Transcript

Season 1: Episode 5

Touch Me! I’m Yours!

Hosts: Gillian Frank & Lauren Gutterman

Guests and Additional Audio: Marabel Morgan, Dr. Marie Griffith, Darien Cooper, Newscaster 1, Newscaster 2, Dr. Emily Johnson, TV Guest, Dr. Rebecca Davis

Marabel Morgan:       People were saying to me, “Can you write this down? Can you write these principles down for me?” So, I did. I wrote ‘em down in little booklets and was handing them out, and putting in, uh, different examples of women who had—what they had done in their homes. Someone said to me, “Well, what if you wrote a book?” and I said, “Oh, I could never write a book, but I-I’ll write down these experiences.” I had thought that maybe I would write it down, and this shows how long ago it was. I was going to mimeograph it, ha, and stand on street corners and pass out this, the, um, principles.

Gillian Frank:             That was Marabel Morgan. In 1973, Morgan’s marriage guide, The Total Woman, became a bestseller and a cultural sensation. Within two years of its publication, Morgan had sold three and a half million copies of The Total Woman, and more than 15,000 women across the United States had signed up for her Total Woman classes. These classes offered advice about living according to Evangelical Protestant marital principles. They also included sexual assignments for wives, such as asking them to dress up in lingerie and to be prepared for sexual intercourse every night for a week. Although many readers dismissed The Total Woman as silly or dangerously misguided, Morgan’s ideas became a fixture in many homes and were celebrated by Evangelical women.

Because of Evangelical’s association with the religious right, which opposed feminism and some aspects of the sexual revolution, it’s easy to assume that Evangelicals were prudish and opposed to sexual pleasure. Marabel Morgan, her book The Total Woman, and her many fans within the American Evangelical world tell a different story. We can understand Marabel Morgan’s Total Woman as being part of an Evangelical sexual revolution. In the 1970s, born again Christian women contributed to the sexualization of American culture as the authors and readers of bestselling instruction manuals. Their books had titles like The Electric Woman, You Can Be the Wife of a Happy Husband, and The Spirit-Controlled Woman. In these marriage guides, Evangelical authors promoted male-dominated marriages. They argued that wives should be submissive to men.

At the same time, they encouraged women to explore a wide range of sexual pleasures with their husbands, such as oral sex, roleplaying, and costumes. At a moment when many women were striving for social and economic equality, these Evangelical advice books told women that God said that men should be the men of households. It was a woman’s job, these books argued, to make the male-dominated home sexy. I’m Gillian Frank.

Lauren Gutterman:     And I’m Lauren Gutterman. This is Sexing History. The 1970s witnessed Evangelicals take center stage in American culture and politics.

Marie Griffith:            The word Evangelical has meant many different things in different times. It has a very historically specific meaning. But if we’re just trying to think about what Evangelical has meant over the last 50 years, there’s really 3 core beliefs that constitute an Evangelical. My name is Marie Griffith, and I’m the director of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in Saint Louis.

Uh, the first is the belief in the literal meaning of the bible, so, the biblical stories are true, they really happened, they’re not myths. The second core belief is a belief that you really have to give your life to Jesus, surrender to Jesus, in order to receive salvation after death. And then, the third core belief is really a belief that one must share the faith with others, so that’s a kind of, the evangelizing function there is where we get the term Evangelical.

Lauren Gutterman:     The Jesus movement of the early 1970s, a conversion of celebrities, and the publication of bestsellers like Hal Lindsey’s The Late, Great Planet Earth,  put a spotlight on born again Christians.

Marie Griffith:            You know, the 1960s saw a lot of fascinating things when it comes to religion. We think of it as the era of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, which is certainly true, but meanwhile, Evangelical churches and leaders were, i-in a sense, reshaping the style of Evangelicalism. There was tremendous anxiety in the country over rapid changes, the overarching sense of doom and-and potential nuclear crisis. So, it was a—it was a period of real crisis and fear in the nation as a whole. And, in some ways, you can say that Evangelical leaders and churches were really responding very much to that-that sense of crisis and doom there.

Lauren Gutterman:     As the United States celebrated its bicentennial, the magazine Newsweek declared 1976 The Year of the Evangelical. That same year, the presidential campaign of Jimmy Carter gave born again Christians even more national attention.

