Maureen Freely
Body Language
Do you ever look at your husband when he’s fast asleep and wish he were someone else? If you answered yes, Laura Doyle, America’s new self-help queen, has some bad news for you. The person you should be blaming is yourself.
The biggest mistake you ever made was throwing away your bunny suit. Let’s face it, there isn’t a man on Earth who isn’t desperate for a good, old-fashioned, full-service wife.
Not that long ago Doyle’s husband was just as unhappy as your husband is right now. Maybe he was even worse, because she used to do such awful things as roll her eyes when they were on the freeway and he missed their exit. But then she got what was coming to her because he started watching television to avoid talking to her. She went into a panic, but that turned out to be a blessing.
It made her look around her neighbourhood and see that the happiest marriages in her corner of Orange County, California, were the ones in which the women willingly bowed down to their men. So she decided to try it out. The results were spectacular, so then she closed her eyes and handed over the household finances, saying she trusted his judgement utterly. She started keeping her mouth shut, except to tell him everything he thought and did was wonderful, even when it wasn’t.
She still had to struggle to keep her less kind thoughts to herself, though. She had to keep telling herself: “Don’t try to control him.” That was a mouthful, if you had to say it over and over. So she decided to reduce it to a one-word mantra: surrender.
The mantra worked wonders in all the compartments of her life, but never so wonderfully as it did in the bedroom. By now her friends were noticing that she and her husband were acting like a couple of newlyweds, and they wanted to know what her secret was. So she started running a surrendered wives group, and when the group got too crowded, she started running seminars. When these started multiplying she decided the time had come to spread the word.
After personally publishing The Surrendered Wife a year ago, Simon & Schuster picked it up in the United States. The US networks have also shown interest, and thanks to their coverage, women all over the US are now setting up surrendered wife support groups. Other women are getting together to tear their hair out. But why non-surrendered women see Doyle as a threat is another question. Her message is not new in many ways it’s an update of the Seventies bestseller, Marabel Morgan’s The Total Woman, which taught us that the “total woman caters to her husband’s special quirks, whether it be in salad, sex, or sports”. So you have to wonder why non-surrendered women are paying so much attention to her.
It could be her weird mix of self-help styles that non-fans find so exasperating. She doesn’t tell women to give up work. All you have to do is change your attitude, plus a few habits. What she’s done is to take the total woman and send her off to a 12-step recovery programme.
Doyle suggests that a wife who surrenders her will and her life to a husband is not just going to help his ego and rejuvenate their marriage, but also help her become a power in her own right. Doyle did just this, and it worked.
But she’s still only 32, so maybe she shouldn’t count her chickens yet, her feminist critics suggest unkindly. Boy, does she get angry, though, if you say this to her face. Feminism may have done a lot for the workplace, but what, she splutters, has it done to help women find fulfilment at home?
“It seems to me that these people have simply empowered women to get divorced, become single mothers, get married again, and leave the next man, too, because he’s no good.”
A surrendered wife as Doyle defines it isn’t “about dumbing down or being rigid. It’s certainly not about subservience.” It’s about following some “basic principles” that will restore intimacy to your marriage. The main principle is to relinquish “inappropriate control” of your husband. But you are also supposed to respect his thinking, express gratitude for all he gives you, tell him what you want but never, ever, ever tell him what to do. You must hand the family finances over to him, even if he is bad with money. And you’ve got to let him have his way with you, even if you don’t want it, at least once a week. Do all this, and you will have more time and energy to focus on your own fulfilments, she assures us. In other words, you can surrender at home and still kick ass at work.
Changing yourself into a more amenable animal is not easy, she admits. Whatever he says to you, your response should be: “Whatever you say.” You have to mean it, too. Utter compliance may feel strange at first, she warns. But: “Your husband will adore you for it.” Especially you know where.
So this is what Doyle is telling them: you can have everything you want, so long as you play by one set of rules at work and a different set at home. That, of course, is what most people do anyway. Which is why, I suspect, we wish Laura would show us the same courtesy she shows her husband, and keep her stupid, half-baked, insulting grains of truth to herself.