by Susan Faludi
In 1988, Grant issued her conclusion: women’s liberation is really a set of “big lies” that deny women love and happiness. This “Feminist Infection” has given women, according to her book’s full-page ads, “stress, anxiety, depression, compulsion, addiction, exhaustion.” And that’s not all. As her book maintains, “The lie of sexual equality has led to widespread promiscuity among women, detachment from their bodies, and indeed, from their very souls.” Female career achievers are no longer Wonder Women. “Split off from their Madonna aspect,” Grant writes, “without genuine feminine composure, receptivity, or serenity, these women conjure up images of a devouring, consuming monster, a Lady Macbeth completely divorced from her feminine feeling.”
Nonetheless, Grant claims that Being a Woman is “not really about feminism and was never intended as a feminist attack. In fact, there’s a page there where I say what the movement did that was good for women.” Her book’s diagnosis restates the stock backlash chain of causation: feminism leads to professionalism leads to psychosis. Clinicians of the late 19th century similarly linked feminism with neurasthenia and hysteria; the agitation of suffragists, charged a typical late Victorian counselor, had unleashed in the female population “a nervous distress that has become universal.” Grant’s rhetoric, as well, is on loan from past backlash periods. In fact, the 1947 Modern Woman: The Lost Sex invoked Lady Macbeth as its symbol of the liberated madwoman, too.
To her radio listeners and readers, Grant offered a way out of feminist lunacy: “Surrender into being a woman.” To replenish the depleted female spirit and reclaim mental tranquility, she advised, cultivate “passive receptivity and silence.” Also on Grant’s strongly recommended list of restorative feminine regimens: “quiet meditation, long walks in nature, warm baths,” and a “spiritual,” if not technical, virginity. She called this strategy, originally enough, developing a “feminine mystique.” If a single woman follows all these steps, Grant promised, she will win the ultimate trophy of good mental health: a husband.
As Grant was drafting her “steps to becoming a woman,” she recalls, she was also applying them to herself. She worked on developing a “more spiritual” side, began wearing frilly clothes, and learned to “lower my voice.” Nonetheless, despite many long soaks in the tub, Grant was still single when her book hit the stores in the early spring of 1988. This was bad news for her publisher’s marketing department and for Grant herself, who faced a book tour and the inevitable question from the press.
Just then, while lecturing on “relationships” at a Young Presidents Organization conference in Hawaii, Grant met an eligible bachelor on her panel. John Bell, who ran a corrugated-box company based in Indiana, was divorced and in the market for a wife. Grant swung into action and a whirlwind courtship commenced. “It was eight days and nights filled with romance and glamour,” as she was fond of repeating on the promotion circuit later. As soon as they left the island, Grant started angling for a ring. “John, what are your intentions?” she inquired a few weeks after the trip. “He assured me they were honorable.” She pressed some more, and he proposed. She consented at once—and suggested they marry the following Sunday. Bell thought that would be “a little soon.” So they set the date for June.
With Bell signed on, Grant’s publicists raced to alert the media. “Dr. Toni Grant to Wed Industrialist John L. Bell,” a hastily issued press release announced. A promotional party was arranged at a Hollywood restaurant to spread the engagement news. And the fiancée herself appeared in a pouf gown and prim white gloves—which she wore under her five-carat pear-cut solitaire engagement band. Clinging daintily to her intended’s arm, she thrust her left hand out to all who approached and exclaimed, “Have you seen my ring? I’m going to be a June bride!”
The following September, the pendulum swung a little farther in the life of Toni Grant. She issued another press announcement: she was going to quit her radio show to devote her life to “being a woman, to living the book I have written.” Unlike many of the other backlash authors, she had at least decided to take her own advice. She hung up her radio headset, bought a house in Lake Tahoe, and vowed to become the ultimate corporate wife. It was a very feminine retreat—if one overlooks the fact that it was financed by this counselor’s million-dollar career.