Gillian Frank:             Often, we associate Evangelical Christianity with the anti-sex positions of some of its leaders. Former beauty queen, Anita Bryant is best known as the figurehead of Save Our Children, a political coalition that fought against gay rights in the late 1970s. But she matched her disgust for homosexuality with her passion for marital sex. “Christian sex has everything,” Bryant said in her 1972 book, Bless This House. “Married sex, as with all else God created, is beautiful.” Anita Bryant was just one participant in what might be called an Evangelical sexual revolution. While they condemned premarital sex, unmarried cohabitation, abortion, and homosexuality, they also celebrated the pursuit of sexual pleasure among heterosexual married couples.

Darien Cooper:          The most intimate that two human beings can be with each other on Planet Earth is through s—the sexual relationship.

Lauren Gutterman:     That’s Darien Cooper, author of the bestselling book You Can Be the Wife of a Happy Husband.

Darien Cooper:          And I realized that our enemy takes everything that is good and he counterfeits it and seeks to destroy it and defile it and distort it. And I realized that-that the most precious relationship between two human beings is the sexual connection, because that’s the most intimate that you can be with another human being. And that the marriage relationship is to be a reflection of our relationship with our heavenly bridegroom, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Lauren Gutterman:     By the mid-1970s, the Christian publishing industry produced a number of advice guides that discuss the importance of sexual fulfillment and excitement in marriage. Beverly and Tim LaHaye’s book, The Act of Marriage: The Beauty of Sexual Love, candidly described human anatomy and the mechanics of sex. The LaHayes emphasized mutual sexual pleasure and underlined the importance of spiritual fulfillment. The LaHayes encouraged sexual variety. They suggested mutual masturbation, extensive foreplay, and a range of sexual positions for married heterosexual couples.

Gillian Frank:             In the postwar period, a number of mainstream books, such as Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex, encouraged men and women to have sexually fulfilling and adventurous marriages. A number of records, like How to Make Your Husband a Sultan and How to Strip for Your Husband told women to bring excitement to their bedrooms by dancing exotically like belly dancers or performing strip teases like burlesque dancers. One record’s liner notes stated, “Think a minute. How did you look when you turned out the lights? Were you still the pretty little thing he married? Was your complexion peaches and cream or bleaches and cold cream?” The message was clear. Women needed to be beautiful and sexually provocative for their husbands.

Evangelicals took up these messages enthusiastically. Even as they condemned so-called perverted sex, such as homosexuality or pornography, Evangelicals participated in the sexualization of American culture. They told women they needed to make themselves attractive, and they suggested risqué sexual activity, such as greeting their husbands at the door in peek-a-boo lingerie or plastic Saran Wrap. Marabel Morgan and her fellow Christian authors insisted that they were not being dirty. They cited a biblical passage that stated, “Marriage is honorable in all, and the bed undefiled,” and Morgan wrote that she viewed sex, within marriage, of course, as something as clean and pure as eating cottage cheese.

Lauren Gutterman:     Marabel Morgan wrote The Total Woman at a moment when American families were undergoing profound changes.

Newscaster 1:             Marriage. It’s an old custom, but only in the last few years have people started to examine it openly and experiment with different ways for a man and a woman to live together. This is David and Noelle. They’re not married. They have lived together for three years and they have a 15-month-old son. Some people think the answer to living with another person is to live with many people in a commune. This is the Castle Commune in Minneapolis. Seven adults, five children, in one common family. For some people, a contract is the answer. Before they married, Jerry and Mary put their responsibilities in writing, in a two-year contract. They also combined their two last names into a new married name.

Lauren Gutterman:     Divorce was also reshaping American families.

Newscaster 2:             The number of marriages in the United States decreased last year for the first time since 1958. There were 2,223,000 marriages in 1974. That’s 54,000 fewer than in 1973. But the number of divorces increased for the twelfth year in a row. Last year in the country, there were 970,000 divorces, almost 1 for every 2 marriages.

Lauren Gutterman:     Many Americans wondered what the future held for the institution of marriage and their own relationships. Increasingly, pundits assured unhappily married couples that divorce could lead to a new, more fulfilling life. Economic pressures and social changes were transforming the male breadwinner, female homemaker family model that defined white middle class life. A tougher economy meant many white married women joined the workforce. At the same time, greater numbers of white women saw personal fulfillment and economic independence in the workplace.

Gillian Frank:             Even as the economy shifted men and women’s roles in the labor force, a resurgent feminist movement drew attention to how women were socialized to be subordinate to men and the role that marriage played in women’s oppression. Many feminist women and men believed that marriage could and should be more egalitarian. Other feminists believed that the institution of marriage was an instrument of women’s oppression and could not be reformed.

