When I was a teenager, domestic science was what you learnt if you were too dim even to flip burgers. Now, it seems, we have been missing out on one of the greatest pleasures known to womankind. According to last week’s Good Housekeeping survey, 40% of women under 35 find housework more pleasurable than sex. With upmarket designer companies like Cath Kidston making even the humble ironing board a thing of beauty, it’s easy to see how women are being seduced back into discovering their inner housewife, but now
Along comes Dr. Laura Schlessinger’s provocative new book, Woman Power, a companion to The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands, published by Harpercollins next month to add her voice to those who believe women need to cultivate the domestic arts.

Dr. Laura (her medical degree is debateable) is billed as “America’s favourite on-air counsellor”, and with sales of 5 million and a radio audience of 17 million, her thesis that “men are simple creatures” for whom women need to provide such basic necessities as respect, gratitude, food, sex and space has clearly struck a chord despite the deplorably winsome style in which it is couched. Predictably, she blames marital unhappiness on feminism, and “having it all”, which places husbands at the bottom of a woman’s list of priorities. Her message – that if women want to have a better marriage and a better love-life, they have to stop nagging and look after their husbands properly. She claims “if you buy the book, read it, and do what it suggests – you will be happier within forty-eight hours.” Does it work?

Day One as a surrendered wife begins (luckily) during the holidays. I am beaten down by eight weeks of having my children at home, and at the tail-end of nine months of cancer treatment which has had my poor husband getting home from a twelve-hour day in the office and cooking supper for us. He is at present the major breadwinner, but I also work long hours as a novelist and journalist on top of looking after our two children. My “personal grooming” has plummeted. Reading The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands has been a most uncomfortable experience, even if it makes my feminist blood boil. Have I been neglecting him? Will he suddenly start behaving like a newly-wed man if I become Nicole Kidman in The Stepford Wives?

My first act as a surrendered wife is rather nice. I park my kids with another frazzled mum and get my hair done. “Always look your best for him”, Dr. Laura advises. I am strained, stained, rumpled and frizzed. My husband however always arrives home looking as elegant as only a man who wears posh suits and works in an air conditioned office can be. Hmm.
“ Is it a special occasion?” asks my hairdresser.
“ No,” I say. “I just want to look nice for my husband.”
Heads turn and jaws drop all round the salon. This is North London, where even to be married to your partner is a dubious political statement. Only one ancient Irishwoman, who is having pink tints put into her hair, says approvingly, “That’s what I do too, dear.” My heart sinks. Is this to be my future role model?
Back at home, there is the usual chaos of work and childcare competing for my attention, plus stomach-clenching panic as I start to go through the children’s kit for the start of a new school year. My son has outgrown his trainers; my daughter is in meltdown because her new school skirt is too long.
“ I might as well wear a burqua!” she sobs, bursting into my study.
“ Can’t you just wear trousers?” I ask. I live in trousers, but according to Dr. Laura I should change into “a sexy outfit to flounce around in” by supper-time. I have no sexy outfits: as Helen Simpson put it in a short story, I’m “a vanity-free zone”. I rush out to the dry-cleaners to have my daughter’s pleated school skirt taken up six inches, then on to buy my son new trainers. Both Camden Road and Kentish Town Road are an inferno of road-works and traffic wardens. My new hair is soon soaked with stress. I dash off a book review for the Times and try to finish another novel for this year’s Whitbread Novel Prize.
“Romancing a spouse is supposed to be a two-way street”, Dr. Laura says. “That a wife cleans the house or drives the kids all over town or argues a big court case is all wonderful, but it’s not giving of herself to her husband.” According to her, you can pay someone else to do this stuff. Really? It’s true, I do pay someone to clean my house, but there’s nobody else to do the other stuff I squeeze around my working life, like getting my kids’ verrucas cut out at a chiropodist, filling the fridge with food or taking my mother out for her birthday. Is this being “controlling”? It’s horribly easy to make a woman feel guilty about being jack of all trades and master of none, and that’s exactly what the author of Woman Power does.

