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She was more than a teacher, she was a
writer, an organizer and a dynamic motivator, willing to handle any
size job she felt important. When I met Julie I naturally expected the
best and was not disappointed. She was extremely diligent in collecting
material of all sorts from my records, in interviewing me and has given
a great deal of her time and energy in putting it all together into a
historical document. Since most of you are Fascinating Womanhood
followers, I thought you would be interested in reading the following
interview regarding her research project.
The Fascinating
Womanhood Movement
Host:
Please tell us about your background as a Research
Historian, the University you are affiliated with and the line of
research you have been working on.
Julie:
I am a graduate student in the final stages of my doctoral program in
American history at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington.
I did my undergraduate work at Pacific Lutheran University, earning a
dual degree in American history and religion, and a Master’s degree
in Religious Studies from Gonzaga University in Spokane. I have always
been intrigued by the study of religion and history together. In my
mind, one can’t fully understand religion without history, or history
without religion. I have always been better at history than theology,
so when it came to the decision about where to do my graduate work, I
decided on a state university rather than divinity school. WSU has been
very good to allow me to combine my interest in the study of religion
with my program in American history.
Host:
What prompted you to choose the Fascinating Womanhood Movement as the
study for your doctorate? Actually, my mother taught FW back when
I was in grade school. Sometimes when she was getting ready for classes
she would assign me the job of stapling together class materials. She
would practice being feminine around the house, and we were all quite
impressed with the transformation she made once she read Mrs.
Andelin’s book and began believing she was a truly fascinating
person. She seemed genuinely happy to have found her place in life
helping other women with their marriages. I read FW many times
as a kid, along with Fascinating Girl, and all of the other
books my mother used for teaching.
At some
point, she stopped teaching and I went away to college, and then on to
have a family of my own. I kept reading. Over time, I rejected most of
FW as being old-fashioned, sexist, and even silly. In fact, I pretty
much forgot about it altogether, though I was always drawn to the
question of women’s experience in my academic studies.
Years
later, after I had begun my doctoral work the subject of Fascinating
Womanhood came up in a lecture in one of my American history
classes. My instructor, who later became my mentor, pointed out that
millions of women had read FW and followed Andelin’s
philosophy in response to Betty Friedan’s feminist critique in her
ground breaking book, The Feminine Mystique.
I
couldn’t believe I was hearing this in a college class. For whatever
reasons, I had assumed FW was a local phenomenon – kind of a fad that
had lived and died in and around the small town where I grew up. I had
never thought about it before in the larger context of American
cultural history and certainly not in relationship to the feminist
movement. It dawned on me that if millions of women had read
this book, and tens of thousands had taken the kinds of classes my
mother had taught thirty years earlier, and a very
distinguished American historian was talking about it in a huge lecture
hall, then Fascinating Womanhood was something much bigger and more
enduring in the history of this country than I had ever imagined.
I went up
to the professor after class and said, “…you won’t believe this,
but my mom used to teach those classes back in the 70’s. I
was raised that way.” A few days later, he brought me an
early edition of Fascinating Womanhood and said, “maybe you
can do something with this.” I knew then that I had what every
serious historian dreams of – the desire to write good, solid history
along with first-hand knowledge about an incredible subject that had
been overlooked by everyone else. I crossed my fingers and hoped that
Mrs. Andelin would agree to work with me.
Host:
Have you interviewed Mrs. Andelin personally on the
subject of Fascinating Womanhood? How did you actually go about it? Did
you find a lot of material to review? Did it supply answers to your
questions?
Julie: Yes,
I did interview Mrs. Andelin personally. In fact, I was able to spend
two weeks with her at her family farm in Missouri. She not only housed
and fed me, but also generously gave me access to all of her personal
files, papers, and photographs. We were able to record over twenty-one
hours of taped conversations about her life, the FW movement, and what
she is doing now. Mrs. Andelin is a passionate woman with incredible
stamina and an urgent sense of mission. She is also extremely
organized. We stayed up past midnight on many occasions recording our
conversations. No matter how late we talked into the night, she was up
at daybreak the next morning keeping right on track with her office
work. I was also able to interview three of her eight children while I
was in Missouri, which is remarkable.