Speaker:                      The WITCHs. The name stands for Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell. The WITCHs are uniquely satirical and witty in a movement that, like all crusades, is rather humorless. The WITCHs materialize at demonstrations. They perform guerrilla theater. They emerge just to harass.

Gillian Frank:             Members of the feminist group WITCH described marriage as a dehumanizing institution, legal whoredom for women. On February 15, 1969, the day after Valentine’s Day, WITCH members crashed a large bridal fair at Madison Square Gardens in New York City. They sang, “Here come the slaves, off to their graves,” to the tune of the traditional bridal march. In a decade that witnessed the increased visibility and availability of pornography, open access to birth control, expanded abortion rights under Roe v. Wade, and other legal changes such as no-fault divorce, and the passage of Title IX, which prohibited sex discrimination in educational settings, what was expected of a husband or a wife, and of marriage, itself, was increasingly unclear.

By the time Marabel Morgan published The Total Woman in 1973, American culture offered new possibilities for sexual expression and new opportunities for men and women to redefine their roles.

Lauren Gutterman:     Conservative religious women believed their way of life was being threatened by these economic and cultural shifts. They worried about the erosion of their family values and feared that marriage was under assault. Conservative religious women did not simply reject the sexual revolution. They condemned some changes while welcoming others.

Emily Johnson:           Some books of marital advice had been published, but mostly by men talking to women, or by married couples talking to women, and Marabel Morgan’s book is very chatty. You feel like you’re talking to a girlfriend. And so, it was more attractive, I think, to a lot of female audiences in that way to have a woman talking to you about woman stuff, rather than having a man or a couple talk about it more clinically. My name is Emily Johnson, and I am an assistant professor of women’s and gender history in the United States at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana.

S-so, she’s not the first person to include some discussion of sexuality, but she sort of reclaims aspects of the sexual revolution, which Evangelical churches, conservative Christian churches feel very ambivalent towards. They obviously are not into the free love. They’re not into the gay rights movement. But she says, you know, sex is supposed to be fun, and it can be fun. And she talks about things like sexy costumes or sex games or perfuming your sheets. All of these sorts of things that had been really taboo in Evangelical culture, but because she talks about them sort of euphemistically and because it’s very much presented as just a lady talking to other ladies, she’s able to get away with it and, in fact, to experience explosive success with it.

Lauren Gutterman:     The tone of The Total Woman is irreverent, and the advice often verges on the absurd. But Marabel Morgan was sincere about her reasons for writing the book. She believed that women who followed her program would save their marriages and bring their husbands closer to God. Her optimism stands in stark contrast to her unhappy childhood.

Marabel Morgan:       My past wasn’t so happy. I grew up in Mansfield, Ohio, a small town, and my mother was very disturbed as I was a child. Well, my father ran off when I was a baby, so I never knew him, but my mother married her second husband when I was six, and we had a year and a half of happiness. And I remember that as just the highlight of my life. But then my mother got involved in the occult, and after some time, she actually became psychotic.

And when I was in the third grade, she decided that people were looking in the windows at her, and one day she pulled down all the blinds in our house and she went upstairs to bed, and she stayed there. She wouldn’t come down. And I was an only child. My daddy went to work and came home at night. My mother stayed in bed all through my third grade, fourth grade, fifth grade, all through junior high. I was 8 when she went upstairs, and I was 14 when she came back down. And it even—just saying it, it still gives me a little tremor.

Lauren Gutterman:     Morgan wanted to avoid recreating the family life she grew up with. She attended a bible school in Miami, which taught her that the ideal marriage is one in which a wife submits to her husband’s authority. It was there that she met Charlie Morgan, whom she’d soon marry. While their marriage began blissfully, Charlie and Marabel’s relationship turned sour within a year.

Marabel Morgan:       Charlie and I had such a wonderful beginning. I just thought it was—I thought it was perfect and wonderful. But, you know, I guess it’s like colleges that tell us that we tend to repeat the pattern that we saw as child. And that’s all I had ever seen. I really didn’t even have much contact with other people growing up. It was just my mother and her relentless—she was on my father’s case [laughter] continually. And so, I didn’t realize I was doing this, but I began to nag Charlie. I-I was on his case day and night about everything. And it’s because I was in a turmoil inside, I think, all this unresolved hostilities from my childhood sorta was directed at him. I mean, it-it comes out. It’s in there and it comes out.

