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. 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. “She must feel loved and cherished by her husband. “ne need is fundamental,” Andelin writes. 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. 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.
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She followed the pamphlet’s advice, and her marriage experienced a miraculous recovery.Īs 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.
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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. God offered no reply, so she turned to history. A devout Mormon and mother of eight, she turned to prayer. Her husband didn’t seem interested in her anymore. Fascinating Womanhood would become the anti-feminist manifesto that galvanized a decades-long “family values” movement for conservative women.Ī few years earlier, Andelin, a Central California housewife, had been experiencing a malaise common to 20-year marriages.
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.
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