I begin the hour-long battle to get the children to bed. I haven’t even peeled the potatoes or changed my shirt by the time my husband gets come. He quietly puts supper on while my son, with fierce Oedipal jealousy, locks his arms round me and refuses to let me go.
“I’m cooking tonight,” I say when I at last get to the kitchen.
“ But I find it relaxing,” he replies. It’s true, he does. Then, “You’ve had your hair done!” he says. I feel oddly pleased.

I forget to tell him that I’m proud of him, but I think he knows I think he’s the ant’s pants, the bee’s knees and the cat’s pyjamas. We both fall exhausted into bed.

Day Two.
With another twenty-four hours to go, and following the advice in Woman Power, I send my husband a bunch of flowers at work. I can’t quite bring myself to attach an emotional letter apologising for “not realising that he needed me more”. He often sends me flowers, but (I realise guiltily) I never do it back.
“ Is something wrong?” he asks, ringing my mobile.
“ No, I just thought it a nice thing to do.”
“ Well, it’s very nice of you,” he says dubiously.
This time, I start putting the children to bed an hour earlier. I peel the potatoes and get some fish marinated. Then, before I can get it into the oven, all hell breaks loose. Someone I work for rings me up, and we try to have a professional conversation with children shrieking on the other side of the door.
“ What’s going on in there?” my employer asks, as my son playfully tries to strangle himself with the telephone cord in a bid for my attention. “It sounds like World War Three.”
“ It’s just normal family life,” I say, frantically mouthing Go Away.
Following Dr. Laura’s book, I have a bath and change before my husband gets home. “You’re really starting to get better, aren’t you?” he says. I notice that his suit is stained from the bouquet I sent him. More dry-cleaning to take in.
We chat over a candle-lit supper, but in the middle of it all one of my close women friends who lives in America calls. She is going through a horrible divorce, so I can’t wind up the conversation quickly. When she finishes, another friend calls. I feel like the married version of Bridget Jones. It does strike me that my poor husband, now watching the news on TV, is being neglected during all this, but then so many of my women friends seem to be in a state of crisis. Almost all of them do one thing which Dr. Laura utterly condemns, which is to complain about their partners. I don’t like this any more than she does when the complaints are petty, but what about my friend whose husband has just dumped her? She was a saint to him, no question, and he’s run off with a younger woman.

I’m still not doing very well as a Surrendered Wife. “Men shift emotional gears more easily…and that’s what gives WOMEN the POWER!” says Dr. Laura. In order to find peace and inner growth, I am supposed to fill in a questionnaire about “how he knows you love him” to help me assess myself and my marriage. I rather enjoy this kind of thing, but know perfectly well my husband, like most Englishmen, would rather have his teeth pulled than do anything similar. So I ask things like “Do you think I’m a nag?” “Only when I’m driving and you try to get me to break the law by going down a one-way street,” he says kindly. It’s hopeless. He refuses to make any sweeping condemnation of the way women behave towards men, but is getting rather bewildered by my meekly agreeing with anything he says. I ask him whether he has any complaints about our marriage, and he can’t think of any except for the vague fantasy (which we both share) of one day leaving our children with his mother in order to have a week-end away together.

Finally, I slip into something lacy and frilly, and wait for him to come to bed. My husband hasn’t seen this night-dress for years, and I’m wondering whether it will “fill him with energy and joy.” To my mortification, he looks aghast.

“Oh God,” he says. “You’re pregnant again, aren’t you? You’ve done a Cherie Blair.”

At this point, I confess all. The relief on his face makes him suddenly look ten years younger. He roars with laughter and says, “But I married you for being exactly who you are. I don’t want some stupid woman who agrees with me all the time. I’ll tell you what, though: you can be a surrendered wife today, but only if I can be a surrendered husband tomorrow.”

The Sunday Times, September 2004