One day, well, I had gone to the library because I knew my marriage was floundering, and I thought, “I’ve gotta get a book on-on what to do.” There were two books, uh, very big, thick books, and I thought, “I don’t need theory. I need something practical.” So, I didn’t know where to turn. And I picked up the Bible one day and turned to the Book of Proverbs. And I knew that King Solomon had written this, and he was supposedly the greatest, wisest man who had ever lived. And I thought, “I need wisdom,” so I was reading along, flipping the pages. And suddenly, I saw this verse, “A nagging wife is like a continual dripping on a rainy day.”

And it was just like neon. Those words just shone to me, and I—it hit me. I thought, “That’s me. I’m a nagging wife. I’m a continual dripping. Charlie must think of me as a-a Chinese water torture.” It was a moment of truth. I was so horrified at who I was. I actually saw myself as I really was, and I thought, “How has he even stayed with me?” This, we, uh, were six years into the marriage at this point. And I was like a screaming shrew. I was, because that’s what my mother had been. But that day, it was a turning point. I vowed that I was going to stop nagging Charlie if it killed me.

Gillian Frank:             Morgan’s unhappy marriage and her religious training gave rise to the Total Woman seminars. She based her seminars on the very steps that she took to salvage her once-failing marriage. Over the course of four two-hour sessions, and for the price of $25, women learned how to follow the four As: adapting to, admiring, appreciating, and accepting their husbands. They were given assignments, such as dressing up in something exotic and greeting their husbands at the door.

Marabel Morgan:       They were s—they were so simple and-and naïve, like go home and make his favorite dinner. A lot of my friends, I must admit, didn’t cook for their husbands. They-they just rebelled. They didn’t wanna do it, and I said, “Well, go home and make his favorite food, and then, um, make a sign to yourself that every time you feel a nag coming on, you’re going to give a compliment instead of nagging. And, um, be ready for sex every night this week.” That was one of the assignments. Well, you should have heard the howls and the moans. [Laughter] But it was—uh, you know, we were—we were shaking up what had been our regular way of life. And the husbands were responding to this. I mean, just those three assignments would have been enough, but there were all kinds of things like, go buy a new nighty. It was so simple. It was so simple, and-and probably silly to a lot of people. But lives were being changed.

Children’s lives were being changed. One little girl had told her mom—the day she came to the class for the first time, she and her husband had had a fight that morning at breakfast. And the little girl was five years old, and she said, “When I grow up, I’m never going to get married.” And the mother realized that she was painting this picture of marriage for this little girl, and so, she came to the class that day and-and her life changed. At—by the end of the—we had a four-week series. By the end of the four weeks, she said her husband was bringing her gifts. He was falling all over himself, he was so thrilled with her change. And-and I was thrilled. I mean, these were families. Husbands and wives and children, their-their lives were changed.

Gillian Frank:             The Total Woman seminars became popular in Miami and quickly spread across the nation. Early on, the wives of players on the Miami Dolphins, Atlanta Falcons, Green Bay Packers, and the Washington Redskins all took Total Woman classes. Many of the wives of these athletes, like their husbands, were African-American. And Morgan remembers racially and religiously diverse students in her courses. As her course grew in popularity, Morgan translated her Total Woman seminars into book form for Revell Publisher, a Christian publisher based in New Jersey. At the center of The Total Woman was an emphasis on sex and submission.

Marie Griffith:            Submissiveness has been one of the most interesting doctrines throughout Christian history, in its gendered interpretations. In that kind of late ‘60s, early ‘70s world, there were really shifting models of authority. So, one of the important results of the youth movements of the 1960 and-and the, sort of, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, was a shifting sense of authority. You know, authority was no longer to be feared and, in many cases, it was to be toppled. It was to be overturned.

So, there’s a-a lessening, you might say, respect for authority in the culture at large. Evangelicals respond to that with a very strong defense of authority, a strong defense of male authority, a strong defense, frankly, of political authority. And this doctrine of female submissiveness to male authority flourishes in that context. In some ways, female submissiveness becomes more important in the 1970s as Evangelicals are responding to that cultural, as they see it, disrespect for authority.

