I don’t often think about Marabel Morgan, but when I do, it’s while watching the Super Bowl.
If you’ve heard of Marabel Morgan, you are probably either a religious historian or an evangelical of a certain age. No longer a common name in the American church, Morgan was a superstar in the 1970s.
In 1973, Morgan published The Total Woman. Here’s historian Emily Suzanne Johnson’s description of this wildly popular book, from her own thoughtful and balanced work This is Our Message: Women’s Leadership in the New Christian Right:
In simple language and upbeat tone, Morgan explained how she had transformed a disappointing marriage into one that was both exciting and gratifying. She encouraged women to stop nagging their husbands and to focus instead on changing themselves, to adapt to their husbands’ needs and then watch how their husbands became more attentive to them in return. She also emphasized the sexual aspects of marriage, encouraging wives to spice up their marital sex lives with arousing costumes, erotic games, and other strategies designed to break up boring, even sexless routines. Perhaps most notorious was her suggestion, given during one of her many talk show appearances, that wives try greeting their husbands at the door wearing nothing but Saran Wrap. (11–12)
The Total Woman sold 500,000 copies in its first year and would go on to be the following year’s nonfiction bestseller.
Johnson is not the only recent historian to renew attention to Morgan. In her wildly popular book Jesus and John Wayne, Kristin Kobes Du Mez argues that many women experienced Morgan’s program as empowering: it promised that their own actions could positively transform their marriage.
Many evangelical women in the 70s, Du Mez notes, embraced stay-at-home motherhood either from conviction of its superiority or from lack of highly employable skills. Consequently, the feminism of the 70s did not sound like an empowering solution to a dissatisfying marriage: these women lacked either the desire or the ability to escape from a less-than-ideal home life through a satisfying work life like their husbands could. Morgan’s book encouraged these wives that their role supporting their husbands was meaningful—it was critical to his success—and, done rightly, would lead to wives’ happiness as well.
The catch, as Du Mez notes, was that The Total Woman implied that “men were entitled to lead, to rule, and to have their needs met—all their needs, on their terms” (64). A good husband treated in this way would begin to reciprocate and the marriage would indeed improve. A bad one, however, would not. In that case, Morgan’s program would not serve the true good of either spouse.
But what, you may be wondering, does all this have to do with the Super Bowl? Turns out that historians and Christian wives of the 70s have not been the only people to take an interest in Morgan. The Miami Dolphins did too.
Morgan had preceded publication of her book with Total Woman seminars. Du Mez recounts how in 1972 twelve Dolphins players’ wives attended one of Morgan’s Total Woman classes. The very next year the Dolphins became the first undefeated team in NFL history. They not only won the Super Bowl in 1973, but again in 1974. Morgan didn’t take credit, but other teams decided not to take that risk: Johnson notes that the Dallas Cowboys and the Green Bay Packers subsequently asked for the course for their own players’ wives.
I thought about all this while watching the Kansas City Chiefs play the San Francisco 49ers in the Super Bowl a couple weeks ago. Taylor Swift flew in from Japan, where she was conducting a leg of her wildly popular Eras Tour, to support Chiefs boyfriend Travis Kelce. And the Chiefs won.
Coincidence?
Their victory led me to muse on the comparison between Morgan and Swift. Swift is not exactly a submissive wife. And not just because she and Kelce are not married at this time. Swift’s net worth is estimated at over a billion dollars, and those dollars came not from inheritance but from both writing and performing her own music. Music where she excoriates a number of ex-boyfriends.
Morgan did not necessarily oppose wives holding jobs. After all, she was an author who ran seminars. But she did say it was a risk, because, as Du Mez quoted her, a husband’s “masculinity may be threatened by your paycheck” (61). Such a wife should make it a particular goal to praise her husband’s masculine qualities and make sure he felt like the man of the house. Morgan, like many evangelicals, believed that the Bible taught that wives—whether they worked outside the home or not—should ultimately submit to husbands. Everyone would be happier doing things the way God designed.
Shortly before the Super Bowl, Ross Douthat penned a fascinating op ed noting that the Right criticized the Swift-Kelce romance on superficial grounds—she advocated for Democrats and he for vaccines—while missing the fundamentally conservative nature of their relationship: “A story where the famous pop star abandons her country roots and spends years dating unsuccessfully in a pool of Hollywood creeps and angsty musicians, only to find true love in the arms of a bearded heartland football star who runs a goofy podcast with his equally bearded, happily married, easily inebriated older brother … I mean, this is a Hallmark Christmas movie!”
In his opinion, the modern iterations to their relationship—“she’s richer and more famous than he is and he respects her career”—don’t fundamentally change that. (He attends many of her shows like she attends many of his games.)
It strikes me that Swift and Kelce may be living out the core of Morgan’s message in a more egalitarian way. It’s intuitive that a supportive relationship can lead to professional flourishing—at least compared to the reverse! It’s intuitive that for a couple of good will, supportive gestures by one will inspire supportive gestures by the other. Swift, like Morgan, does not appear to believe that professional success, even wild professional success, negates the importance of extravagantly supporting the man in your life.
But neither Swift nor Kelce seem to agree with Morgan that the responsibility to support your partner lies primarily with the woman. Perhaps, ironically, they respect men more: they don’t seem to think men’s egos as fragile as Morgan does. But neither are Swift’s and Kelce’s professional successes interchangeable. Swift’s musical career very much draws on her experience and persona as a woman. And, well, Kelce plays football. Taylor and Travis seem to value each other’s gender differences without making it about hierarchy.
Turns out that kind of love gives you just as much a chance of winning the Super Bowl.
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