Jesus and John Wayne - 03 - God's Gift to Man

⬅️ Book: Jesus and John Wayne - Kristin Kobes Du Mez · Previous: Chapter 2 · Next: Chapter 4 · Source: Attachment (file not included in this release)

Chapter 3: God’s Gift to Man

Chapter Objective

Du Mez shows how conservative women helped make patriarchal gender difference into both a personal solution and a national political cause. Marabel Morgan and Elisabeth Elliot taught women to stabilize men through submission, admiration, sexual availability, and self-denial. Phyllis Schlafly then translated that domestic identity into opposition to feminism and the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), forging an interfaith coalition whose defense of male protection also carried commitments to anticommunism, militarism, racial hierarchy, and Christian nationalism.

The Total Woman

• Marabel Morgan’s The Total Woman began as a program to repair unhappy marriages and became the best-selling nonfiction book of 1974. Morgan told wives that marital conflict came primarily from resistance to their assigned role, not from male power or inequality. Attachment (file not included in this release)
• The remedy was to treat the husband as king: praise his body and masculinity, avoid threatening his ego with one’s earnings, remain attractive, stop “nagging,” and make sex constantly available. Morgan framed submission as biblical but sold it as a pragmatic exchange—gratify the husband and he will remain home, become generous, and provide security.
• Her model defines masculinity indirectly: men possess fragile egos, vigorous libidos, and an entitlement to leadership and service. Women are responsible for repairing male confidence so men can rule.
• Morgan linked absent fathers and insufficiently masculine homes to homosexuality. Anita Bryant moved from Morgan’s courses into antigay activism, illustrating how distinct gender roles—not only an abstract doctrine about sexuality—powered conservative opposition to gay rights. Attachment (file not included in this release)
• The evangelical distribution network made the message mainstream within conservative Christianity. It also offered women in stagnant marriages a program they could enact without employable skills, economic independence, or a desire to leave domestic life. Du Mez treats the appeal seriously: submission promised agency within the limited options many women perceived.

Complementarity as Sacred Hierarchy

• Elisabeth Elliot’s Let Me Be a Woman gave a more sacrificial and theological version of the same order. Woman was “totally other” and God’s gift to man; husbands possessed a virile drive to dominate and wives fulfilled Christian vocation through self-giving, suffering, and submission. Attachment (file not included in this release)
• Elliot rejected equality as a Christian ideal and grounded hierarchy in the Trinity: the Father rules, the Son submits, and the family mirrors this divine order. Chivalry joined male authority to an obligation of love and protection.
• Women were instructed to forgive the sins of the men they married and to intensify their own femininity so husbands would become more masculine. Morgan and Elliot differed in style, but together they formed a shared domestic identity that evangelical women would later defend politically.

Schlafly Makes the Personal Political

• Phyllis Schlafly was a highly educated Catholic political operative whose own public career contradicted the domestic ideal she promoted. Her anticommunism, Goldwater activism, and foreign-policy expertise preceded her interest in the ERA. Attachment (file not included in this release)
• Schlafly reframed male provision and female dependency as women’s privileged rights. Because women bear children, she argued, law and custom rightly obligate men to protect and support them. The ERA would destroy this arrangement by imposing sameness, military service, state childcare, abortion, and sexual vulnerability.
• Her argument appealed beyond evangelicals. Many working-class women associated employment with low-paid drudgery rather than liberation, while homemakers experienced feminist criticism as contempt for their lives. Schlafly made defense of their existing identity feel both rational and heroic.
• Evangelical opposition to abortion was not yet fixed. Christianity Today remained uncertain in 1968, and the Southern Baptist Convention supported broader legal access in 1971. Mobilization hardened as abortion became identified with feminism, sexual autonomy, and women’s rejection of motherhood; it then became an attack on family and Christian America rather than only a difficult moral question. Attachment (file not included in this release)

Gender, Race, and National Security

• Schlafly’s worldview linked the ERA to communism, federal bureaucracy, women in combat, and a weakened military. Her “Positive Woman” was a patriot charged with defending free enterprise, the American family, Judeo-Christian civilization, and military superiority. Attachment (file not included in this release)
• Race entered through coded issues: parental control of private schools, opposition to busing, and anxiety about integrated or unisex bathrooms. Some anti-ERA rhetoric explicitly invoked fear of Black men sharing facilities with white women.
• Du Mez places this rhetoric in the longer southern myth of white male protection. Although Black women had historically faced sexual violence from white men, opponents imagined equality as exposing white women to Black male danger. The same logic anticipates later conservative panic over transgender people and bathrooms. Attachment (file not included in this release)
• Schlafly defeated the ERA by turning ordinary women’s domestic roles into a religious war. Her coalition joined Catholics, evangelicals, Mormons, and white middle- and working-class women. By the time her personal prominence faded, her language had become ordinary Republican and evangelical speech. Attachment (file not included in this release)

Key Concepts

• Total Woman: Morgan’s ideal wife, whose admiration, attractiveness, domestic service, and sexual availability restore male confidence and secure provision.
• Complementarity: The claim that men and women possess different, mutually fitting roles; in this chapter it functions as an unequal hierarchy of male rule and female submission.
• Chivalric protection: A bargain in which women receive provision and safety by accepting dependence on male authority.
• Pro-family politics: A coalition that defines the legitimate family as heterosexual, patriarchal, and privately governed, then treats policies that enable other arrangements as attacks on the family itself.
• Gendered Christian nationalism: The belief that maintaining distinct roles and male protection is essential to preserving America as a Christian nation.

Questions for Reflection

1. Why might submission have appeared more actionable than feminism to women trapped in unhappy marriages or poor labor markets?
2. Does calling unequal roles “complementary” change the power relationship, or mainly change its moral language?
3. How did the ERA become a symbol for fears far beyond its brief legal text?
4. What does the history of evangelical uncertainty about abortion reveal about claims of an unchanging biblical position?
5. How did the protection of white womanhood connect gender hierarchy to racial politics?

Citations and References

Author’s complete endnotes

Chapter 3 endnotes 1–25: Attachment (file not included in this release) · Attachment (file not included in this release).

• Domestic femininity (notes 1–9): Marabel Morgan, The Total Woman; Jean Marbella; Daniel Silliman; and Elisabeth Elliot, Let Me Be a Woman.
• Schlafly and the ERA (notes 10–19, 23–25): Carol Felsenthal; Schlafly interviews, newsletters, and The Power of the Positive Woman; Donald Mathews and Jane De Hart; Daniel Williams; Neil Young; and Alan Wolfe.
• Race, sexuality, and protection (notes 20–22): Mathews and De Hart plus Danielle McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street, support Du Mez’s analysis of coded racial politics, sexual violence, and bathroom fears.