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The Surrendered Wife
There's a woman in California named Laura Doyle who is probably, right this minute, leading a seminar on how to please your husband and keep your marriage in tact. Either that or she's on her knees scrubbing the floor. Or praying for strength. Or doing that other thing that being on your knees is good for...whether she wants to or not.
No matter what she's doing, she's doing it for completely the wrong reasons. And so are millions of women who have joined her following and formed support groups, college campus discussion forums and the like, all of whom have been misled by Mrs. Doyle into thinking that the only way to have a good marriage is to completely and totally abandon yourself to your husband's every whim.
When I first heard about her book "The Surrendered Wife", I thought that she was finally saying something I've been waiting to hear; that women should stop trying to control their husbands lives, stop trying to dress them and tell them which friends they can have, stop telling them they're disgusting for wanting sex and start letting them be the grown men they married. I was intrigued by her notion of "surrendering" the neuroses women can often have concerning their marriages. But as I discovered more about her philosophy, I realized that if I thought I had found a kindred spirit in Mrs. Doyle, I was very much mistaken.
Her philosophy is simple. Completely wrong, but simple. She believes that the high divorce rate is caused by women, who are effectively ruining their marriages by being too assertive, too selfish, too much of a person, I suppose. She advises that women should hand over control of the family finances to their husbands without question, should never challenge their husbands on his career, and should essentially obey their husbands at all times, and defer to him in everything.
That includes keeping your mouth shut about everything. Everything. If it occurs to you, don't say it. If it's a belief you have, stifle it. If it contradicts your husband's ideas or actions in any conceivable way, just repeat "surrender" like a mantra and smile. Whatever you do, don't ever call him on a mistake he's making, don't ever offer your opinion about a possible better way to do things. Don't gasp in the car when he's about to rear end a pick up truck, don't get angry when he fails to do something he expressly said he would do, and don't ever question how he relates to your children. Don't let him think for even one minute that he's a human being like you are. If you want a happy marriage, just shut the hell up and let him do whatever he wants with your life.
I am not making this up.
While she provides the typical caveats you would expect from any psychobabble self help book, such as not surrendering to an abuser or a user or a man who is "chronically" unfaithful, the rest of the book more than makes up for whatever rationality she might have displayed in saying such things. Page after page describes how wrong women are, how shrewish they are, for daring to have a say in what goes on in their own lives, and how bitchy they are for expecting their husbands to be grown men. She places the blame for disorganized lives and unfaithful husbands squarely on the shoulders of women who - in her opinion - are ruining their marriages by suggesting things, asking for what they want, and keeping an eye on their financial situations.
If your husband wants you to do something - like going whaling in Greenland - and you don't, you go anyway. You don't tell him you don't want to. You don't tell him there's somewhere else you'd rather go. You just pack your bags, and hope that he has momentarily developed extra sensory perception and can sense from your vibes that you'd rather do something else. If you're lucky, she says, and if you have a really great guy, he'll "sense" you don't want to go to Greenland.
If you're not lucky, zip up that parka. The only time you should even think of protesting is if your health is in danger. Otherwise, buck up little camper. You have no say.
As ridiculous as that is, it gets worse. Regarding sex, she claims that the best way to stay married is to submit to your husband's every sexual demand, at all times, and to never seek your own satisfaction from the encounters. You should also forgive his adultery, and strive to be available and fully sexual at all times.
"Most men are not interested in having sex with their mothers and that is who we remind them of when we try to control them." she says. "A surrendered wife always says yes and is always available for sex."
Oh dear.
Mrs. Doyle may have started out with the right idea, but somewhere along the way she must have hit her head and woken up as June Cleaver. Somewhere along the way she must have lost all her self-respect and decided that the only way to "save" her eleven-year marriage was to absolve her husband of any responsibility for its problems and completely subjugate herself to him. Somehow she must have lost the ability to question whether a troubled marriage is worth saving if it means having to completely lose yourself to it. And somehow she never questioned the morality or worthiness of a man who would actually embrace such inequality in his marriage.
This is what I find so objectionable about her theory. While I agree that submission as I define it - meaning the enjoyment you get from being feminine and less dominant around your masculine and ultra-dominant man - is a good thing, it is only sexual in nature, and only within the confines of a respectful, loving, happy marriage. It most certainly does not include having sex when you don't want to, or foregoing your own pleasure, or feeling unequal or disrespected in any way. And as for adultery - forgiving adultery is one thing, something I would never do but a choice I understand many women decide to make. Making it a policy to forgive adultery, however, implies there's no forgiveness needed at all. How can you forgive something you yourself imply isn't wrong? This is submission at its worst, the feeling that you as a woman, as a wife, are not worthy of the wedding vows you both took, but that the man who would violate them is.