The amount
of information that I gathered was staggering. I was under intense
pressure to extract the data from the documents quickly before the
entire collection was donated to another research university. I worked
non-stop while I was in Missouri, and then day and night for several
months on papers that I had brought home with me. Nothing could have
prepared me for the kind of anxiety I experienced at this point in the
project. I worried incessantly about the time constraints, and became
incredibly discouraged. I even got sick. I am grateful that I had a
wonderful mentor who guided me through this phase of research. He
taught me to step back and let history take its natural course. I have
an assistant, now who has been a great help in transcribing the tapes
and analyzing the demographic data that I gleaned from the records
while I had access to them.
Mrs.
Andelin continues to send me new material on a regular basis, and is
extremely conscientious about keeping me updated with current
correspondence amongst her devotees. It is a wonderful project. I have
been incredibly lucky. We are still working hard.
Host:
Do you find that Fascinating Womanhood is truly a
movement, rather than just Helen Andelin and her followers? Perhaps you
can explain a little about what “a movement” means.
Julie:
Any kind of social movement is larger than the single person who
articulates it. Otherwise, the original intentions of the leader
wouldn’t endure beyond that person’s particular time in the
limelight. What makes any message resonate beyond the excitement of the
immediate moment is that it is communicated in the right place, at the
right time, by people who will listen when they are ready to hear it.
Otherwise, it isn’t a message at all, but a fad that will simply die
out when it is no longer relevant.
When Helen
Andelin wrote Fascinating Womanhood in 1963 she had the right
message at the right time. She provided an alternative voice to
feminism, and she was in the right place to do it. This was crucial to
huge numbers of women, particularly in the west where Andelin started
out. Many women in this part of the country saw themselves as having
been discounted and left behind by the very vocal but relatively small
group of eastern educated elite who led the women’s movement. Andelin
made sense to these women, and they wanted to listen to her.
She had something important to say and she was articulate. Most
importantly, she combined original thinking with the nerve to step
forward in order to make herself heard in the discussion about the
place of women in this country.
Later, she
had the grace to step back and modify her approach when the climate of
the country changed. Women are still listening to her all over the
world because, whether you agree with her or not, she continues to be
relevant. This is different than being popular. And, herein lies her
power. Helen Andelin doesn’t care what people think of her
personally. Fascinating Womanhood is the message, and for Andelin, the
message is larger than she is. In fact, it is the only thing that
counts. In this sense, the FW movement isn’t about Helen Andelin at
all. She didn’t write the book for herself, but for the millions of
women she believes it speaks for. I call FW the “other” women’s
movement. With or without Andelin, I think it will be around for a
long, long while.
Host:
Were you a skeptic when you first started the interview?
Julie:
Do you mean did I doubt the seriousness or
dedication of Helen Andelin? The answer is, no. Her success speaks for
itself. All you have to do is pick up any current best-selling
relationship manual and you can see the influence she has had. People
don’t quote her directly, but they use her material all the time. She
is a force to be reckoned with, and I continue to be honored that she
graciously agreed to work with me.
If you are
asking me whether or not I was concerned that I would personally
disagree with Andelin’s message, no. I already knew what Fascinating
Womanhood stood for, and I respected it as a significant historical
event. I did feel uniquely qualified to write about it, though, and
that was enough. My job is to write a fair and accurate history of the
movement because it affected millions of women, not because it supports
or does not support my own agenda. Women are intelligent. They can
decide what they think without me putting in my two cents worth.
Host:
What things about the movement impress you the most?
Julie:
Its endurance. Helen Andelin wrote Fascinating Womanhood forty
years ago. She still gets fan mail, book orders, and applications from
women who want to teach classes every day. The message that Andelin
articulated in 1964 still resonates with women all over the world. It
is also remarkable that FW seems to cut across racial, cultural,
geographic and social boundaries. In this sense, it seems to have
universal qualities. Women want to improve their relationships with
their husbands. They want to be good mothers. They want to feel better
about themselves. FW speaks to these desires. It is a philosophy that
encourages women to go back and try again when they feel like they have
failed.
In many
ways FW is a huge support group. The face of the movement has changed
over the years. In the beginning, women learned about it mostly by word
of mouth. Over time Andelin became a media sensation. She trained
thousands of teachers and gave hundreds of interviews. The movement
grew at an incredible rate, and Andelin increasingly relied on the help
of her husband, and other business professionals to standardize the
organization so that it would not lose its original character. It was a
monumental job to keep the philosophy, literature, and teaching
consistent during a period of such enormous growth.
