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Discounting the various excesses of feminist rhetoric, it is undeniable that the women's liberation movement is an expression of all sorts of legitimate grievances. It is undeniable that millions of women have been discriminated against at work and at home, that their minds and talents have often been ignored or wasted, that they have been brainwashed into thinking of themselves as inferior beings. Equality in marriage is indeed an ideal, which sometimes does work; but as in other relationships, the ideal is not easily achieved. That said, it is also proving true that a remarkable number of American housewives either do not want to compete in the world of factories and offices or else cannot find any work preferable to housework. From their harassed husbands, they want love and security more than new challenges or an exactly equal division of labor. They feel puzzled and threatened by the complex choices demanded of them, by the soft but persistent denigration of their role, even by a constitutional amendment that officially guarantees them equal rights in all things. And even women who have given up successful outside careers because they feel that caring for families is more rewarding yearn for reassurance that the traditional values still hold, that the traditional lives they have chosen are worth living. Marabel Morgan, wisely or not, offers them that.
Her constituents are, predictably, largely white, middleclass, religious and scattered widely through the South, Midwest and California. A sampling interviewed by TIME correspondents around the country turned out to be fairly broad—from 18 to 64 years in age, from near illiterates to Ph.D.s, from the poor to the affluent. More than a third have jobs or careers (somewhat less than the national average of 47%).
Gratitude to the books and their author seems incontestably genuine. Both TIME interviews and letters to Marabel—like most insights into troubled marriages—reveal how pitiful are the devices that can hold domestic despair at bay. A typical Total Woman suggestion, for example, urges an alienated wife to think of something she genuinely can admire in her husband, and then tell him about it. One wife, well past middle age, had to rack her brain until she remembered, from way back during the 1930s Depression, how hard her now crusty husband had worked to hold the family together. When she gently reminded him of how proud and grateful she had been at the time, he promptly burst into tears.
Both in the matter of flaunting sexiness and offering submission to a husband's will on key decisions, most women who followed the Morgan instructions said these proved in practice to be mainly symbolic acts, icebreakers that helped re-establish the habits of consideration and generosity after years of mutual resentment and marital coldness. Instead of feeling like slaves and door mats, a great many women told TIME that they found themselves for the first time consulting amicably and equally with their husbands about all family decisions.
"I wouldn't even have read the