The Sexes: The New Housewife Blues

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book if I'd heard all those silly sexual parts first," says Kathy O'Connell, 30, wife of an accountant in Wauconda, Ill. "But after the seminar I no longer felt obligated to apologize for being a wife and mother. One night when my husband came home from work, I decided to do what my instructor suggested. Instead of unloading all my troubles on him before dinner, I shuffled him into the bedroom, brought him the mail and turned some quiet music on the tape recorder. After 15 minutes he was relaxed and happy and began to talk. I was just treating him like I would want to be treated." Agrees Lois Jenkins, 26, a secretary at U.S. Steel and wife of an FBI agent: "My view of sex is the same, but now I say 'Thank you' when he opens a door, rather than just take him for granted. In fact, I try to be as nice to him as I would be to a stranger."

These women hardly needed Marabel Morgan for that. But housewives who struggle every day not just with washing dishes but with maintaining values like loyalty, dedication and caring for others complain that they now get very little help from their surrounding culture. "You're told so often how normal it is to feel bitter and resentful as a wife and mother," says Lois Kholos of Tarzana, Calif., "that if you do enjoy it you somehow feel unusual." "Every issue of Woman's Day and Family Circle, "Tina Klein of Los Angeles points out, "tells stories of women doing things in the outside world or how they have turned their hobbies into moneymaking projects." Meanwhile, from the centers of expertise and progress, women mainly get refracted images of Gloria Steinem ("Sex is now primarily a form of communication") or R.D. Laing (blaming most of a civilization's discontents and even its wars on the crimes of the family). Says Martha Bardack, a Los Angeles housewife who gave up a part-time job to care for her son Noah, 2: "Society makes it very hard for me to respond to my need to care for my child."

One of the ironies of the domestic '70s, in fact, is that the "just a housewife" syndrome, one that the women's movement was partly founded to cure, is still around, and that the broadening of women's choices, which was meant to take the sting out of it, has made it worse. Says Becky Vascellaro, 24, a nurse who was attending a Total Woman seminar in Oklahoma City last month: "I work part time, and I'd like to advance my career, but I put my family first." Others in the class had similar views. Sharon Burton, 30, wife of an insurance agent: "You don't go to college and get a degree in how to make a marriage work, and people put you down when you tell them that's your goal." And Sharon Stiverman, 38: "People constantly say, 'You have a college degree. You're wasting your time at home.' " Adds a woman who recently graduated from a once all-male Ivy League college and now works in journalism: "Everyone tells me I must not have a baby. That would mean that another woman has proved professionally unreliable. We were pioneers at college, and now everyone is working except one girl who's married to a law student. And everyone says, 'Poor Karen. She's really gone round the bend.' "

Young professional women who quit work for child care are sometimes