"Surrendering to your husband is not about returning to the '50s or rebelling against feminism."
-Laura Doyle
Over the past two months, I have been carefully examining the books of Laura Doyle, "feminist and former shrew." She is the bestselling self-"help" author of The Surrendered Wife, The Surrendered Single, and Things Will Get As Good As You Can Stand. If you have ever tortured yourself by looking through any of these, you will likely have found her identity as a feminist to be just a bit trite. If not, read the letter I sent her several weeks ago. Almost everything that ruins her credibility is detailed herein.
Dear Mrs. Doyle:
I am writing to address a piece of advice you present in your books that I find ill-advised and disquieting. While your general thesis — nagging and control are bad for a marriage — is acceptable, one talking point made what might have been a sensible book absolutely ridiculous, to say the least.
In Things Will Get As Good As You Can Stand, you advise women to let men support them financially. You claim that men need to provide for their wives in order to feel like men, which, in turn, will make women feel like women. You make it clear that such enforcement of gender roles will ultimately make the relationship more intimate.
What you fail to realize is that intimacy means nothing when it poses a threat to a woman's future well-being.
I have never heard of a man who leaves his wife after she puts him through school. I have, however, heard of a good many women who allowed their husbands to control all the money in the household, who ended up losing their job, asking for a divorce, or even dying. These wives, all of whom were housewives (who can find ways to earn money at home, though not many do), were thrown into a desperate situation. Most of them had quit their careers after marrying without becoming established in them, and so, needless to say, their employers weren't gasping to have them back.
This is the issue which you neglect to mention. Perhaps a man will enjoy being the breadwinner for a couple of years, but over time, many of them will begin resenting having to pay for everything. This was a popular reason for divorce in the marriages I described above. You say that men should be the ones to manage the finances because . . . it's hard. And even if women earn their own money, you insist that separate savings and chequing accounts are the wrong way to go, for it will not make your husband feel trustworthy — however, is blind trust really better than no trust at all?
Furthermore, financial dependence can also pose a threat to the children, if there are any. In most cases, if the marriage fails, they will end up with the mother. If she has no money of their own, how will she be able to provide for them? Alimony and child support are not infallibly granted, even if they are ordered to be by law.
The author of the book from which I gleaned this information (The Feminine Mistake, Leslie Bennetts) charges that between 66% and 75% of currently dependent wives will go through the same thing at some point. If you tracked the women you coached over several decades, you might just see the same statistic for yourself.
An aside: You followed up the "Let a Man Support You" chapter with "Receive Money for Work You Love." So . . . which is it? Have a man pay your way, or do it yourself?
Marriages can be intimate without the wife letting the husband take the lead. Studies have shown that when spouses consider each other to be equals, the marriage is ultimately happier and fairer, thus spawning more closeness. And is it not better to marry someone of an independent mind, instead of someone who conforms to some arbitrary standard of masculinity or femininity? Only people on the lunatic fringe of gender studies would say no to this.
Additionally, your admonishment never to tell men when they're wrong is simply absurd. You're a big fan of quotes; did you know that "[d]issent is the highest form of patriotism," according to Thomas Jefferson? In layman's terms, it means that telling someone when they have made a mistake is better than letting them continue to make it. Therefore, letting your husband know that he accidentally crossed the state line is indeed a good idea. The alternative would be pretending you didn't notice — which, of course, would be a lie. Which, of course, is bad. Just as anarchists don't realize that society needs leaders in order to function properly, you don't realize that men, like all human beings, need boundaries in order to keep them from screwing up, either a vacation or their entire lives.
In your worldview, men were put on this planet to serve women, and women were put on this planet to give men something to do. Anyone who dares to say otherwise will end up alone and bereft. It is laughable — nay, insulting — to see you claim to be a feminist when you refer to marital equality as a "myth." But to be fair, one cannot expect too much sensibility from someone whose only qualifications are a few therapy sessions and a copy of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus.
I hope you will take my criticism to heart and rethink some of your suggestions. Your unblinking devotion to traditional gender roles is appalling. What's worse, there are now thousands of other women milling around who are just as ignorant as you.
Rio Madeira
Chair, Yahoo! Answers Feminists' League
P.S. I don't really expect you to reply to this message with anything constructive. I just had to get all this off my chest.
P.P.S. In the interests of full disclosure, I am one of those women who is "comfortable living solo and [doesn't] want to get married."