But it wasn’t a retreat motivated by feminine concerns. Asked about the decision later, she offers two reasons for quitting: “I felt that media psychology had peaked” and “I wanted to travel and see the world.” And it wasn’t even a retreat. “Creative people,” Grant explains, “in order to renew their creativity, really need to stop for a while. Coco Chanel took a hiatus for seven years, and when she emerged, she created the Chanel look for which she became famous.” Will Grant follow a similar timetable? “Oh, I don’t think I need seven years,” she says. One and a half years into what she calls her “semi-retirement,” Grant has already begun to resurface, making the media circuit (“I’ve done ‘Oprah’; I’ve done ‘Donahue’”), lecturing “both nationally and internationally,” and directing relationship seminars. “I miss my work,” she says. She is already planning a comeback—on an even higher profile platform. “I’m more inclined to see myself doing something on television.”
STAGE TWO: THERAPY FOR THE OVERLY FEMININE WOMAN
On an unusually sunny summer day in San Francisco, sixty women are huddled inside a shuttered half-lit storefront, curled on sagging armchairs and sofas. Yellowed oil paintings hang cockeyed on the walls; dustballs drift like tumbleweed across the floor. In an attempt at cheer, someone has set a rose on the chipped coffee table, but the lone flower only underscores the gloom.
At one time, only Alcoholics Anonymous met in these dreary quarters. But in 1986, a group trying to conquer another “addiction” began convening every Saturday. And soon, fifty, sometimes a hundred, “women who love too much” were reporting regularly to the room. Like thousands of women in identical meetings around the country, they were flocking to contemplate the written word of Robin Norwood, therapist and author of Women Who Love Too Much: When You Keep Wishing and Hoping He’ll Change.
On this particular Saturday in 1987, the group leader rises and locks the front door, giving the knob a few sharp rattles. “We are all here,” she says, “because we share one thing in common. We all have basically miserable relationships.” A list of Norwood’s “Characteristics of Women Who Love Too Much” is passed around, and each woman reads one line aloud. “Number one: You come from a dysfunctional home in which your emotional needs were not met” . . . “Number eleven: You are addicted to men and emotional pain.” . . . “Number fourteen: You have a tendency toward episodes of depression.” Women sip decaffeinated coffee from a carafe on the counter; no stimulants are allowed at these meetings. On one sofa, women take turns cradling a teddy bear.
The group leader reminds attendees of two ground rules for Women Who Love Too Much support groups: no advising each other and no talking about “him.” Remember, she stresses, this is your problem, not his.
Then the “sharing portion” of the meeting begins.
“Hi, my name is Sandra [names have been changed] and I’m a Woman Who Loves Too Much. I got married to a man who became addicted to liquor. . . . What is it about me that attracted a sick, dependent alcoholic?”
“Hi, my name is Nancy and I’m a Woman Who Loves Too Much. I’m involved with a man who is very sexually rejecting. I think I am attracted to him because when he rejects me, that allows me to play the hurt, angry one and close down.”
And so it goes for the next hour and a half, each speaker ticking off her troubles and pointing an accusatory finger at herself. One woman tells the group that she is “tired all the time” and doesn’t know why. Another cries “for no reason,” sometimes twice a day, huddled in the bedroom closet. The confidences are offered up to an unresponsive audience. Since no one is permitted to comment on anyone else’s troubles, authentic “sharing” is absent; the women seem more like children in a sandbox, engaged
in parallel play.
When the personal accounting is done, the women finish as they do every week. They rise from their seats, clasp hands in a circle, and chant the Serenity Prayer, asking God to help improve their relationships with their men. Then the leader unlocks the door and the women wander out, one by one, to face the sun-drenched streets alone.
