I am asham 'd that women are so simple
To offer war where they should kneel for peace,
Or seek for rule, supremacy, and sway
When they are bound to serve, love, and obey.
"Hogwash and bullshit," says New York Psychiatrist Judianne Densen-Gerber, J.D., M.D., who has, along with her two degrees, her career and her four children, some very definite opinions about a woman who would subscribe to those lines at the end of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew.
"Sick," says Theologian Martin Marty of the University of Chicago Divinity School about the same woman. Adds another theologian: "The Christian whore."
"Inaccuracies ... clichés ... a patchwork quilt of impressions, intuitions and out-of-style dogma," say Dr. William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson, they of the inquiring movie cameras and the surrogate wives.
In these permissive days it is hard to imagine what sort of female could be talked about in such a way. One half expects a practitioner of cannibalism or perhaps a worshiper of Baal. In fact, the object of all this vituperation is a small (5 ft. 5½ in.), slender (124 Ibs.) Miami housewife who believes passionately in the virtues of middle-class monogamy. Now 39, she came from a poor family in Mansfield, Ohio ("I grew up on peanut butter sandwiches"), and worked as a beautician to send herself to Ohio State University. There she became May Queen, having previously been Miss Mansfield and Miss Talent and Congeniality. She is a born-again believer in Jesus Christ. She is inventively kind to her husband Charles, a shy, bespectacled attorney who acts as a lawyer for several of the Miami Dolphins football players. She dotes on her daughters, Laura, 11, and Michelle, 7, but firmly makes them wash the dishes and sort the laundry. She greets the world with a straightforward look and a friendly smile that viewers have been enjoying lately on TV talk shows.
Her name is Marabel Morgan, and her sole transgression is that she is the author of two treacly and wildly popular books, Total Woman and its newly released sequel Total Joy, which argue that every housewife can find happiness by pampering and submitting to her husband. Total Woman, with one pink rose on its cover, had few ads or reviews when it appeared in 1973 from the venerable religious publishing house of Fleming H. Revell, but a housewives' grapevine spread its message until sales reached a phenomenal 3 million copies (and still climbing). Total Joy is already moving in the same direction—177,000 hard-cover sales so far at $6.95.
Housewives not only buy huge quantities of Marabel Morgan's books but also write her fervent letters to tell her their difficulties. The letters (100 per day) are a cross section of "housewife blues" in the age of liberation. She answers all these pleas, which provided the basis for her second book. Furthermore, she has some 75 Morgan-trained disciples now giving Total Woman courses to thousands of women in 60 cities. Four two-hour sessions cost $15, of which Marabel gets $5—helping to bring her take so far to nearly $1.5 million.
No matter what her faults or limitations as a self-created savior of the troubled American marriage, Marabel's books are significant as a kind of cartoon version of genuine problems that confront millions of