Carolyn Jessop; Laura Palmer by Escape

stomp your foot in an adorable and feminine way.
    The manipulation chapters were outrageous to me. They were also designed for women who were the only wife. What was a plural wife supposed to do, and how could these methods work on a man who was supposed to be obedient to his religion? We were taught not to manipulate our husbands. A woman was supposed to pray for guidance and understanding about fulfilling her husband’s desires.
    What a comedy. In Fascinating Womanhood, acting stupid was one of the most important ways a woman could make her husband feel manly. Installing the Dixie cup dispenser was one example. The husband asks his wife if she needs help. She refuses, insisting she can handle this itsy-bitsy chore herself. She pretends to read the instructions carefully and then hangs the dispenser upside down. Full of pride, she shows her husband what she has managed to do. When her husband explains the dispenser is upside down, the wife acts shocked and disappointed. She should have asked her husband to hang it after all, praising him for his many talents and manly abilities.
    “For hell’s sake!” I shrieked to myself, not even trying to sanitize my reaction. I could not believe that anyone would believe such a stupid book. Were men so dumb that they could fall for something like that?
    On Monday I found Jayne and mocked the book. She chided me about being disrespectful to the nusses’ Bible. “They have taken every part of that book to heart and it is going to be their salvation. This is how they will be treated like queens and escape their mothers’ fate.” I thought I would collapse in laughter. Apparently there was even a younger version, Fascinating Girl, which was making the rounds of the nusses’ younger siblings.
    We began inventing nuss jokes. I came up with one of the first: “Did you hear about the nuss who was really stupid? She hung the Dixie cup dispenser right side up!”
    Then there was the joke about the two hoods and the nuss who went on a trip to the Nevada desert. Their car broke down in the scorching heat, and the three girls realized that they would have to hike for help. One hood took a gallon of water from the car, and the other took the sandwiches they’d packed for the trip. The nuss took the car door so in case she got hot she could roll down the window!
    There was a clear social divide at school between the hoods and the nusses. If we were in the same room, we never interacted with each other. When something came up at school that forced us to talk to each other, we were deliberately rude. We were divided into two camps, but there was a certain détente. The unwritten rule was that we were going to leave each other alone.
    This worked very well until Margaret, one of Merril Jessop’s daughters, upset the delicate balance. Margaret was not attending high school. She worked for Merril and was about to turn twenty. She felt bad that she’d not been assigned in marriage yet. Unless something happened soon, she’d be the oldest old maid in town. So she decided to have a party and invite all the unmarried teenage girls. Her plan was to invite only the nusses and exclude all the hoods. That was just fine with us. We really didn’t want to go to a nuss party. The nusses were keeping us entertained, which was all we wanted from them.
    One prime example of the pure theater they created was watching Merrilyn, one of Merril’s most beautiful daughters, flirt with a teacher she had a crush on. One day in class she was standing at the pencil sharpener, loving every moment of looking up into his eyes. The teacher was polite but clearly had a lot of other things to do while preparing for the next class’s lesson.
    Merrilyn put her pencil in the sharpener and looked up at the teacher with an adoring gaze in her big green eyes. “Will you please turn the crank?” Without giving it a thought, the teacher turned the handle. Merrilyn removed the pencil, blowing on it carefully. “Thank you,”