Female Of The Species

I love being a woman. We are courageous and emotionally wealthy," Patsy Clairmont declares. The silver-haired author of Normal Is Just a Setting on Your Dryer is framed by four overhead TV screens as she roams a circular stage of the Memorial Coliseum in Portland, Ore., one of a series of speakers commanding the attention of the 12,000 women gathered there. She stops abruptly and pulls hundreds of rubber bands out of a bag, an embarrassment of riches meant to represent the psychic entanglement she has had to deal with. "This is me," she says. "All of me." Agoraphobia, fear of open spaces, she explains, kept her housebound for two years.

Clairmont isn't alone in her troubles. Another keynote speaker was hospitalized for depression, another lost two of her sons, a third was abandoned by her father. Their burdens differ, but they are all Women of Faith, adherents of an evangelical Christian movement that is rapidly becoming both complement and antidote to the all-male Promise Keepers. And despite the problems, the tenor of the weekend becomes resolutely cheerful. "Joy" is invoked almost as frequently as God. Members of Women of Faith don't trade promises or admonishments; they swap stories and compliments. Since 1996, when the for-profit enterprise was founded, predominantly white women of all Christian denominations have been drawn to revivals staged in churches and cozy sports arenas across the nation. For a $52 advance-registration fee, women can take part in a spiritual slumber party punctuated by hushed confessionals, occasional jokes about PMS and giggles aplenty.

The sisterhood is getting crowded with similar Christian groups. The women's ministry of James Dobson's Focus on the Family expects to pull in tens of thousands of participants at five conferences this year, and African-American pastor T.D. Jakes will host a "Woman, Thou Art Loosed!" rally at Atlanta's Georgia Dome this week. But WOF attracts more followers than its competitors. Attendance has grown from 36,000 in 1996 to 156,000 in 1997 to a projected 350,000 by year's end. It is a subsidiary of New Life Clinics, a private company that is the largest Christian counseling chain in the U.S. WOF, with headquarters in Plano, Texas, has its own management; its revenues, largely from fees and souvenir sales, totaled $6.1 million in 1997. They are expected to more than double this year. The appeal? Good old-fashioned therapy, cloaked in the Ten Commandments.

The idea, well, it began with a man. Stephen Arterburn, who owns 10% of New Life Clinics and is paid a salary of $160,000 plus stock options, had offered a program of New Life seminars, which failed dismally. "Those were seminars where you had to admit you had a problem before you came," he says. "I thought we could reach more people if we could ask, What can we do for you?" That psychotherapy-under-another-name worked, and the movement collected a roster of upbeat dispensers of inspiration, such as Sheila Walsh, author of Never Give It Up, and Barbara Johnson, of Where Does a Mother Go to Resign? To enhance the illusion of intimacy, the speakers eschew the talk-and-run approach customary at most mass gatherings and listen intently to soft Christian rock and tales of hard knocks.