Lauren Gutterman:     In the postwar period, marriage advice literature for Evangelical women emphasized key passages in Ephesians. The scripture told wives, “Submit yourselves onto your own husbands as onto the Lord.” These verses recognized the husband as the head of the family, as Christ was head of the church. Morgan told her readers that God planned for woman to be under her husband’s rule. She also tried to make submissiveness sexy. She wrote, “It is only when a woman surrenders her life to her husband, reveres and worships him, and is willing to serve him, that she becomes really beautiful to him.”

Marabel Morgan:       The idea is simply allowing him to be the leader. Submitting to your husband as to the Lord is what the scripture says. I had a woman say to me one day, “Well, I don’t submit to the Lord. I don’t even know the Lord.” I said, “I understand, but that’s-that’s what God says. Let me lead you to make life better for you, to make life happy for you. And in a marriage, the husband, if he’s a good man, he wants to make life better for the wife and-and the family.” And so, I-I think submitting, not being subservient, but on your own volition, saying, “I’m going to go your way, Charlie,” is very careful that he wants to do it the right way because he knows I’m looking to him.

Gillian Frank:             These authors claim that men would naturally respond to submissive women, like caring for them, protecting them, and granting their unspoken desires. Beverly LaHaye wrote, in The Spirit-Controlled Woman, that a husband puts his wife in charge of areas where she functions well. This is a truly liberated woman. By contrast, women who sought to assume leadership roles would turn a family upside down. Darien Cooper warned her female readers, “As homes have become more wife-dominated, there has been a rise in juvenile delinquency, rebellion, homosexuality, the divorce rate, and the number of frustrated women.”

Lauren Gutterman:     Even the act of having sex expressed male domination and female submissiveness. Beverly and Tim LaHaye wrote, “The very nature of the act of marriage involves feminine surrender.” By act of marriage, they meant sex. The LaHayes claimed that a woman could only reach orgasm by relinquishing control to her husband. And while neither Morgan, Cooper, nor any of the other authors used language this crass, their books were consistently on-message. In order for these hierarchies to work, wives needed to make their husbands hard.

Darien Cooper suggested using soft lighting to create a romantic atmosphere and having sex in different rooms and in a variety of positions. She also encouraged her female readers to explore their husbands’ bodies. She wrote, “You must realize that your husband needs the freedom to initiate whatever sexual actions he desires, knowing you will respond lovingly. You can be relaxed in the knowledge that it is God’s will for you to meet his needs enthusiastically.”

Gillian Frank:             Marabel Morgan also sought to rev up her married readers’ desires. She instructed wives to titillate their husbands with thoughts of what the evening might bring. She advised women to call your husbands at work an hour before quitting time to say, “I wanted you to know that I just crave your body.” Costumes were an important part of The Total Woman sexual playbook. Marabel Morgan explained, “You can be lots of different women to him. Costumes provide variety without ever leaving home.” She suggested pink baby-doll pajamas and white boots, and going braless as some of the many options for sexual play in the married household.

Lauren Gutterman:     None of this advice would have been necessary if Morgan and other writers of Evangelical marital guides had not believed that American men were dangerously fragile. The Total Woman described a wife’s role as rebuilding a partial man. With the competitive workforce depleted, Evangelical wives would replenish. Evangelical authors in the 1970s repeatedly emphasized how husbands returned home from work tired, broken, and angry. Morgan explained to her readers, “At the end of a long day, your husband especially needs your compliments. Put your husband’s tattered ego back together again. He needs to be pampered, loved, and restored through food and sex.”

Morgan and others believed women could use sex to repair men’s egos. They encouraged readers to make themselves beautiful while their husbands were away, and to initiate sexual foreplay as soon as they came home. Morgan believed a husband needed to be greeted by the girl of his dreams, who’s feminine, soft, and touchable. Another Evangelical advice book, The Fulfilled Woman, instructed readers, “Wives should always be lovers, too. Run into his arms the moment he comes home to you. Show him how pleased you are that he’s home again.”

Gillian Frank:             Religious salvation was also at stake. Marabel Morgan and her peers believed that a sexy wife made her husband more likely to join her in church. The Total Woman literally tried to make religion sexy.

Lauren Gutterman:     If sex was meant to be a gateway to salvation, it was equally an attempt to defend marriage against men’s adultery. Evangelical marriage advice manuals fixated on the idea that their husbands’ offices were sizzling with sex and young, attractive secretaries.

TV Guest:                    She was attractive and charming. She was efficient. She was intelligent. She had initiative and ingenuity. She was loyal and trustworthy, and had everything organized just right. She had everything. You see, I’m the one who married her.

