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Jesus to erase damaging memories.

A secular analysis of Stapleton’s own newfound well-being

seems, by contrast, pedestrian. A brilliant woman has found a socially acceptable w ay to use her intellect and compassion in the public domain— the dream of many women. Though fundamentalist male ministers have called her a witch, in typical female fashion Stapleton disclaims responsibility for her own inventiveness and

credits the Holy Spirit, clearly male, thus soothing the savage misogyny of those who cannot bear for any woman to be both seen and heard. Also, having founded an evangelical m inistry that demands constant travel, Stapleton is rarely at home. She has not given birth again.

Marabel Morgan’s description of her own miserable marriage in

the years preceding her discovery of God’s will is best summarized

in this one sentence: “I was helpless and unhappy. ” 8 She describes

years of tension, conflict, boredom, and gloom. She took her fate

into her own hands by asking the not-yet-classic question, What do

men want? Her answer is stunningly accurate: “It is only when a

woman surrenders her life to her husband, reveres and worships

him, and is w illing to serve him, that she becomes really beautiful

to him . ”9 Or, more aphoristically, “A Total Woman caters to her

man’s special quirks, whether it be in salads, sex, or sports. ” 10

Citing God as the authority and submission to Jesus as the model,

Morgan defines love as “unconditional acceptance of [a man] and

his feelings. ” 11

Morgan’s achievement in The Total Woman was to isolate the

basic sexual scenarios of male dominance and female submission

and to formulate a simple set of lessons, a pedagogy, that teaches

women how to act out those scenarios within the context of a

Christian value system: in other words, how to cater to male pornographic fantasies in the name of Jesus Christ. As Morgan explains in her own extraordinary prose style: “That great source

book, the Bible, states, ‘Marriage is honourable in all, and the bed

undefiled. . . ’ In other words, sex is for the marriage relationship

only, but within those bounds, anything goes. Sex is as clean and

pure as eating cottage cheese. ” 12 Morgan’s detailed instructions on

how to eat cottage cheese, the most famous of which involves

Saran Wrap, make clear that female submission is a delicately balanced commingling of resourcefulness and lack of self-respect. Too little resourcefulness or too much self-respect will doom a woman

to failure as a Total Woman. A submissive nature is the miracle for

which religious women pray.

No one has prayed harder, longer, and with less apparent success than Anita Bryant. She has spent a good part of her life on her knees begging Jesus to forgive her for the sin of existing. In Mine

Eyes Have Seen the G lory, an autobiography first published in 1970,

Bryant described herself as an aggressive, stubborn, bad-tempered

child. Her early childhood was spent in brutal poverty. Through

singing she began earning money when still a child. When she was

very young, her parents divorced, then later remarried. When she

was thirteen, her father abandoned her mother, younger sister, and

herself, her parents were again divorced, and shortly thereafter her

father remarried. At thirteen, “[w]hat stands out most of all in my

memory are my feelings of intense ambition and a relentless drive

to succeed at doing well the thing I loved [singing]. ” 13 She blamed

herself, especially her driving ambition, for the loss of her father.

She did not want to marry. In particular, she did not want to

marry Bob Green. He “won” her through a war of attrition. Every

“No” on her part was taken as a “Yes” by him. When, on several

occasions, she told him that she did not want to see him again, he

simply ignored what she said. Once, when she was making a trip

to see a close male friend whom she described to Green as her

fiance, he booked passage on the same plane and went along. He

hounded her.

Having got his hooks into her, especially knowing how to hit on

her rawest nerve—guilt over the abnormality of her ambition, by

definition unwom anly and potentially satanic— Green manipulated

Bryant w ith a cruelty nearly unmatched in modem love stories.

From both of Bryant’s early books, a picture emerges. One sees a

woman hemmed in, desperately trying to please a husband who

manipulates and harasses her and whose control of her life on every