This book is the marriage bible for ‘alt-right’ women, and it was written in 1963
‘Trad wives’ unite…if your husband allows you to
The same year Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique rocked American households by defining the dissatisfactions of housewives, Helen Andelin was on the other side of the country writing her own book, and coming to the exact opposite conclusion. Fascinating Womanhood would become the anti-feminist manifesto that galvanized a decades-long “family values” movement for conservative women.
A few years earlier, Andelin, a Central California housewife, had been experiencing a malaise common to 20-year marriages. Her husband didn’t seem interested in her anymore. A devout Mormon and mother of eight, she turned to prayer. God offered no reply, so she turned to history. Andelin began scouring marriage manuals from the 1920s and came across one pamphlet in particular, “The Secrets of Fascinating Womanhood,” which counseled that female subservience was the way back into a husband’s heart. She followed the pamphlet’s advice, and her marriage experienced a miraculous recovery.
As historian Julie Debra Neuffer explains in her 2015 book, Helen Andelin and the Fascinating Womanhood Movement, Andelin sought to teach women how to become good wives by reverting to traditional gender roles. The self-published Fascinating Womanhood is in equal parts a chatty self-help book, a religious text, and cultural criticism that uses the works of Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens to support a “family values” agenda. Like Friedan, Andelin recognized a “problem that has no name,” but Andelin claimed the problem wasn’t caused by domestic drudgery, but by a lack of love. “[O]ne need is fundamental,” Andelin writes. “She must feel loved and cherished by her husband. Without his love, her life is an empty shell.” The book sold more than 2 million copies and sparked what is known as the Fascinating Womanhood movement. The New York Times dubbed her “a self‐appointed spokesman for the ‘silent majority’ of American women who believe that women’s place in the home.” Today, the book has become a totemic text for women on the so-called “alt-right,” a sort of “trad wife” Bible. (Though one could argue the Bible is the “trad wife” Bible).
In her book, Andelin advocated for strict adherence to conservative gender roles: “Let him be the guide, protector, and provider.” This involved a theatrical wifely performance: “Admire his manliness.…his large build, strong muscles, deep pitched voice … Be specific: when expressing admiration don’t talk in generalities. Don’t say, for example, ‘You are such a manly sort of man.’”
As Neuffer writes in her study, “The Ideal Woman that Andelin championed was ideal from a man’s point of view” — which to Andelin was the only point of view that mattered. What men and women admired was not the same, since “women are inclined to appreciate poise, talent, intellectual gifts, and cleverness of personality, whereas men admire girlishness, tenderness, and sweetness of character.” She was advocating for infantilization and the stunting of women’s intellect. She praises characters from literature who demonstrate “childlike ways,” “girlish trust” in male characters, and “absolute dependency on others to provide for her.”
Women’s agency only comes into play where blame is involved. In a passage on what to do if your husband mistreats you, Andelin writes that a woman shouldn’t try to change his behavior (not to mention leave him), but should “count these flaws as human frailties.” A mistreated wife needn’t be a doormat, but should “have some self-dignity. Stand up to him and he will love you more because of it. But do it in the right way.” If a woman’s husband is having an affair, Andelin advises, “first, ask yourself if you did anything to drive him away. Take measures to correct them as a means of winning him back.”
While Friedan alienated some women by seeming to belittle their domestic work, Andelin argues that domesticity is the road to bliss. If you followed her advice, she writes, you would achieve “Celestial love,” which is “the highest kind of tender love a man feels for a woman.” And most appealingly to her readers, she proclaims that any marriage, no matter how terrible, can achieve it, if the wife just follows her simple steps.
Though it is tempting to see Fascinating Womanhood as the conservative response to Friedan, in reality, when Andelin was writing her book, she had never heard of Friedan. Instead, Fascinating Womanhood is a response to a turbulent historical moment. In the summer of 1963, more than 200,000 civil rights activists marched on Washington. Freedom Riders had begun traveling through the Deep South to support racial equality. In November, John F. Kennedy was shot. Divorce rates had reached new highs. To a white housewife, it looked like everything that made her comfortable in the world was coming undone. While Friedan’s book spoke to women dissatisfied with their place in society, Andelin’s spoke to another group: anti-feminists like Phyllis Schlafly, who saw the roiling conflict in the world and wanted to retreat into simpler lives and gender roles. In a hotbed of social change — the Vietnam War, intensifying racial unrest, and the Sexual Revolution — Andelin conjured a nostalgia that was appealing to conservative women. The world was frightening, let men take care of you.
As her book gained prominence, she began teaching Fascinating Womanhood classes to sold-out audiences at YMCAs and universities across the country. Among the things the Fascinating Womanhood classes taught was foot stomping, or, “How to be cute, even adorable, when you are angry.”
But thousands of women nationwide ate it up. As Neuffer describes Andelin meeting an adoring crowd at the Phoenix airport in 1975, “This foe of liberated women everywhere looked more like the First Lady than a rising cult-heroine,” she writes.
After her proven success, Random House agreed to publish the book, and it remains in print today. In 1977, Andelin left public life to focus on her family. Fascinating Womanhood classes are still available online.