At the
height of her career, Andelin moved with her husband and children to a
farm in rural Missouri, effectively removing herself from the grueling
schedule of interviews, lectures and media attention that she had been
subjecting herself to for years. She lowered her own profile and
concentrated on the essentials of her message. This turned out to be a
bold and surprisingly effective strategy. While many competing
philosophies emerged and died out, Fascinating Womanhood quietly
endured for another twenty years without fanfare. These days Helen
herself is back at the helm of the FW organization, but remains out of
the media spotlight. I think it works better that way. Andelin’s
philosophies are strongest at the grassroots level where they remain
undiluted, very personal, and can be articulated through a smaller,
more close-knit community.
Host:
Was Mrs. Andelin what you thought she would be, or
different?
I met Mrs.
Andelin for the first time when I was a teenager. She was in my
hometown giving a lecture during the big push to defeat the Equal
Rights Amendment. I watched her walk off an airplane, and she reminded
me very much of Jackie Kennedy. She was stylish, graceful, and had a
magnetic quality about her that I recognized even as a kid. She was
intense and kept to a strict schedule, and people were drawn to her.
When I saw
her again thirty years later, she still had this persona. It was
different, though. She was older, a bit softer, and I found her waiting
patiently for me with one of her daughters at the airport gate. She is
a lovely woman with great intensity and we began talking about the
project the minute we got in the car for the ride home. Mrs. Andelin is
one of the most driven individuals I have ever met. Her sense of
urgency can be intimidating. She is also profoundly generous, and has a
quick sense of humor. She was everything I thought she would be, but
much more than I had ever imagined.
Host:
I understand you are writing a book to the public about
the Fascinating Womanhood Movment. It this in addition to your
dissertation or the same book? Tell us about your plans for the
book.
Julie: There
has been a great deal of interest in my project. I have had my
detractors, too. Some of my colleagues are mystified as to why I am
writing about a conservative women’s movement. Overwhelmingly,
though, I have found support in the academic community, which I am
grateful for. I have been urged to submit my dissertation for
publication by an academic press. While I am confident the study will
find a much larger audience than my dissertation committee, I am
hesitant to discuss any developments about wider publication of the
work until I have finished the first order of business - satisfying the
requirements for my Ph.D. I hope to have this accomplished by the end
of 2004
A
dissertation is written for an academic audience, and is generally not
suitable for public consumption. However, a really good writer with an
exceptional subject can sometimes get a book contract from the
dissertation as it stands with relatively few revisions. This is what I
am shooting for. The subject is compelling, and I have had an
enthusiastic response to my writing so far. I’ll keep you posted.
Closing
remarks: Last year Julie held the position as Visiting Senior
Lecturer in American Religion at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma,
Washington. She has taught classes in religion and history at Gonzaga,
and Washington State Universities. She recently returned from a month
in Italy where she and another professor taught a course on Early
Christianity in Rome. She is the mother of three children, and lives in
Spokane, Washington.
* * * * *
The Fascinating
Womanhood Teaching
Program: There has been some confusion about the FW
teaching program so I will try to clear this up by making an
explanation here: If you wish to become an authorized Fascinating
Womanhood teacher, you must receive this permission directly from the
Fascinating Womanood office. You can do this by writing us a letter or
email, requesting a Teachers Application Form. Our email address is
listed at the top of the website and our mailing address is Fascinating
Womanhood, PO Box 219, Pierce City, Missouri 65723. You are to fill out
this form, including a clear head shot photo of yourself, and a $6.00
application fee, and return it to our office. If you qualify we will
send you your permission. If you don’t we will return your $6.00
application fee.
About
Online Classes: Online classes are taught by Sandy Schindler and
her assistants.
Sandy is
an authorized Fascinating Womanhood teacher but has a program of her
own called Ultimate Femininity. Although it is a separate
program that she directs, we refer students to her online Fascinating
Womanhood classes. If you would like more information or would like to
register for one of her classes, click on the link below.
Fascinating Womanhood Online Class
I am
pleased to announce a new online class for men called Manhood By
Design. This class is based on the book, Man of Steel and Velvet
by Aubrey Andelin, and is being taught by Charles Sickels and Pastor
Gabe Abdelaziz . To register, or for more information, the site address
is:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ManhoodByDesign/
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