My sil is reading this in her book club... I just read a bit online. Has anyone read it and want to give me a review/explanation of it?

Basically it seems to teach women how to be manipulative and whiney to get their own way with men. I find that revolting myself. I'd rather get my own way by making slaves of men. ;)

word, sister! word.

That book screwed up a whole lot of girls at our church school.

Advice like - never do well in subjects like mathematics - you can only do better than a male in feminine subjects and similar nonsense.

If you don't follow the advice in the book and become a total mindless molly, you will never have a happy relationship. The book states that men can never be happy with a woman who is not a mindless molly. Well, real men anyway.

I can't belive that book is still in print. My mother re-reads it every now and then, cycling through ridiculous giggling vapors, before sinking further into depression and upping her meds.

It looks like it is still going strong...

"Fascinating Womanhood is the title of a book written by Helen Andelin in 1963. The book recently went into its sixth edition, published by Random House[3]. The book has sold over 2,000,000 copies and is credited with starting a grassroots movement among women."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascinating_Womanhood

Oh my gosh! I never read it but someone I served with in a RS Presidency was her daughter in law. She is now divorced. That husband of hers (the authors son) was lazy and didn't have a clue how to support his family.

A-Fascinating Womanhood
B-Mormon Doctrine
C-Miracle of Forgiveness

Must have literature.

Apparently, the book is also not Helen Andelin's own creative work:

"She based the classes and her book on a set of pamphlets that were published in the 1920s and 1930s, 'The Secrets of Fascinating Womanhood.'"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Andelin

Since Andelin was born in 1920, it's unlikely she was the original author the the pamphlets. No authorship of the original pamphlets is given. She followed Joe Smith's model...

I read this book in the early 70's and it almost ruined my life. It teaches women to be manipulative and stay childlike. What it really does is keep them subservient and in my case angry about it all because deep down I knew it wasn't right.

I was so young and married to a young man still believing the role models of the 40's and 50's that kept women down. I felt caught between the women's movement and making marriage and home life work. The day I looked at that book and said this is bullshit was the day I began to take my life back.

I'm sad that the damn thing is still being read! I told my granddaughters about it and sent them this great article:

http://bitchmagazine.org/article/forever-your-girl

P.S. That young man did grow up and loves that I did too.

I read this article... It was great! I also read many of the comments and I couldn't believe how many Mormon women think the can be both feminists and Mormons. It's ridiculous!

Interesting, but I really have trouble seeing the character in Almost Famous as a manic pixie dream girl... Her life kind of technically sucked and I didn't see Natalie Portman's character like that either.

But Fascinating Womanhood sounds really gross and hideous. I really am not sure if Mormonism and feminism go together either.

I knew Helen Andelin's nephew at BYU. Helen's husband wrote a book for men called "Man of Velvet and Steel". The nephew told me the Andelins were getting a divorce back then in the late 70s. So much for her marital advice!

They may have been having marital problems but according to the Wiki article listed above, they stayed married until his death in 1999. No divorce.

No, but I read The Fascinating Girl....just as yucky. For the unmarried younger gals....and I do mean gals. I never let my girls read either one.

Hated the book even as a TBM and to be honest LOTs of Mormon girls hated it too. Just like there were some of us who knew Saturdays's Warrier was worse than kitsch.

I cannot believe it is still being read-- and not in an ironic way. Only in the great Morg can a piece of trash like that live on.

Oh, yeah.

Fascinating Womanhood and Man of Steel and Velvet read on tapes by a Dr. Watson, a self-proclaimed marriage guru in the early 70's in Portland, Oregon. The sets sold for $500 each in a suitcase. He accompanies his marriage make-over with a seminar in Portland, Oregon and interviewed me to be the manager of his family-oriented movie theater.

Because I was an emotional mess and quite the sucker, I bought the tapes and attended the seminar. Watson was quite paranoid with death threats and bodyguards, lots of secrecy, etc. He had a cult thing going on with the principles and the following is an accurate story of what I personally witnessed in his seminar.

In addition to learning important skills like purchasing hair ribbons with lac edges, Watson informed the class of women that they must lick their husbands "everywhere." His own wife then rushed out of the room leaving behind a great silence.

I was singled out as a bad example for standing in a masculine stance (legs apart) while wearing jeans (instead of a skirt) and sticking my thumbs in my pants thereby causing all my fingers to point to my vag. It was said to be unsexy.

Although later the guy who was second in command--and married--hit on me.

For those interested in content, the most famous of the Helen Andelin tips for women was to wait for your husband to come home and then swing the door open wearing only saran wrap.

Seriously

Anagrammy

Oh my gosh. That book was at the height of its popularity when I graduated from BYU in the mid-80s. My best freind and I sat at our desks at work as an ex-Mo freind read it aloud and we just laughed and laughed at it.

That year (I was only 25), a married freind advised me to read it because she felt it would help me hook a husband.

I didn't marry for another 7 years. Maybe it was because I didn't read the book . . .

Rates right up there with The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands. Some woman gave me a copy when my husband and I are not only put in that marriage class that they assign couples to take instead of Gospel Doctrine, but they had us teach it. Certain things make my skin crawl and this is one of them.

