If You Identify As a Woman, You're a Real Housewife

A Black Eyed Review of The Total Woman & The Real Housewives Franchise

So, for a short time, I worked at this big-deal-not-too-big-of-a-deal-but-still-a-big-deal church. It was a blast. I enjoyed it. I learned a lot. I grew a lot. I made good friends that I still have today. 

As a part-time employee at this semi-mega church, I was an admin for a pastor who led our Restore ministry that included classes such as 12-Step Recovery, DivorceCare, Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University, GriefShare, Henry Cloud’s Boundaries, Dan Allender’s Wounded Heart, and a pre-marital class called Soulmates. 

Soulmates was designed by my boss who was a warm, funny, thoughtful and brilliant licensed therapist. Though it wasn’t exactly progressive, it was a great class because it was often the first time that couples discussed their expectations, their goals, their past relationships, their family drama, their money personalities, their crisis plans and temperaments in said crises. It was a prerequisite for anyone who wished to have a spiritual leader from our church officiate their wedding. 

One of the first sessions of Soulmates opened with a video testimony from an older, well-traveled couple. The husband was a lawyer who served on our church board. His wife was a housewife, beautiful, youthful, remarkably feminine and warm. They were in their 60s. I adored her and admired their “love” story which they shared with each class of newly committed lovers who no doubt envisioned their own future in this venerated couple before them. 

In their testimony, the husband revealed that in the past he’d been unfaithful in some way - though I don’t remember him ever using that word. It was implied. But what was absolutely clear was at some point he was unwilling to continue in the marriage because he was so unhappy with his wife. 

The details were obscure, and in telling his side of the story, his tone was unreadable. Was he remorseful or mournful? Perhaps the distance of time had veiled his feelings, leaving only phantom pain.

But then, his luminous wife of decades told her side of the story. This beautiful, classy, refined, soft-spoken woman looked into the camera and said, “I was a bitch.” And everyone in the room gasped. 

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I’ve watched every episode of The Real Housewives of New York, Atlanta and Potomac, and I’m just starting to make my way through Salt Lake City. At first, I started watching because it was something mindless to binge while I worked out. It was easy and a little salacious, and felt a little rebellious after a day of researching the history and impact of race, gender and sexuality in American Christianity. It was an adrenalin release. I could lift weights or speed-pedal on my stationary bike while screaming at the TV, “yasssss!!!!” when Sheree Whitfield leaned across the table and said, “Who gon’ check me, boo?!!” - or almost fall off my bike laughing when Dorinda Medely said, “I'll tell you how I'm doing: Not well, bitch!”

But the more Real Housewives I’ve watched, the more I’m convinced there’s more than meets the eye here, and that someday there just might be graduate classes taught about this media sensation – if there aren’t already. Maybe my watching isn’t a mindless brain-dump. Maybe I’m conducting a field study in American womanhood. 

Yesterday, I was on my bike about to hit my 13^th mile while watching The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, when cast member Heather Gay gave me my first and probably most important field study sample in her confessional. She looked into the camera and said: 

A Mormon prophet, Harold B. Lee, said there’s no work that women will ever do outside of the home that will be equal to what she does as a mother. So we are successful Mormons based on how we raise our children and how happy we keep our husbands and how perfect our family is or appears. Even though in our hearts we know that that’s not important, that’s really the social code that we all adhere to and we know we’re judged on it. 

I stopped mid-pedal. “Wow!!! This!!!” 

The next morning, I woke up thinking about that SoulMates class all those years ago and the moment when that sweet, soft-spoken and seasoned wife in that veteran marriage looked into the camera—as if she was doing a Real Housewives confessional—and said “I was a bitch.” And I wondered why we all gasped. A b-i-t-c-h certainly wasn’t the worst thing she could’ve been in that marriage. But it certainly was the most accusatory and disgraceful. Her confession was the scapegoat that saved their marriage. No matter what he did, no matter if he was a d-i-c-k, the failures between them were now bound up in that single word “b-i-t-c-h,” that now and forever belonged to her. 

With our sharp emittance of shock, every woman became a cautionary housewife to be judged—and every man a cautionary husband to be pitied.

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There are more than 268 episodes of The Real Housewives filmed in cities across the country. Season after season, the most offensive thing a housewife can call another housewife is a b-i-t-c-h. And so, episode after episode, the show proves that the average American believes it’s the worst thing anyone can be. 

Once on the RHOA, Nene Leakes told Cynthia Bailey’s husband Peter to “stop trying to be a bitch,” and the two bff housewives didn’t speak for over a year. 

Though Bailey’s husband had been arrested on different occasions for drug possession, falsifying checks, and battery, in addition to being accused of cheating and being broke, calling him the b-word was the ultimate thing that dissolved the women’s sisterhood. The whole cast agreed that Leakes’ words were the worst slur a woman could throw at a man!! As a seasoned viewer, I promise you far more damaging accusations have been slung around the show. For example, one housewife and her husband were accused of being rapists. But just like in that Soulmates class, viewers all gasped when Leakes dropped the b-word onto—shocker—a man!

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Recently, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) expelled Saddleback Church from its organization because the megachurch’s new lead pastor appointed his wife as a teaching pastor. The SBC cites its Statement of Belief for its decision: 

“While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.”

It also states (emphasis mine): 

The husband and wife are of equal worth before God, since both are created in God’s image. The marriage relationship models the way God relates to His people. A husband is to love his wife as Christ loved the church. He has the God-given responsibility to provide for, to protect, and to lead his family. A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ. 

Long before kids from my generation had even started dating, the SBC and the Moral Majority had published many Christian lifestyle books that upheld this dangerous, misogynistic treatment of scripture. Unfortunately, it’s this outdated theology that has most permeated, not only the lives of Christian wives, but also the lives of women—married and single—in mainstream culture. For decades to follow, wives like the one who gave her testimony in that Soulmates class, and even the Real Housewives, have been stained by those books lingering legacy. 

In her 1973 bestselling book The Total Woman, self-described former “nag and… shrew” Marabel Morgan gave women this advice:

“Look and smell delicious… Be the seducer, rather than the seduced… If you’re stingy in bed, he’ll be stingy with you.” 

In 1976, Elisabeth Elliot taught in her book Let Me Be a Woman:

“The woman is totally other, totally different, totally God’s gift to man… The more womanly you are, the more manly your husband will want to be.”

In 1977, Phyllis Schlafly wrote in her bestselling book The Power of the Positive Woman:

“The Positive woman starts with the assumption that the world is her oyster… She understands that men and women are different, and that those very differences provide the key to her success as a person and fulfillment as a woman.” 

So according to these books, a woman at Saddleback Church can be a redeemed b-i-t-c-h, but not a pastor. 

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It all boils down to this: the producer and creator of The Real Housewives franchise, Andy Cohen, is worth about $50 million thanks to the confessions of women who ruefully point fingers at each for not getting married soon-enough, for not staying married long enough, for not getting divorced quick enough, for getting divorced at all, for being cheated on by their husbands, for not having a financially successful husband as the breadwinner, for cheating on their husband, for not appearing thin enough, for growing old. And they’re expected to do all of this while being a mother—a great mother—who’s also a “Boss Bitch”. The Moral Majority’s tentacles are all entangled in the franchise, and viewers (myself included) can’t get enough of it. Why? Because we resent what we’ve been taught and love the see the breakdown caused by that resentment.

And it only took me hundreds of miles of peddling to finally see it when an ex-Mormon, divorced Real Housewife of Salt Lake City who is the mother of three daughters spelled out just how far we haven’t come when she confessed, “That’s really the social code that we all adhere to and we know we’re judged on it.”