences? In The Stepford Wives that woman is killed by a robot. The Total Woman helps create her own replacement.
An article on the Total Woman several years ago in Cosmopolitan magazine was sympathetic to many of Morgan’s techniques but criticized her for encouraging husband idolatry. Writes Morgan, “It is only when a woman surrenders her life to her husband, reveres and worships him, and is willing to serve him, that she becomes really beautiful to him.” It’s sad that the evangelical women who rushed to buy Morgan’s book and take her courses, had to be told by Cosmopolitan about the spiritual nature of what was being asked.
The sinister effect of The Stepford Wives goes beyond the crawling thrill of a murder mystery. The horror comes from the attempt to steal women’s souls. The Stepford wives were left with their own bodies and speech patterns and families and homes, but nothing else.
Unlike the Stepford wife, the Total Woman is no innocent victim. She may give up a lot, but she has her price. One Total Woman alumna’s husband rewarded her new attitude with new luggage and a trip to San Juan. Another woman was given a trip to Nassau--for greeting her husband in a sheer black gown. Morgan herself received a refrigerator freezer and a redecorated house from her husband as a result of her initial efforts at Total Womanhood. The ghetto woman bears the dubious distinction of not being able to afford Total Womanhood.
Morgan relates that when Mrs. Albert Einstein was asked if she understood her husband’s theory of relativity, she answered, “No, I just know how he likes his tea.” That, according to Morgan, is love in a nutshell. A woman whose sole reason for being is serving tea and whose reward is new carpeting is no threat to the male establishment; and such idolatry seems to make her an unlikely candidate for eternal life.
Novelist Francine Du Plessix Gray wrote recently, “Men are asking ‘What does woman want?’ even more often. As usual, they’re relegating us to pure matter, denying us any share of spirituality . . . Woman can’t live by bread alone. It’s time they taught that in kindergarten and Sunday School.”
We can join the Time editors in hoping for a society that seeks more than self-fulfillment, but the answer to that problem is not the one-sided self- abasement of Marabel Morgan. Let’s not let the plea for commitment be used as a guise for stealing the souls of women.
Sharon Gallagher was editor of Radix in Berkeley and a contributing editor and columnist for Sojourners when this article appeared.
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