How can women find happiness in marriage? According to "feminist" author Laura Doyle all we a wife needs do is "surrender" to her husband's every wish. In her book The surrendered wife: A practical guide to finding intimacy, passion and peace with your man, Doyle tells us that, "A surrendered wife always says yes, and is always available for sex". A "surrendered wife" knows how to respect her husband — she does not challenge him, even if he is wrong. "In some cases", writes Doyle, "not responding may require putting large quantities of duct tape over your mouth. Do whatever it takes."
According to Doyle, this is not submission but empowerment. "What has feminism done for the family woman?", she asks.
"It seems to me", she continues, "that [feminists] have simply empowered women to get divorced, become single mothers, get married again, and leave the next man, too, because he's no good. We're empowered to sue for child maintenance, and then live struggling and lonely for the rest of our lives".
So, rather than fighting for more economic and civil independence, women should realise that their problems actually lie in their expectations of individual men. "Don't try and control him", she urges. Rather, surrender to the bliss of looking after the every desire of poor, downtrodden, misunderstood hubby. This implies that the problem for women is a lack of "control" over their husband, rather than women's lack of control over their own lives.
Doyle paints a dangerously deceptive picture of divorce as the act of "selfish" women who go on to build comfortable lives at the expense of men. This has been unchallenged in the corporate media reviews of the book, and is consistent with the ideological and practical war being waged and funded by the Howard government against the right of women to escape bad personal relationships with male partners.
This war has included the funding of anti-feminist "men's right's organisations" like the Lone Father Association; reductions in maintenance payments for divorced mothers; restrictions on domestic violence orders; the cutting of the sole parents' pension once the youngest child reaches school age; attempts to reintroduce the notion of "fault" into divorce proceedings (changing the way in which property is divided.
But women already suffer the greatest financial hardship after divorce, because of restricted access to secure employment.
Doyle does concede that there are some men whom women should not "surrender" to — alcoholics, those who commit "adultery" or men who are violent. She does not mention that economic and emotional dependence are the reasons many women remain in domestic violence situations.
The corporate media in Australia has mocked the extremes of Doyle's theory. But amidst the undue hype is a real attempt to legitimise the ideology behind it.
Writing in the 3 March Good Weekend magazine, Maureen Freely, for example, argued that Doyle should keep her "insulting grains of truth to herself". Through mocking the most overtly anti-women claptrap, Freely postures as challenging Doyle's theory, but at the same time argues that there is truth in her ideas.
However, there is not a grain of truth in Doyle's book, or any other version of the increasingly common "back to the pre-feminist 1950s" propaganda. This is why most women will not accept this sort of rubbish, and those like Freely and her ilk in the corporate media have to assume a feminist posture to package their support for the assumptions of "feminine denial" underlying it.
The corporate media don't give the facts that destroy Doyle's theory because their owners benefit from the continued oppression of women. They benefit when governments cut funding from social services such as childcare, aged care and women's shelters to increase corporate handouts.
This requires convincing women to accept heir traditional role as unpaid domestics within what Prime Minister John Howard described as "the best social welfare unit society has devised" — the nuclear family.
This is why we are are constantly bombarded with their ideological barrage. Every "new" theory, TV soap, Hollywood movie and commercial pop song tells us that women can only be happy and whole with a man and a family. We are told that it is women's responsibility to uphold the family (even at the expense of their safety, sanity and happiness).
As Doyle's book hits the shelves and the media hype fades away, we can be sure that it won't be the final addition to the anti-woman, anti-feminism arsenal. We can expect more of her ilk to pump out volumes of this sort of trash, because they know as well as we do how hard it will be to push us back to the '50s.
If ever we needed another reminder of the urgency of building a fighting women's liberation movement independent of the system and all its lackeys, this is it.
BY KATHY NEWNAM
[Kathy Newnam is the Adelaide branch secretary of the Democratic Socialist Party]