• • •
FIRST PUBLISHED in 1985, Norwood’s book on female “relationship addiction” became the guiding light to more than 20 million readers. More than a year in the number-one spot on the New York Times bestseller list, Women Who Love Too Much was the number-one 1986 bestseller in mass-market paperbacks nationwide, the top 1986 best-seller on the Times list for advice books and the most requested book at both Waldenbooks’ and B. Dalton’s national chains. A year and a half after the book’s publication, cities from Philadelphia to Atlanta to Los Angeles supported scores of Women Who Love Too Much groups. In 1987, when the New York Daily News ran a small item that simply mentioned a Women Who Love Too Much group, the leaders of the group received several hundred calls by the end of the day.
There plainly were great numbers of women who were locked in destructive relationships and in desperate need of help. And surely there were many women who found comfort in Norwood’s book and the meetings that the text inspired. But the book’s cover promised women more practical help than it delivered; the underlying Women Who Love Too Much message was a quasi-mystical one that advocated a childlike and passive acceptance more than grown-up and active change. To borrow from the wording of the Serenity Prayer, Norwood’s text offered women more serenity to accept things they couldn’t change than courage to change the things they could.
Like so many therapists in the decade, Norwood had an opportunity to observe up close the increasing toll of emotional and sexual violence against women. She puzzled over the evidence of millions of women suffering verbal and physical abuse from husbands and lovers. Yet, in the end, she proposed an explanation that entirely ignored the social dimensions of these developments and turned the problem inward. Women today, she writes, are literally “addicted” to men who hurt them. “Many, many of us have been ‘man junkies,’” she writes, “and, like any other addict, we need to admit the severity of our problem.” While many women, of course, do follow such self-destructive patterns, Norwood’s ahistorical analysis doesn’t help to explain why the problem is so acute now—or why the violence directed at women is rising so dramatically. Nor does it ever turn the tables: her book asks why so many women “choose” abusive men, but not why there are so many abusive men to choose from.
Norwood’s self-help plan, modeled on Alcoholics Anonymous’s twelve-step program, advises women seeking the source of their pain to refrain from looking beyond themselves, a habit she calls “blaming.” Instead of encouraging women to develop stronger egos, get feistier, and challenge men to change, Norwood recommends that her readers “build your willingness to surrender,” steer clear of “passion,” and “let go of self-will.” Only by “getting in touch with your higher power” can a man-addicted woman escape from emotional pain. “Spiritual practice calms you,” she writes. It doesn’t actually help you to change your circumstances or yourself, but it “helps change your perspective from being victimized to being uplifted;” simply by saying, silently and to yourself, “I no longer suffer,” a woman can get relief. Taking the initiative to improve one’s situation is not part of the Norwood plan. Instead she advises “letting go” of “the determination to make things happen.” She explains, “You must accept the fact that you may not know what is best in a given situation.” In fact, the reader should regard self-assertion itself as a “character defect.”
Real personal growth and mental health are also not part of Norwood’s treatment program. There are no cured Women Who Love Too Much, she warns, only “recovered” ones. “Man junkies,” like chronic drinkers, are hooked for life. The women can only work to “control” the illness, which will always linger in their systems. To keep the sickness in check, she prescribes only one thing: regular attendance at Women Who Love Too Much “support groups.”
The meaning of “addiction” itself—“the giving of oneself to a desire”—fits nicely the traditional Victorian vision of feminine passivity. The Women Who Love Too Much treatment strategy trades one form of passivity for another, more glorified one, the giving of oneself to a “higher power.” The students of Women Who Love Too Much don’t learn to direct their lives but only to credit a mysterious force for directing it for them. They learn not to fortify and harness power inside themselves but only to submit to its delivery from on high. In a way, Norwood’s cure is the reverse image of the personal transformation plan of the New Right’s Concerned Women for America’s Beverly LaHaye. LaHaye concealed her drive for self-determination and authority under the cover of “spiritual submission;” Norwood tries to pass off a true form of surrender as an active way of taking charge of one’s life.
