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Even now that millions of women have paid for her message, she is cheerfully unawed by her creation. Says she: "There's nothing new in Total Woman or Total Joy. A lot of self-help books say the same things, only in different ways." She is correspondingly dismayed at the criticism that she advocates tricks for the sake of getting husbands to provide "goodies." Says she: "The word I use for a wife is not subservient but submissive. One is involuntary. But if I do something because I want to, because it gives joy, I'm not being manipulative at all. It's a struggle to submit, but it's worth it. I don't know why Total Woman should be a threat to feminists. I'm for women's liberation in that it opens up more options. But marriage and children is also an option. When I share with other women what happened to me, I give them hope."
At best, the rearing of children is a fascinating and rewarding occupation. But at worst, the mopping up of spilled food and the changing of diapers are menial labor of the lowest sort, dirty, boring, wearying and endless. The housewife gets no salary, no promotions, no titles, no formal evidence that the maintenance of family life is, as Jimmy Carter said in his Inaugural Address, "the basis of our society." The only thing that makes it bearable is constant reassurance that the best does go along with the worst, but the housewife has never had too much of that reassurance. Her husband is often busy with other things, and the children take her for granted.
Until perhaps ten years ago, she had been regularly told (whether she believed it or not) that it was the housewife's duty, happiness and fulfillment to maintain a home for her husband and children. From this, certain reassuring (or oppressive) rules followed. Among them: that monogamy is a state blessed by, and based on, religion; that sex inside marriage is sacred, though sinful outside; that it is largely up to a wife to keep her husband from straying and, indeed, to set the moral and spiritual tone of their union. Today, in addition to all the chores of housework—and, increasingly, the additional demands of an outside job as well—the American housewife is suffering from a fundamental uncertainty about what a housewife is or should be.
Less than a decade ago, Feminist Author Cynthia Propper Seton could write: "I came across a short reference in the Times to a University of California psychiatrist who said that from his experience a happy marriage was the rare thing, that education did not seem to improve its chances, and that it was usually up to the woman to make it work or break it up. Oh, I thought, how like a man, how unfair, how unequal, how true." One major reason for the hostility to Marabel Morgan is the belief that she preaches a return to those days of unfairness and unequality. Marriage itself, runs the extreme form of this argument, is a centuries-old exploitative prison from which women are only now beginning to escape—with help from the Pill, legal abortion, equal rights laws and a chance for a fair share of the job market.
Even feminists who value family as highly as careers are