Fascinating Womanhood / Total Woman / Created to be his Helpmeet

[plaingirly]

Does anyone follow any of these books and guidelines?

I found them in a charity shop - I guess someone had them all and donated them as I have never seen anything similar there before - and have just skimmed through them.

Funny enough, Mum and I were talking about the Roald Dahl leg of lamb murder story the other day and how good we thought it was. Cogito I like your story.

The books the OP talks about seems to be utter rubbish. Not my type at all.

Leave them in the toilet for when you run out of bog roll

Sounds like a good idea....

Then again, to be serious for a minute, these books may be very specifically recommending an extreme version of a submissive female culture but they are not alone. The not-so-thinly-veiled subtext of most magazines, gossip columns and other celeb-peddling at the moment is that women are nothing more than frothy adornments, interested only in make-up, shopping, their 'lovely children' and their 'lovely homes', notable only when seen on the arm of some male footballer, actor, business tycoon, politician. In fact, some women are notable for nothing else but their association with certain men. It alarmed me, for example, when I recently overhead a group of young women (late teens I'm guessing) on a train talking about a friend. "I don't know why she bothers working" said one... "she's beautiful enough to get a footballer". I don't think they'd been reading 'Created to be his Helpmeet' et al but 'keep your man happy and quit the day-job' was exactly their philosophy.

I like the idea of that story!

I don't think they would all end up together at a charity shop if they worked. The scary thing is that flicking through them I can see how women would get sucked in. It is very much that YOU can fix yourself and your relationship which basically sounds like it was all YOUR fault in the first place.

Yuck. Those books sound like my mother wrote them.

Would it be too much to say that this is the kind of culture that gives rise to the exploitative situations being discussed in the news this week (Savile, Peel etc), where women/girls feel very very grateful for attention from a powerful man and the man thinks he can do what he likes? I'm aware that many of Savile's victims didn't ever feel grateful for his attentions, but for a few, the attention-from-celebrity factor is partly what got some of them into those dressing rooms in the first place.

I'm speaking as someone who has been in this kind of situation, but didn't (originally) identify it as such, because the perpetrators were such terribly civilised and intelligent wonderful professors at elite universities... and of course if they told me I was wonderful, intelligent and sexy, then it must be true and it must help my career... because my mother always told me men are a different species and that true success is your parents' male friends crying at how beautiful you are, and having 23 boyfriends at once all fighting on the front lawn to take you out.

I've subsequently developed the ability to recognize idiocy, lechery and abuse of power, told the sleazebags to get lost, and after they each tried it on again, delivered a swift phonecall to the sleazebags' superiors. I've told my mother that she's done enough damage to me and my sister, and if she dares teach my niece that kind of rubbish I wil never speak to her again. I'm aware I'm lucky to now not be as vulnerable as many who have been in the same situation.

Yes - Cogito that's great (and i love the Dahl stories too).

I think a huge amount of damage has been done to the world by teaching this vile rubbish to women like my mother (downtrodden from birth by men telling her the only thing that mattered was that she was pretty and submissive, ASD, has always blindly followed 1950s social rules).

When I look back at how utterly miserable and dysfunctional I was when sleazy professor loverboy didn't pay me enough attention - or paid me waaaaay too much attention - I am very very angry, first at myself for being so stupid, secondly at him for behaving like that when he's so intelligent, thirdly at my mother for teaching me all the things that made me put myself in that situation, fourthly at society for promoting that kind of non-autonomy princessy shite.

I toyed with the ideas in the Helpmeet book for a while a few years back. I had a lot of Christian American friends and discovered they nearly all thought that way, so read that book to see if I was missing something.

I was, looking back. I was being mostly ignored by my H who worked hard and partied late (all networking, dahling), wouldn't even lift his eyes from his computer screen when I was talking to him. I thought I could become a SAHsuperM and at least feel better about myself.

I soon got disillusioned with the whole thing.

Anyone who's interested in an alternative Christian perspective might like to take a look at one of Michele Guiness's books which is rather more empowering.

I have fascinating womanhood. While I wouldn't follow all of its instructions, some of it is interesting and actually pretty useful. One of the main things I've taken from it is that you can't change your DH, you can only change your reaction to what he does (which was quite ahead of its time, seeing as how that's now the basis for CBT therapies). I also like it because it does actually motivate me to get the housework done :) but as a SAHM I do feel most of the housework is my responsibility.

I think it's no more manipulative than many modern self-help books, and as long as you read it with an open mind and a small pinch of salt it can be useful. Certainly I've noticed positive changes in my own marriage since making little changes based on what I read in FW!