Norwood cast herself, too, as a mere spiritual medium rather than an actor in her own life. Even her book, she says, was written by a “higher power,” not her. “I feel it was really guided from the beginning,” she says later. Even the title was whispered in her ear while she was driving on the highway. In defining herself in these terms, as a passive recipient of divine wisdom, she recalls the Victorian Verena Tarrant in Henry James’s The Bostonians, the childlike heroine who explained away her talent for public speaking by saying, “Oh, it isn’t me, you know; it’s something outside! . . . I suppose it is a power.”
In the late ’80s, with the rise of “codependency,” the addiction or disease model of female neurosis quickly spread to other forms of therapy. It helped to double membership in self-help counseling organizations, spawning an endless variety of “support” groups for codependents from Women for Sobriety to Women with Multiple Addictions. There was even a group for Formerly Employed Mothers at Loose Ends, or FEMALE. Apparently now even a poor job market was seen as an individual woman’s personal psychosis. The professional medical journals supported this illness metaphor, defining codependency as “a disease of relationships” in which the individual “selects a life partner who is chemically dependent or who is otherwise dysfunctional.” (The individual they had in mind was almost always a woman; the codependency market was about 85 percent female. Codependency was even defined in female terms—its original model the alcoholic’s wife.)
The leaders of the codependency movement exhorted their female patients to picture and even treat themselves like little girls. One self-help strategy that these gurus widely recommended to their patients: buy a doll to cuddle, and carry it at all times. “Reclaiming the inner child” was the movement’s mantra, and codependent initiates were encouraged to call themselves “adult children.” While this concept may well have begun with good intentions—to revisit the crimes of one’s abused and victimized childhood in order to transcend them—too often the excavation of the buried injured child became the all-consuming central drama, and the effort to reject victim status and move toward maturity was largely sidelined. In so many codependency groups, women waded into the quagmires of childhood to “rescue” their hurting little-girl selves—only to sink deeper in the mud.
Despite their infantilizing methods and their distaste for “self-will,” codependency’s creators and practitioners claimed to have a feminist outlook. The codirectors of the National Self-Help Clearinghouse declared, “The codependency movement may well be the psychological arm of the women’s movement.” Norwood herself compared her Women Who Love Too Much groups to the consciousness-raising sessions of the early ’70s.
But by sequestering women in dimly lit, locked, and caffeine-free meeting rooms and instructing them to swap adult assertiveness for an unpassionate, passive, and puerile tranquility, Norwood’s regimen comes closer in spirit to the late-19th-century “rest cure” than it does to early-’70s feminist rap sessions. The hundred-year-old cure, which also involved confinement in darkened rooms
, diets of unstimulating foods, and a denial of self-expression, succeeded more often in accelerating the deterioration of its patients than in curing them. As feminist writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman observed most famously of her 1887 rest cure, she had tried to follow the doctor’s orders to put down her pen and “live as domestic a life as possible”—and “came perilously near to losing my mind.”
The ’70s consciousness-raising movement, by contrast, whatever its foibles, at least called on its participants to act, speak out, and grow up. Its meetings were envisioned as sort of weekly pit stops in a social revolution. As Ms.’s 1972 guide to consciousness-raising described it, the groups were intended to provide emotional refueling, companionship, and confidence building, “when we come back battered or ridiculed from trying to change our worlds.” The sessions were free—so that women from all incomes could join—and leaderless—so that no one would become the authority figure and each member would be encouraged to think and speak for herself.
The women who flocked to the Women Who Love Too Much groups in the ’80s were battered and ridiculed, too, from trying to change their world. But if they were hoping to pursue such social change further, they weren’t likely to find much encouragement at these counseling sessions. Furthermore, Norwood had originally proposed that the groups be free and leaderless; by the late ’80s some enterprising therapists descended on the movement, having discovered a tempting way to double-dip. Soon, in many of the Women Who Love Too Much groups, the counselors were running the show—and not pro bono.
At the regular Friday session of the Women Who Love Too Much group at the California Family Therapy Institute, the women are seated in a circle, the blinds drawn, the lights low. They have paid the group’s therapist leader $30 to $40 a week—on top of her $80 fee for individual counseling.