Remembering ‘The Total Woman’ Nearly Fifty Years Later

A best-selling book that taught women to submit to their husband and greet him in sexy costumes served as one formula for those rejecting the women’s movement

Morgan on the cover of TIME, featured on one of her subsequent books.

Nearly fifty years ago, in the wake of the Equal Rights Amendment’s passage through Congress, a book published offering an alternative model of womanhood. The Total Woman, authored by Marabel Morgan, a former beauty queen and Campus Crusade for Christ counselor, recommended women dedicate (or rededicate) themselves to wifely submission, sexual availability to their husbands, and organizing their homemaking days to maximize their husbands’ pleasure.

While feminists pushed for reproductive freedom, professional and educational opportunity, and equal rights under the law, Morgan found success sponsoring Total Woman seminars. Within a year of publication, The Total Woman was a best-seller — the best-selling nonfiction book in the U.S. in 1974 — selling roughly four million copies.

In many ways, Morgan followed the pattern through which many evangelical leaders have found success: she focused on home and hearth issues, built a following via in-person gatherings, then published a book that encapsulated her take on scripture and leaned on stories…