Lauren Gutterman:     Unmarried female workers terrified Evangelical women, who feared that lusty young secretaries would lure their husbands away from them. Marabel Morgan warned, “All day long, your husband is surrounded at the office by dazzling secretaries who emit clouds of perfume.”

Rebecca Davis:           The entire premise of The Total Woman is that married men are fucking their secretaries, and so, as a result, wives need to become more like youthful sex workers in order to make their marriages stick. I’m Rebecca Davis, associate professor of history and associate professor of women and gender studies at the University of Delaware. I’m also a producer and the story editor for Sexing History.

There’s an idea we’re still grappling with, which is this logic that women’s presence in the workplace threatens men’s ability to remain faithful to their wives, and that it is women who are the threat to marriages by-by very virtue of them being in the workplace, and that their wives, which are weirdly in this di— narrative, never the workers, themselves. The wives, in this scenario, are these women sitting at home, taking their bubble baths, waiting for the men to come home, and not these working women who are, according to this narrative, giving blow jobs to their bosses at work.

Marabel Morgan’s solution to that was not to take women out of the workplace. Marabel Morgan’s solution to that was to teach married women how to sex up their marriages by play-acting and roleplaying scenes from pornographic films. This narrative removes coercion from the sexualization of the American workplace. It removes any notion of power imbalance, harassment, and even violence from the sexualized relationships between men and women. It removed this whole notion of power from the sexualization of the American workplace. And it puts all of the blame on women’s audacity to want to be in that workplace, or women’s necessity to be in that workplace. 

Lauren Gutterman:     Morgan directed her readers to foster intimacy, excitement, and commitment through hot sex. In The Total Woman, Morgan relayed the story of Connie, who attended her husband’s company’s annual dinner dance.

Marabel Morgan:       One of the secretaries stopped the show with a most revealing gown. As Connie watched her husband’s glassy eyes, she casually asked him, “What would you do if I wore a getup like that to greet you some night?” His reply was a shock to her. “Oh, honey,” he said, “I’d love it. If I thought you’d be home waiting for me in an outfit like that, the bumper-to-bumper traffic wouldn’t bother me a bit. In fact, I might even leave early to beat the traffic.” Connie is a smart woman. She tried it, he liked it.

Gillian Frank:             Some readers love The Total Woman. The book also inspired revulsion and criticism. In the mainstream media, reactions to The Total Woman were largely hostile. Some argued that Morgan was endorsing a model of marriage based on dishonesty and trickery. Others saw her book as part of a broader backlash against the women’s liberation movement, and they warned that the dependence and subservience it encouraged was dangerous.

Lauren Gutterman:     Letters to the editor in Newsweek and the New York Times captured similar sentiments. Judith Glasner of San Diego, California, wrote, “I don’t get it. How come all these cute, little, womanly women who believe women’s place is in the kitchen or the bedroom are in the studio banging out bestsellers or riding the lecture circuit, telling off those feminist freaks? Could it be they felt just the teensiest little bit unfulfilled in their organdy aprons and black mesh stockings?”

Gillian Frank:             Here’s Emily Johnson to tell us more.

Emily Johnson:           Feminists react really strongly to Marabel Morgan. You hear a lot about Marabel Morgan setting the women’s movement back decades, setting women back centuries. But Marabel Morgan responds to that in a really interesting way. So, she claims that she had never heard of the feminist movement before her book was published, before feminists started reacting to it. I think that she was at least a little bit aware of the feminist movement because she sort of implicitly writes against it in Total Woman, but she does—she doesn’t ever name it. But she really doesn’t wanna be part of that debate. And she says, “I don’t want any of that. I’m just trying to write this apolitical book. I’m just trying to write this book to help people improve their marriage.” Which, of course, is a really political statement.

Lauren Gutterman:     While The Total Woman was published 44 years ago, its ideas still resonate. In our digital age, Evangelical writing on sexual pleasure and experimentation within marriage has only grown. Websites, including Between the Sheets and the Marriage Bed offer married couples explicit advice about how to create more pleasurable and varied sex lives. Internet stores, like Married Dance, provide Christian couples with sex toys, lingerie, sex swings, and handcuffs.

Some modern Christian sex writers even condone sexual behaviors, like female masturbation, pegging, and even male crossdressing, which most certainly did not appear in the initial wave of Evangelical sex books. And blogs and online message boards allow Christians to discuss their sexual problems and share sex tips anonymously with a broad virtual community. In these venues and others, Marabel Morgan, Anita Bryant, and Darien Cooper’s ideas about how to create a hot and exciting Christian sex life live on.

