Right-wing Women

resourcefulness and lack of self-respect. Too little resourcefulness or too much self-respect will doom a woman

to failure as a Total Woman. A submissive nature is the miracle for

which religious women pray.

No one has prayed harder, longer, and with less apparent success than Anita Bryant. She has spent a good part of her life on her knees begging Jesus to forgive her for the sin of existing. In Mine

Eyes Have Seen the G lory, an autobiography first published in 1970,

Bryant described herself as an aggressive, stubborn, bad-tempered

child. Her early childhood was spent in brutal poverty. Through

singing she began earning money when still a child. When she was

very young, her parents divorced, then later remarried. When she

was thirteen, her father abandoned her mother, younger sister, and

herself, her parents were again divorced, and shortly thereafter her

father remarried. At thirteen, “[w]hat stands out most of all in my

memory are my feelings of intense ambition and a relentless drive

to succeed at doing well the thing I loved [singing]. ” 13 She blamed

herself, especially her driving ambition, for the loss of her father.

She did not want to marry. In particular, she did not want to

marry Bob Green. He “won” her through a war of attrition. Every

“No” on her part was taken as a “Yes” by him. When, on several

occasions, she told him that she did not want to see him again, he

simply ignored what she said. Once, when she was making a trip

to see a close male friend whom she described to Green as her

fiance, he booked passage on the same plane and went along. He

hounded her.

Having got his hooks into her, especially knowing how to hit on

her rawest nerve—guilt over the abnormality of her ambition, by

definition unwom anly and potentially satanic— Green manipulated

Bryant w ith a cruelty nearly unmatched in modem love stories.

From both of Bryant’s early books, a picture emerges. One sees a

woman hemmed in, desperately trying to please a husband who

manipulates and harasses her and whose control of her life on every

level is virtually absolute. Bryant described the degree of Green’s

control in M ine Eyes: “T hat’s how good a manager m y husband is.

He w illingly handles all the business in m y life— even to including

the Lord’s business. Despite our sometimes violent scraps, I love

him for it. ” 14 Bryant never specifies how violent the violent scraps

were, though Green insists they were not violent. Green himself,

in Bless This House, is very proud of spanking the children, especially the oldest son, who is adopted: “I’m a father to my children, not a pal. I assert m y authority. I spank them at times, and they respect me for it. Sometimes I take Bobby into the music

room, and it’s not so I can play him a piece on the piano. We play

a piece on the seat of his pants! ” 15 Some degree of physical violence, then, was adm ittedly an accepted part of domestic life.

Bryant’s unselfconscious narrative makes clear that over a period of

years, long before her antihomosexual crusade was a glint in Bob

Green’s eye, she was badgered into giving public religious testimonies that deeply distressed her: Bob has a w ay of getting my dander up and backing me up

against a wall. He gets me so terrifically mad at him that I hate

him for pushing me into a corner. He did that now.