In recent weeks, Laura Doyle's The Surrendered Wife has become surrounded by controversy. The book, which currently ranks 54th on Amazon.com sales, has been criticized by feminists and psychologists for suggesting that women can and should "give up unnecessary control and responsibility" and "trust their husbands in every aspect of marriage--from sexual to financial" if they want to save their marriages. But what is truly striking about this book is not that it presents a new and original call to "turn back the clock," but that the advice it gives is really nothing new at all.
The past decade has seen a number of books–most of them written by women–extolling the value of traditional femininity and calling for women to resurrect the ideals of past ages. In 1999, Wendy Shalit's A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue became the center of a similar storm of controversy when it dared to suggest that looser standards of sexual behavior promoted by the modern women's movement might actually constitute a form of misogyny. Many other women, among them Danielle Crittenden and Katie Roiphe, have also chosen to make the women's movement's failures, rather than its successes, the central themes of their books. There may truly be, in Susan Faludi's words, an "undeclared war against American women," but for the time being it appears that that war is being waged not by men but by other women. And, judging by the popularity of The Surrendered Wife, many women seem willing to participate in that war.
That so many women should be writing in this antifeminist genre is puzzling. Why should women who fought so long and so hard to end "outdated" gender role expectations now be so eager to return to them? Perhaps the answer lies in the unspoken sense of many women that modern feminism has simply failed to see them as complete people.
Throughout most of its history, the modern women's movement has had a single credo: go forth and conquer. In the early 1970s, it encouraged millions of women to join the work force and compete with men for high-paying and prestigious jobs from which they had previously been excluded. Later in that decade, the campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment prompted American women to fight for important changes in their public roles, and by the early 1990s, the women's movement was using Take Our Daughters to Work Day to encourage parents to take their daughers to work as a way of instilling a sense that women too can have a useful place in the workforce. But in other aspects of life that do not center around competition, the women's movement has failed to give women much useful advice.
Marriage is one aspect of life in which the women's movement's conventional rhetoric of competition is decidedly misplaced. From the 1920s through the 1960s, psychologists and sociologists spoke of "the companionate marriage"--the notion that marriage was a kind of lifelong companionship in which husband and wife were complements to one another. Husbands and wives were different people, with different interests and perspectives, but marriage was meant to be free of competition. It was not meant to be about who did or did not have power
Doyle's main purpose in writing The Surrendered Wife is not to tell women to submit to their husbands under all circumstances; she clearly stresses the need and the right of abused wives to leave their husbands, and she advises women to pick and choose what they find useful from the book's many pieces of advice. The surrendered wife, in Doyle's thinking, surrenders not her basic rights or her identity, but merely her need to be in control every minute she and her husband are together. The surrendered wife strives, in other words, to resurrect the ideal of the companionate marriage.
It is the very success of the women's movement that has produced demand for books like The Surrendered Wife. Women raised to believe that they have a right to seek satisfaction in their professional lives are now realizing they have the same right to seek satisfaction in their personal lives. They are seeking to rebuild strong, lasting relationships on the model of the companionate marriage, and it is precisely this seeking that Laura Doyle encourages.
American women are realizing, in short, that they have a right to ask the women's movement to live up to its rhetoric; they have the right to be viewed as full human beings, not simply as competitors in the professional world.
