Fascinating Womanhood & The Total Woman
Two bestselling marriage manuals, Helen Andelin's self-published Fascinating Womanhood (1963) and Marabel Morgan's The Total Woman (1973), taught wives that admiring and deferring to their husbands was the path to a happy marriage, and built class networks that reached hundreds of thousands of women.
View in the interactive map →Helen Andelin (1920–2009), a Latter-day Saint homemaker, began teaching women's marriage classes in the early 1960s and self-published Fascinating Womanhood in 1963. The book was derived from a set of booklets issued in the 1920s and 1930s by the Psychological Press. It promised wives a marriage that would be 'a lifelong love affair' if they accepted their husbands' leadership and cultivated their own femininity. By 1975, Time reported, the movement had 11,000 teachers, and more than 300,000 women had taken Fascinating Womanhood classes. Marabel Morgan's The Total Woman, published by the evangelical house Revell in 1973, carried the same promise into evangelical Christianity. It taught that 'a total woman caters to her man's special quirks, whether it be in salads, sex, or sports.' It sold more than 500,000 copies in its first year, making it the best-selling nonfiction book in the United States in 1974, and more than ten million copies overall. Historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez places both books in a longer lineage. She reports that Morgan had taken a class based on Andelin's book, and argues that both repackaged older New Thought advice (think positively, be attractive, and good things will follow) with Bible verses added, while carrying forward the holiness promise that surrender brings happiness. The books arrived as second-wave feminism went mainstream, and feminist critics largely regarded them as harmful to women. Du Mez argues that their central promise, that a wife's submission would be rewarded with a happy marriage, runs through the evangelical marriage and gender literature that followed.
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Connections to Fascinating Womanhood & The Total Woman
- Patriarchy & Gender: Before 1940 influenced (1963) — Fascinating Womanhood (1963) was derived from booklets published in the 1920s and 1930s by the Psychological Press. Du Mez argues that Andelin's book and Marabel Morgan's The Total Woman (1973), whose author had taken a class based on Andelin's book, added Bible verses to that New Thought advice and carried forward Hannah Whitall Smith's holiness promise that surrender brings happiness.
Sources
- Fascinating Womanhood — Wikipedia (2026)
- The Sexes: Total Fascination — Time (1975)
- The Total Woman — Wikipedia (2026)
- Helen Andelin and the Fascinating Womanhood Movement — Julie Debra Neuffer (2014)
- Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made — Kristin Kobes Du Mez (2026)