Woman Power: Transform Your Man, Your Marriage, Your Life

199 Pages·2009·0.75 MB·English

by  Laura Schlessinger

W OMAN
P OWER
TRANSFORM
YOUR MAN,
YOUR MARRIAGE,
YOUR LIFE
THE COMPANION BOOK TO
The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands
Dr. Laura C. Schlessinger
For family, friends, colleagues, and fans who have stood by me—in humble gratitude.
It’s a funny business, a woman’s career. The things you drop on your way up the ladder, so you can move
faster. You forget you’ll need them again when you go back to being a woman. That’s one career all females
have in common—whether we like it or not—being a woman.
Sooner or later we’ve all got to work at it, no matter what other careers we’ve had or wanted…and, in
the last analysis, nothing is any good unless you can look up just before dinner or turn around in bed—and
there he is. Without that, you’re not a woman. You’re something with a French Provincial office or a book
full of clippings—but you’re not a woman.
—B ETTE D AVIS, in the classic film All About Eve
Contents
Author’s Note
Introduction
PART 1 Yeah, But…What If?
Questions and Challenges About The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands
PART 2 Proper Caring: “Was It Good for You?”
Assessing Yourself and Your Marriage
PART 3 Proper Respect: Girls Rule—Boys Drool
Sensitivity Training and Consciousness Raising
PART 4 Proper Understanding: The Guys’ Turn!
What the Heck Are Men Thinking, Needing, and Wanting?
PART 5 Proper Feeding: Inspiration and Tips
Using Your Woman Power!
Endnote
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Books by Dr. Laura Schlessinger
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher

Author’s Note
Consider this companion book your personal companion, as you take an
important journey.
I promised with
The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands that “if you buy the book, read it,
and do what it suggests—you will be happier that you’re married…and to him,
within forty-eight hours.”
Sounded cheeky even to me!
Then came the hundreds of letters that testified to the change having taken place
within minutes or hours.
That is because
The Proper Care was not about awkward actions like greeting your man at the
door in plastic wrap—it was about a change in heart, mind, spirit, and attitude.
Although they may joke to the contrary, men are really not very interested in
daily raunchy seductions; they are desirous of daily warmth, appreciation, and
affection.
Inanimate objects are not required.
The Proper Care
was also not, in spite of feminist reviews/tantrums to the contrary, about making
women submissive, servile, opinionless, or weak.
Quite the opposite, and that is why this book is titled
Woman Power.
As one male listener, a college professor, wrote:
“We are each blessed with different moral powers.
In some instances, these moral powers divide nicely along gender lines; in
others, it is simply a matter of natural gifts.
Giving is not about rendering oneself servile.
Rather, it is about standing tall and
using one’s moral powers to enrich the moment.
It is the exercise of our moral powers in this way—be it between husband and
wife, or parents and children, or one human being and another—that so
marvelously and wondrously sets us apart from the lower animals.”
What has, throughout all time, been special about women is their natural
tendency to bond, nurture, nest, show compassion, and love.
When we speak of “mother love,” we talk about the purest and strongest of all
affections.
When we speak of “mother’s milk,” we talk about the medium through which
life itself is transferred.
Women are special creatures with the ability (together with a husband and God)
to create life within their wombs.
Mothers are the source of life and sustenance, through breast-feeding and
emotional caretaking.
Through social bonding, women are the link between their men and family and
society.
Through their acceptance of a particular man, women are a powerful force in
determining the social behavior of their men (if bad boys couldn’t get a woman,
they would give more thought to being good boys).
This naturally results in
woman power.
As adults, men come to women, in part, as a boy comes to his mother, generally
not in any neurotic way but as the natural journey of a man.
He lives for the same approval and appreciation and affection and attention he
yearned for from his mother.
And when he does get that from “his woman,” he is better able to conquer the
world, and will be completely devoted to her.
When women “get it” and “use it,” their men, their marriages, their lives are
transformed.
And even in the midst of financial woes, illnesses, recalcitrant children,
annoying neighbors, and a dog that won’t be house-trained, both wife and
husband are happy.
Woman Power
is part standard book, part journal, part workbook, and all a positive way to take
the basic concepts from The Proper Care and expand and reinforce those ideas
to help you transform your life, and that of your family, into the spiritually sound
and satisfying experience it could be.
Introduction
While this book stands on its own in inviting and guiding women to maximize
their inherent potential for transforming their men and their marriages into
experiences of joy and satisfaction, it is also a response to the many questions
from both husbands and wives, generated by its “sister book,” The Proper Care
and Feeding of Husbands.
In that book I pointed out that, as Cathy Young wrote in her review of it in
the Boston Globe, “In the age of feminism…we have paid a lot of attention to
women’s complaints about men and criticized men for not meeting women’s
needs—but we’ve forgotten that men too have needs and women too have faults.
Somehow, we’ve even developed the notion that a woman who seeks to meet her
husband’s needs is subservient (but a husband who fails to meet his wife’s needs
is a pig)….
“Part of the problem is that feminism…offers very little by way of an
alternative. Too often (Schlessinger is right about that), it has promoted anger,
rancor, and male-blaming instead of equal partnership. The majority of women
do want loving relationships with men.”
Amen to that! I have found it fascinating that most women are really not all
that aware of how dismissive they are toward their husbands and their husbands’
needs. That mentality has become so commonplace in our culture that most
women don’t register it as unkind, thoughtless, cruel, abusive, or downright
mean. But it can be. The almost-universally positive response from women who
have actually read the book has been immensely gratifying to me. Instead of a
knee-jerk defensiveness based on the mistaken notion that they are being blamed
for all the world’s ills, women have embraced the concept I have offered them:
that, as women they have the power to transform their men, their marriages, their