The Proper Care & Feeding of Husbands
by Laura Schlessinger
HarperCollins, 180 pp., $24.95 AMERICA HAS, at present, a 52 percent divorce rate, "no-fault" laws that have turned what is supposed to be a unique commitment for life into serial polygamy, and a nearly complete amnesia about the fact that children suffer in single-parent households. The sanctity of marriage is at such a low ebb, it's not surprising the idea of trying to redefine marriage to include homosexuals has gained so much ground in recent years. In a country in which marriage seems to mean so little, what argument can heterosexuals make to retain their monopoly on the empty institution?
The radio personality Dr. Laura Schlessinger may have come closest to understanding why American marriage has broken down so badly. In her new book, The Proper Care & Feeding of Husbands, her idea is simple: The major cause of the American divorce epidemic is the refusal or inability of women to care for their husbands. Schlessinger brazenly insists that a wife should treat her husband with respect, that learning about his needs is a good thing, and that making him feel dignified and needed improves women's lives and marriage.
Using the formula that has made Schlessinger's radio show successful, The Proper Care & Feeding of Husbands examines problems submitted by listeners and offers advice tailored to the real-life situations in which people find themselves. Schlessinger's personal and no-nonsense style explains her popularity, and this new book is her seventh New York Times bestseller. For years, attempts have been made to silence her--specifically because her values-based perspective challenges leftist cultural decay. But the success of The Proper Care & Feeding of Husbands is another indication that her message is one Americans want and need.
Schlessinger rightly points out the state of personal relations between men and women in this country are in trouble, and not always simply from failures of behavior. American women, in particular, have been systematically miseducated and misinformed for nearly four decades. I was president of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women from 1990 to 1996, and I served two years on NOW's national board of directors. I complained even then that the biggest failure of the modern feminist movement was its leaving men behind.
Somewhere along the line, the fight for equality with men became an effort to have independence from men. And many of our current cultural predicaments are due in part to the condemning of traditional institutions and culture by the women's movement over the past forty years. The message of the feminist establishment has been, in Gloria Steinem's famous words, that "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle." With a mantra like that, it was inevitable we would create women unable or unwilling to understand the men in their lives--much less treat them with dignity and celebrate them as husbands, fathers, and brothers.
WITH MEN UNIVERSALLY DEMONIZED as rapists, warmongers, and sexual harassers, with masculinity itself defined as a problem, it's really no wonder women's sense of how to interact with men faded away. Young women from the 1970s through the 1990s were routinely told that marriage was by definition rape and that heterosexuality itself constituted "sleeping with the enemy." Many women chose not to marry, put off having children, and began to experiment with their sexuality in efforts to "find" themselves, free from the chains of society and the dangerous parasite of men.
The Proper Care & Feeding of Husbands is not a theoretical work, by any means, but what Schlessinger grasps in her popular and intuitive style is something an enormous number of feminists have missed: The freeing of women from the bonds of the family has delivered many of them into a kind of sexual slavery. If women are released from the deep structures of being mothers and daughters and wives and sisters, there isn't any reason for men to think of them anymore as mothers and daughters and wives and sisters. And men, being men, have not surprisingly responded by considering women primarily as sex objects--the only male-female relation left over.
So the feminist movement that was going to free women turned out to be the great facilitator of the American playboy, hustler, and pornographer. Sexual freedom and personal liberty turned out to mean that women have to leave their self-respect at the bedroom door. Have you looked, really looked, at the women's magazines in the supermarket lately? From Cosmopolitan to Glamour, the headlines blast such sentiments as "Be His Love Slave," or "Find Those Spots on Him That Will Make Him Want More," or "What Do Men Really Want in Bed? Our Survey Tells You!" Feminism wasn't supposed to be about the titillation of watching Madonna masturbate on stage, and female dignity wasn't supposed to be about becoming someone's love slave.
Of course, when Britney Spears, Janet Jackson, and Courtney Love are the new generation's feminist icons, why would men think that we actually want to be treated with dignity? And while neither a wife nor a husband in a difficult marriage may subscribe to the feminist manifesto, messages promulgated by popular culture have clearly taken their toll on women's understanding. What culture used to know is that women civilize men. Men look to women for cues about how to act and about what is appropriate. The decent early supporters of the feminist movement still knew this, but nowadays it seems to fall to Laura Schlessinger, the supposed anti-feminist, to provide guidance for women who want to know how to improve their lives.
SOME OF THE EARLY REVIEWS of The Proper Care & Feeding of Husbands have been brutal and vicious, parroting the rotten old line that occasionally putting one's husband first and making an effort to be a good wife is a sexist throwback to the dark ages. But the book has nonetheless sold phenomenally well, almost three-quarters of a million copies in print in eight weeks, which is a heartening sign. And Schlessinger has just finished a companion volume, a workbook/journal, to be released in August.
Popular culture may finally be shifting back, giving women, from across the social and political spectrum, answers that will actually improve their lives. If women begin to realize they're not sleeping with the enemy, they may find a way to remain married to someone who loves them and is a good partner in life.
Tammy Bruce is an author, columnist, and Fox News Channel contributor. Her national talk radio show will debut in April.