Admire his muscles
The same year Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique rocked American households by defining the dissatisfactions of housewives, Helen Andelin was on the other side of the country writing her own book, and coming to the exact opposite conclusion. Fascinating Womanhood would become the anti-feminist manifesto that galvanized a decades-long “family values” movement for conservative women.
Her marriage had gone kind of snoozy, you see; her husband just wasn’t that into it any more; as a Mormon with eight children she wasn’t about to take that lying down. She prayed, but God didn’t answer.
Andelin began scouring marriage manuals from the 1920s and came across one pamphlet in particular, “The Secrets of Fascinating Womanhood,” which counseled that female subservience was the way back into a husband’s heart. She followed the pamphlet’s advice, and her marriage experienced a miraculous recovery.
No kink-shaming, now.
As historian Julie Debra Neuffer explains in her 2015 book, Helen Andelin and the Fascinating Womanhood Movement, Andelin sought to teach women how to become good wives by reverting to traditional gender roles. The self-published Fascinating Womanhood is in equal parts a chatty self-help book, a religious text, and cultural criticism that uses the works of Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens to support a “family values” agenda. Like Friedan, Andelin recognized a “problem that has no name,” but Andelin claimed the problem wasn’t caused by domestic drudgery, but by a lack of love. “[O]ne need is fundamental,” Andelin writes. “She must feel loved and cherished by her husband. Without his love, her life is an empty shell.” The book sold more than 2 million copies and sparked what is known as the Fascinating Womanhood movement. The New York Times dubbed her “a self‐appointed spokesman for the ‘silent majority’ of American women who believe that women’s place in the home.” Today, the book has become a totemic text for women on the so-called “alt-right,” a sort of “trad wife” Bible.
So the argument is that women must feel loved and cherished by their husbands, and the only way for that to happen is for the woman to pretend they’re living in the 19th century?
But why would that be true? Don’t at least some men prefer women who can carry on a conversation and help with the responsibilities of adult life? Or do I just think that because I’m a crazy delusional feminist? Who knows.
My husband has no interest in the type of woman of “Fascinating Womanhood”. He was never interested in that trad wife thing, and would be horrified if I suddenly started submitting and admiring and acting like that.
And I’ve known men who had wives like that – my brother always married women like that (yes, he’s been married more than once). He found his wives boring, and would come over and pick a fight with me periodically just so he could talk to someone he found interesting and challenging. That’s until I got sick of his Trump-like behavior (before it was about Trump) and quit talking to him.
Even my parents, highly devout Catholics, would be horrified by a book like that. And they are also both, in their actions, far more liberal about gender roles than their professed beliefs would lead one to expect.
My mother in law would have liked me to be this kind of wife (which is weird because she is definitely the dominant one in her marriage) and produced lots of grandchildren. My husband however had other ideas and married me, a woman who has dragged him partway round the globe in pursuit of her own career and he has happily followed along. And we have produced zero grandchildren, neither of us having any desire for children. I have 5 amazing nieces and nephews with 1 more on the way. I get the best of both worlds – children to spoil without the terrifying responsibility of keeping them alive and mentally healthy until adulthood.
We’ve been married for 12 years and together for almost 20. I think our marriage works because we can always find something to laugh about and things to talk about. I had to laugh recently when a friend bought this ‘Conversation Topics for Husbands and Wives’ thing from Amazon in the hopes of bringing some spark back. I was just sort of baffled by it. How can you not have something to talk about? And in a shocking development, we have a fair(ish) distribution of housework. He actually does a bit more than I do because a) he works from home and b) I earn more, but work longer, less predictable hours.
Martin Mull’s old satirical show ‘Fernwood 2 Night/America Tonight’ included an episode with a hair-sprayed leader of a ‘Fascinating Females’ group babbling about hair sprays, and ‘how to surprise your hunk.’
I didn’t know that the author was Mormon. What a surprise.