Surrendered Wives.

• Author: Clinton, Kate
• Position: Brief Article

On a long car trip, I heard Laura Doyle, self-identified "feminist and former shrew," interviewed on several radio call-in shows. In a very warm, winning voice, she opined that women have to stop controlling, criticizing, and interrupting their husbands. She believes women have to apologize for being disrespectful to their men. They have to be ready to say, "Whatever you think. ..." And--this is the one all the radio guys loved--women must never refuse sex with their husbands, even if they're not in the mood.

Doyle is the author of The Surrendered Wife: A Practical Guide for Finding Intimacy, Passion, and Peace with Your Man. This noncredentialed suggester describes how she almost lost her relationship with her husband because she was constantly nagging him. When she gave up her nitpicking ways, things changed. She is now finally in the relationship she always dreamed about.

In her book and in the women's "Surrender Circles" that have sprung up faster than Promisekeeper stadium rallies, Doyle suggests that a woman's tasks are to take care of herself first, to overcome her desire to have more power, and to abandon the myth of equality. You'll have to yank my copy of Ms. from my cold dead hands, but I say that the second and third cancel out the first.

The D.C. Bush women are all playing their surrendered-wife roles very well. New Jersey's former racial profiler Christine Todd Whitman was forced to eat her pro-enviro words and swallow her water, with acceptable arsenic levels. Condi Rice's solution to global warming is a cold war, and so she defers to the Secretary of Defense ("Whatever you think, Rummy"). And I must have missed a page 6 Post gossip item when I was ducking Mir chunks, but did Maureen Dowd get drunk at some party, come on to Hillary Clinton, and get rebuffed, and as a result has to do every other New York Times column hating Hillary, that most unsurrendered of wives?

I feel like I've returned to The Stepford Wives, that 1975 Ira Levin classic. In it, a wife new to Stepford starts a consciousness-raising group because she is appalled that all the women in her town wear flowery print dresses and seem satisfied with their domestic servitude. She...