To Love, Honor, and Manipulate?

I wanted to like "The Surrendered Wife," Laura Doyle's best-selling (and, in some quarters, highly controversial) self-help book. In the 285 pages tucked between pastel pink covers--the front one illustrated with the single long-stemmed red rose that is the mass-paperback symbol of chivalric male attention--Doyle promises that wives can obtain "romance, harmony, and the intimacy they crave" from their marriages if they quit nagging and let their husbands run the show.

First of all, I'm a surrendered wife myself, a surrendered wife manqué, you might say, mostly because I'm lazy. For example, Doyle advises: "Let your husband handle the finances." I've been doing that for years, as I can't add or subtract. The last time I even tried to balance my checkbook was in 1989. Let him take the wheel of the car, Doyle admonishes, and "don't correct him by telling him where to turn." Fine by me--I hate to drive, and I'd rather look at the scenery than keep track of a bunch of damn street signs. Doyle says you should say, "I need the help of a big strong man," when you want him to lift something large and heavy that you don't feel like lifting. Got a problem with that, Betty Friedan? I don't. "Make yourself available at least once a week" for marital sex, even if you don't feel like it. What? Only once a week?

Second, you've got to love anything that ticks off so many fellow females of the chattering classes. "The Surrendered Wife" calls to mind Marabel Morgan's 1973 suburban classic, "The Total Woman," which bunched the drawers of an entire generation of libbers by advising wives to put the sizzle back into their marriage by cooking hubby a gourmet meal and serving it naked. Morgan was the anti-Kate Millett. The furor over Doyle's book also calls to mind the outrage when the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution in 1998 that wives should "submit graciously" to their husbands--a pronouncement that again caused feminists around the world to shiver with righteous indignation and former president Jimmy Carter to quit the denomination.

Continued on page 2: »