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.
“You’re a hypocrite, ” Bob said. “You profess to have Christ
in your life, but you won’t profess Him in public, which
Christ tells you to do. ”
Because I know he’s right, and hate him for making me feel
so bad about it, I end up doing what I’m so scared to d o . 16
Conforming to the will of her husband was clearly a difficult
struggle for Bryant. She writes candidly of her near constant re
bellion. Green’s demands—from increasing her public presence as
religious witness to doing all the child care for four children without help while pursuing the career she genuinely loves—were endurable only because Bryant, like Stapleton and Morgan, took Jesus as her real husband:
Only as I practice yielding to Jesus can I learn to submit, as
the Bible instructs me, to the loving leadership of my husband.
Only the power of Christ can enable a woman like me to become submissive in the Lord. 17
In Bryant’s case, the “loving leadership” of her husband, this
time in league with her pastor, enshrined her as the token spokeswoman of antihomosexual bigotry. Once again Bryant was reluctant to testify, this time before Dade County’s Metropolitan Commission in hearings on a homosexual-rights ordinance. Bryant
spent several nights in tears and prayer, presumably because, as
she told Newsweek, “I was scared and I didn’t want to do it. ” 18
Once again, a desire to do Christ’s will brought her into conformity with the expressed will of her husband. One could speculate that some of the compensation in this conformity came from having the burdens of domestic work and child care lessened in the
interest of serving the greater cause. Conformity to the will of
Christ and Green, synonymous in this instance as so often before,
also offered an answer to the haunting question of her life: how to
be a public leader of significance— in her terminology, a “star”—
and at the same time an obedient wife acting to protect her children. A singing career, especially a secular one, could never resolve this raging conflict.
Bryant, like all the rest of us, is trying to be a “good” woman.
Bryant, like all the rest of us, is desperate and dangerous, to herself
and to others, because “good” women live and die in silent selfless
ness and real women cannot. Bryant, like all the rest of us, is having one hell of a hard time. *
Phyllis Schlafly, the Right’s not-born-again philosopher of the
absurd, is apparently not having a hard time. She seems possessed
by Machiavelli, not Jesus. It appears that she wants to be The
Prince. She might be viewed as that rare woman of any ideological
persuasion who really does see herself as one of the boys, even as
she claims to be one of the girls. Unlike most other right-wing
women, Schlafly, in her written and spoken work, does not acknowledge experiencing any of the difficulties that tear women apart. In the opinion of many, her ruthlessness as an organizer is
best demonstrated by her demagogic propaganda against the Equal
Rights Amendment, though she also waxes eloquent against reproductive freedom, the women’s movement, big government, and
*This analysis of Bryant’s situation was written in 1978 and published in
Ms. in June 1979. In May 1980, Bryant filed for divorce. In a statement
issued separately from the divorce petition, she contended that Green had
“violated my most precious asset—my conscience” (The New York Times,
May 24, 1980). Within three weeks after the divorce decree (August 1980),