Gillian Frank:             Ideas about submission remain popular. Christian blogs like The Peaceful Wife and The Transformed Wife emphasize women’s submission, distinct gender roles, and of course, being sexually adventurous. The Transformed Wife recently told readers, “Women who do housework live longer and have more sex.” While many authors continue to emphasize wifely submission, others advocate a more egalitarian notion of mutual submission, where husband and wife submit to God and each other. Just like Evangelical marriage advisors in the 1970s, female authors today are pushing against the boundaries of Evangelical Christianity. They are challenging stereotypes of Christian sexual prudery and narrowmindedness.

But as sociologist Kelsy Burke has argued, many of these same authors continue to believe that marriages should express the divinely made differences between men and women. But more than this, many Evangelical women continue to struggle with the enduring questions and problems that Marabel Morgan’s readers faced. How can I be happy in my marriage? How can I give and receive the love I want? And perhaps the hardest question of all, what should I do if my relationship is falling apart? Underneath the submission, behind the flirtation, and barely hidden by the peek-a-boo lingerie of The Total Woman and the books and blogs it has inspired, is a deep insecurity and a haunting question. What if this relationship doesn’t work out?

Lauren Gutterman:     Sexing History is produced by Rebecca Davis, Saniya Lee Ghanoui, Devin McGeehan Muchmore, Gillian Frank, and me. If you’re enjoying our show and wanna help us grow, please review us on iTunes. We’d love to hear from you. And if you’d like an episode, please share it on Facebook or Twitter.

Gillian Frank:             Sexing History is made possible with generous funding from Alan Zwickler of the Phil Zwickler Charitable and Memorial Foundation, created in honor of the journalist, filmmaker, poet, and gay activist, Phil Zwickler. The foundation seeks to promote human rights, education, health, and the arts, specifically with respect to the gay and lesbian community, and generally with regard to those individuals and groups who need assistance to survive and be heard. Visit them at pzfoundation.org.

Lauren Gutterman:     This episode drew from articles on Marabel Morgan by Gillian Frank and Rebecca Davis. Many thanks to Marie Griffith, Emily Johnson, and Rebecca Davis for spending time with us and sharing their expertise about the histories of religion, marriage, and sexuality. We also wanna share the happy news that Marie Griffith has just published a new book, Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Divided American Politics. You can find links to her book and the scholarship of our other contributors on our website. We also wanna thank Marabel Morgan and Darien Cooper for sharing their stories with us. You can listen to extended interview clips with Marabel Morgan and Darien Cooper on our website, sexinghistory.com.

Gillian Frank:             You know, o-one of the things that people associate The Total Woman with is the Saran Wrap at the door, but that’s not actually in the book, is it?

Marabel Morgan:       No, it isn’t. I was on it—I think it was on Donahue, and some caller [clears throat] called in and said it was around Halloween, and, uh, they were telling different stories that, uh, they were dressing up for Halloween. And one woman said, “Well, I took Saran Wrap and wrapped myself up and met my husband at the door, [laughter] and gave him the edge of the Sa-Saran Wrap and said, ‘You can unwrap your present,’ so he liked that a lot.” But I thought that was a great idea. And I have to tell you this. At Christmastime, they make Saran in pink and green, so it’s much more flattering for those who think that they would like to do that.

Gillian Frank:             And before we go, we wanted to let you know that this show will be our last for 2017. We’ll be back early next year with all new episodes. If you’re enjoying our podcast, we’d greatly appreciate your support. You can go to our website, sexinghistory.com, and click the donate button. Your contributions will help us pay our researchers and to take on even more ambitious stories in the coming months. Sexing History is proud to announce that it is collaborating with the Journal of the History of Sexuality.

Established in 1990 and published by the University of Texas Press, the Journal of the History of Sexuality is the premiere scholarly forum for historical, critical, and theoretical research in the history of sexuality. Each month, we will be publishing stories that draw on the richness of the Journal of the History of Sexuality’s archives. We will begin publishing these articles in January of 2018. Visit us at sexinghistory.com to learn more. From all of us at Sexing History, thank you, and we look forward to sharing more stories from the sexual past in 2018. I’m Gillian Frank.

Lauren Gutterman:     I’m Lauren Gutterman. This is Sexing History.

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