Book Review: The Gift of Encouraging Words

(No, I'm not online on Christmas morning. How do you think so many of blog posts managed to go live at exactly 8:30 or 9:00 in the morning? Most of them were written at least a few hours, and some of the book reviews were written months or years, in advance.)

Title: The Gift of Encouraging Words

Author: Florence Littauer

Publisher: Word

Date: 1995

ISBN: 0-8499-1206-7

Length: 161 pages

Quote: “’Religious Women Make Better Lovers.’…When we start each day by talking quietly with the Lord, we’re less apt to scream at our husbands.”

Best known for the temperament workshops they took over from the LaHayes, Florence and Fred Littauer were first known as a happily married Greatest Generation couple who gave other couples advice on how to have a happy oldfashioned marriage like theirs.

That’s what to love about this book, and what not to love. Few modern women and even fewer modern men want that kind of marriage, or that kind of relationship with anybody. “We won’t always be logical and we won’t think as you do,” Littauer pleads, on behalf of women who’d been taught to be “adorably indirect” and never tell their husbands the truth about anything, but “most of you love to argue with us and put us down.” Men of this period had been taught that hammer-and-tongs arguments led to reasonable solutions of differences, but some of them had also picked up a strange idea that instead of reasoning together, the purpose of these arguments was to “win” by any means necessary and “put down” the other person. Well, hello? Men who “put down” women in arguments, or try to make an argument out of a statement of fact meant to motivate activity or a statement of feeling meant to garner sympathy…get married? Women continue talking to them? No more, I hope, and thank God. Women of my generation, and we hope of the younger ones, are not so desperate as women of Littauer’s generation seem to have been.

And, of course, the basic idea that Christian charity gives people ways to reconcile their differences has not changed. Today’s typical couple have different sources and patterns of stress in their lives but, in a Christian marriage, they have the same daily responsibility to provide a safe haven of rest for each other.

We all now “know” that girls typically outscore boys on verbal logic, so instead of “putting down” women with arguments that belittle the women’s intelligence husbands are now accused of “mansplaining,” i.e. yelling, venting the emotionality of frustrated two-year-old boys. (Though they can still scream "You're stupid!" and "You're crazy!" and so on, it's hard to scream "You're illogical!") The stereotype, and for my generation it seems to be mostly true, is that the wife can always “win” on logic so the husband’s only recourse is to display more destructive emotions. Christian husbands don’t do that.

Florence Littauer’s writings began with painfully earnest expressions of love and gratitude for her husband, who, having developed the more complete introvert brain, took responsibility for restoring love in their marriage. A couple of those are preserved in this book; they were part of what her fans remembered her for. But they didn’t stop there. In addition to the temperament workshops Littauer’s talent for speaking got her invitations to speak on all kinds of topics and lead all kinds of programs in all kinds of church groups. Daughter Marita taught the color and fashion classes, with Florence Littauer’s help. Other church ladies took over other specialties. Littauer’s studying and teaching eventually qualified her to write books on topics from depression (and her Blow Away the Black Clouds was not just another advertisement for pills) to genealogy.

“Our whole life is a preparation for ministry,” Littauer wrote. “[Y]ou young women who are at home with the children…God has given you a ministry and will expand it when He feels you are ready.” The successes of church ladies she mentored into their own speaking and writing careers became the examples in her book Lives on the Mend, a guide to discovering and developing your talents. Not only did Littauer not need to falsify the details; you could buy the books of the women who’d been helped by Littauer’s “CLASS Seminars.”

In the production of this book, however, a decision seems to have been made to focus on the books that had been allowed to go out of print, with just a few of the most memorable temperament vignettes from Personality Plus at the end. (Personality Plus was reprinted. And translated.) The result is a pretty little Gift Book with a lovely potpourri-colored cover containing a scattering of sometimes outdated early writings on a variety of topics.

If you had, or one of your elders had, some of Florence Littauer’s early books, and those books were lost or worn out and you’ve not found replacements for them, then The Gift of Encouraging Words was meant for you. If you don’t know this author well enough to want the personal memoirs, and aren’t interested enough in personality psychology to be interested in the stories, you’d probably learn more from Personality Plus and/or Lives on the Mend.