When she made a Christian commitment at the age of 21, she entered an evangelical milieu that saw her gender as a problem. Lisa Bevere, a 46-year-old evangelical author and speaker who's married to prominent author and speaker John Bevere, knows all about church ladies. We all felt safer curled up inside our illusions. But such truths were quickly tamped down. My mother taught Sunday school for teenagers, and one morning a boy confided in her that his father, a longtime church member, brutally beat his mother. Every now and then, reality would protrude. Above all, she had to preserve the illusion of piety. (Sound familiar? The concept was lampooned in the movie Fried Green Tomatoes.)

My mother read it and remembers the same thing everyone else seems to remember about The Total Woman: Morgan holds up as an example a woman who greeted her hubby at the door wearing nothing but Saran Wrap. In light, cheery prose, Morgan counseled wives to accept their husbands, adapt to them and cultivate sexual excitement in their marriages. It sold some 4 million copies and topped the nonfiction best-seller list in 1974, beating All the President's Men. Oh, how my mother hated The Total Woman, that relic of the early 1970s, an evangelical reaction to the burgeoning feminist movement. My parents, always quick with the sarcasm, dubbed her 'Bouffantus Colossus,' then threatened my sister and me with bodily harm if we ever let that slip. It repelled bullets, refracted AM radio signals and frightened small children. It was an impenetrable structure, seemingly shellacked into place. Her single unforgettable feature was an enormous brown beehive that tapered slightly, like a mushroom cloud. Here's mine: I knew a woman of Amazonian stature who loudly extolled the virtues of Marabel Morgan's 1973 best-seller, The Total Woman. Lisa Bevere knows all about church ladies.

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