My grandma gave it to me to read when i was around 13 because she said it would help me be more like my aunt. I really looked up to my aunt and thought she was beautiful and sweet and good. I read the book and felt very depressed because I knew I could never be the woman in that book.

NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!

I had forgotten all about that baloney. I knew a girl at BYU who lived by it. She used to practice batting her eyelashes in front of a mirror for hours.

I thought all you Fascinating Womanhood "fans" might enjoy an old pop culture reference. A subplot of the film Fried Green Tomatoes has one of the main characters (played by Kathy Bates) trying to reignite her moribund marriage using FW principles. In one scene she greets hubby at the door all decked out in high heels and saran wrap, but he just pushes past her to grab a beer from the fridge and is soon glued to the ballgame on TV.

The movie's 20+ years old, but it has aged well, and features a number of great actresses, with a main theme of women's strength and friendship. Quite the antidote to FW! ;-)

I read that and still have a copy somewhere. I thought it was great as a LDS convert. However, it's just NOT me. I am a rebel. My husband would sing the song "she's just a devil woman..." about me because I was "mean". Hmmmm.....he is a TBM and I am second class. He used to make fun of me and my talents that I finally stopped doing any thing I was talented at. So....I am guessing that he should have read the other book about velvet???

I have a copy of this book and it came in useful when I first started working with my therapist. It helped her understand where some of the f'd up gender dynamics in my family come from. She hadn't really believed me about how insidious TSCC was in this regard until I read her a couple of choice passages.

That wretched book totally screwed up my dating relationships for years. I bought it at a church rummage sale, when I was very young and unsure of myself. I took it for gospel truth, and it messed me up for a decade and a half. Stupid cult.

P.S. I'll have to watch "Fried Green Tomatoes" again. Great movie!

P.P.S. Thanks for sharing your story, Anagrammy. From reading the book I do remember the importance of hair ribbons.

I read it somewhere around 35 years ago when we used it as a manual for our Relief Society class. LOL I think that says it all.

I remember RS being the place I first heard about that book. it was highly recommended.

I borrowed it from a friend. I wanted to barf. No way was I going to humiliate myself like that.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/776729650/fascinating-womanhood-documentary

Someone named Erin Fox has raised money to make a documentary about it. All I know about it is what's on this website.

I got married in the late 60s when this book was very popular among a lot of Mormon women. My husband's aunt highly recommended it to me. Even as a young wife, I was appalled. A decade or so later, there was another book along the same lines written by an Evangelical Christian. It was called The Total Woman. Its added twist, as I recall, was to give your husband lots of sex. It was nicknamed "The Totaled Woman."

I read both of those. The latter I sarcastically reviewed for a college class in feminism.

I think that one of the latest books along those lines was one by Dr. Laura, written several years ago. By that time I was done with the genre, so I don't know what Dr. Laura said, but my recollection of what I heard about it was that it was another "give-your-husband-lots-of-sex" books. I could be wrong about that, though. You could probably find all of these books along with customer reviews on Amazon.

What for? Except to ridicule it?

So...does the saran wrap go over or under the garments??

anagrammy wrote (hilariously):

"I was singled out as a bad example for standing in a masculine stance (legs apart) while wearing jeans (instead of a skirt) and sticking my thumbs in my pants thereby causing all my fingers to point to my vag. It was said to be unsexy.

Although later the guy who was second in command--and married--hit on me."

HMMM---sounds like I may have to to try this. Must be the finger-pointing to the vag that did the trick!

Instead of learning how to act like helpless little girls for the rest of their lives, and how to flatter men so they can manipulate them. . . . perhaps they could be encouraged by Betty Friedan to live not only as a mother or a wife, but as an individual with their own interests and important work and contributions to make in the world.

Any man who is so insecure that he would be intimidated by capable women or WANTS a woman who looks and acts like a little girl . . . is no man at all.

It was handed down to me by an older sister, although I'm not quite sure WHY. My mother didn't like the book, and none of my sisters acted like that.

And although I sort of thought I should try to follow the advice in the book, it just wasn't my style. Maybe that's why I married late . . . to a guy who appreciated smart women, and actually wanted a wife who he could have a conversation with.

Women who read that book may also enjoy Bic For Her; serious product (pink and purple ballpoint pens, from what I can tell), hilariously reviewed by real Amazon.uk reviewers:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/product-reviews/B004FTGJUW

Example:
This pen is great. I bought it for all my female friends and relatives. It enabled them, finally, to write things (although they may not yet know to do so on paper; but you can only expect so much, really). I thought they were just a bit slow.

My mother, a hard-working woman who raised twelve kids single-handedly whilst doing all the ironing (as nature intended), was furtively abashed by her illiteracy. Long would she gaze upon her husband and sons' scrawlings and would dedicate five minutes a day (which she really should have spent making sandwiches) to pray that one day she would be granted the ability to create such scribbles of her own. She's still a little slow on the uptake, but this product has definitely helped start the ball rolling. We tried to give her men's pens but she used to rip the cartridges out and drink the ink. Typical woman.

Anyway, it's good that BIC are finally doing something to aid the plight of women. Hopefully a range of 'for her' paperclips is on the horizon - my wife has an awful time keeping her recipes together.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/27/2012 10:03PM by tubbs.