A crucial aspect of submission, for any woman, lies in submitting only to someone worthy of it. That means you never submit to some brute who demands sex from you when you don't want it, or some callous jerk who doesn't care about your pleasure, or some idiot who doesn't love you and sleeps with other women. Submit only to a man who has the character you admire, who enjoys making you feel loved and special during sex and at all other times too, and only in the sense that you enjoy letting him be masculine, and allowing yourself to be "taken" or made love to by him. No woman should ever allow a man to humiliate her, hurt her, embarrass or degrade her, husband or not.
And besides, even if I grant her argument that making your man happy is an important part of marriage, most men aren't interested in a lifeless automaton who exists only to serve. They have dolls for that sort of thing. Most men want a vibrant individual in their lives and in their beds. When Mrs. Doyle insists that most men don't want to have sex with their mothers, she doesn't realize that this is what surrendered wives become - the asexual, disrespected, lie-back-and-think-of-England frumps that a lot of men grew up with. This kind of woman can't possibly enchant and inspire a value-driven man who wants an equal partner in life.
While it is painfully clear that she has little or no respect for her fellow women, it's also clear that she gives men too little credit, and seems to cater strictly to the kind of man who wants a housekeeper and a whore but not a wife. Again, why a marriage to this kind of man is worth saving is incomprehensible to me. Not all marriages are worth saving. Holding up marriage as unconditionally inviolate and sacred can lead to years of unhappiness, and I find it difficult to respect the opinion of someone who blatantly ignores that fact and advocates staying out of divorce court at all costs, even at the expense of her very soul.
The overwhelming feeling of this book is that of frustration. Reading between the lines - and indeed the lines themselves, for she often says it right there in black and white - it's easy to see that Mrs. Doyle is a woman who "married beneath her", who always "felt superior" to her husband and who struggled, daily it seems, to cope with his irresponsibility, lack of maturity and petty, boyish sulking. The truly sad part, the part that disturbs me the most, is that instead of realizing that she did marry beneath her and that she clearly deserves a more responsible and mature man, she instead chose to alter herself to suit him. This is inexcusable. No person, man or woman, should ever repress or deny themselves in order to please a partner who doesn't deserve them. And neither should they write books wherein they try to convince themselves and others that it's okay to bite your tongue four hundred times a day in order to breeze through a superficial relationship with an insincere smile and storm of protest raging in your head.
I honestly don't know how long she's going to be able to keep this up. If her own frustrated intelligence and self-respect struggles through even in a book about surrendering it, how long will it be before she breaks down one day and gives up this silly charade she's forced herself to live? I suspect a divorce may be looming in the Doyle household, not because she didn't follow her own advice, but because she did.
Her philosophy has been called a backlash against militant feminism, and while I understand the desire to rail against such a destructive political movement, I don't understand why she chose to swing so far to the opposite extreme. The expression "throwing the baby out with the bathwater" comes to mind. Women don't need to abandon whatever reasonable progress has been made in fostering equality between the sexes in order to feel feminine. It is possible to be ultra-feminine - taking your husband's name, submitting to him in bed, understanding what "wife" really means - and to be a self-respecting individual who won't be downtrodden because of her sex. It's possible to please your husband sexually because you want to - which, by the way, makes him far, far happier than mindless obedience - and to assert your independence and use your intelligence when it comes to finances or any other decision that materially affects your life. It is possible to have the best of both worlds. Many of us do.
It's a shame Mrs. Doyle thinks women can't balance a chequebook and be great lovers too. It's a shame that she believes holding an opinion and voicing it will ruin her marriage. It's even sadder to think that she believes going back to the fifties when women had to work too hard for too little respect is the answer.
The answer is not to surrender to anything. The answer is to fortify yourself. Be the strongest, most vibrant invidual you can be. Embrace your sexuality and enjoy it, don't consider for a second abdicating the wealth of your personality and the value of your character in order to maintain a facade of a marriage to a man who doesn't appreciate what he has. And don't dare teach your daughters to grow up with such low expectations, such little self-esteem, such dismal hopes for happiness in marriage.
Mrs. Doyle doesn't understand that surrendering your body amounts to prostitution, that surrendering your autonomy is as good a being in prison, and that surrendering your mind is slow, sure, mental death. But she will.
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