#headship

As mainstream culture pondered questions of women’s liberation, evangelical readers wanted to know whether the most conservative kind of woman—a wife and a preacher’s wife no less—could ever be as happy. “The bras are burning, the flags are waving, and pins and bumper stickers burgeoning to announce the dissatisfaction of women. … The libbers are upon us and we must come to terms with them—and ourselves,” said one pastor’s wife. A whole genre of pastoral spouse literature answered with a well-publicized yes.

Wives of famous pastors were in an ideal position to combat the primary accusations of feminists: that housewives were trapped and unsatisfied. Ruth Peale’s 1971 The Adventure of Being a Wife was penned under the name “Mrs. Norman Vincent Peale,” which summarized much of her message: that her greatest achievements have come from being conformed to the image of her husband. Almost every famous preacher’s wife tried her hand at it. There was His Darling Wife, Evelyn about the wife of Oral Roberts and Woman: Be All You Can Be by Dale Evans Rogers, wife and co-star of singing cowboy Roy Rogers.

Other family members got into the game with books such as They Call Me Mother Graham, a celebration of the significance of Billy Graham’s mother “in a day when the bonds that hold families together are unraveling as never before.” The mother of famous 1970s televangelist Rex Humbard weighed in on the decline of modern faith with Give Me That Old-Time Religion, and the daughter of 1980s televangelist Robert Schuller wrote separate books about both her famous parents.

The appetite for stories of their lives soon translated into books like Living Cameos, featuring famous wives such as Edith Schaeffer, Shirley Dobson, Macel Falwell, Beverly LaHaye, and Rexella Van Impe. Even Rita Bennett, the wife of the Episcopalian priest who had helped kick off the charismatic movement in mainline Protestantism, became a star: I’m Glad You Asked That showed her looking like a beautiful bohemian, wearing a homemade floral dress and ultra-long hair, ready to answer intimate questions about husbands and wives.

Colleen Townsend Evans, whose book A New Joy had sold a quarter of a million copies, published reflections about her marriage and her famous husband—she had abandoned a thriving Hollywood acting career to wed Presbyterian luminary, the Rev. Louis H. Evans Jr. She revealed that he was not only her spiritual guide but also her friend. This was not a shocking revelation, but that was precisely the point: there was remarkable consensus about the importance of a woman’s submission. Each woman had her own brand of submission: Beverly LaHaye’s was political; Anita Bryant’s was bubbly; and Elisabeth Elliot’s was poetic as ever, even in the way she called the sexes “gloriously and radically unequal.”

The three major topics these women addressed were the true meaning of liberation, the acceptance of innate sexual differences, and the spiritual importance of femininity as a marker of the Christian counterculture. In the 1972 memoir One Woman’s Liberation by Shirley Boone, wife of 1950s chart-topper Pat Boone, “liberation” centered on her struggle for a happy marriage to a husband who battled the temptations of Hollywood while she struggled with loneliness and jealousy. The story wanders through the private rooms of their famous lives, giving readers a tantalizing peek at the ordinary dinner conversations and glamorous soirées, but it culminates with her discovery that the age’s “new morality” was a threat to her family and to the divine order of creation.

Pat’s accepting responsibility as the spiritual leader of their family restored Shirley emotionally and spiritually, and so the story ends with frank chastisements of women who will not accept their place. She fretted that “women’s libbers militantly object to the place in society God has ordained for their sex, but by doing so, they lose much precious liberty the Lord intended them to have.” The hard-won ease of their marriage came from a loving husband who “frees his helpmeet … by being head of the house and protecting her” and being a submissive wife who “relieved of a lot of the hard, emotion-taxing decision making.” A wife under her husband’s authority would not resort to nagging or counterproductive independent action. Freedom came from letting herself fall into the deep grooves of God’s divine roadmap for men and women.

Though the rhetoric made much of their inequality, it simultaneously elevated such women to one of the most powerful titles of all, that of wife. This was odd, given that most evangelical and pentecostal women were not only wives and mothers, but had joined the workforce in the 1970s. (African American and Hispanic women simply remained in the workforce, having never experienced a similar golden age of single-earner households.) But when white evangelical and pentecostal women looked for paid employment, they clung to the ideal of wifedom far longer than the American mainstream.

The wider society had already begun to valorize the working woman, and this trend gained cultural recognition by the 1980s in everything from Madonna’s power suits to the rash of Wall Street comedies like Nine to Five and Working Girl, proving women could make it to the corner office. By the 1990s, evangelical women were still critically considering their place in relationship to second-wave feminism and its various causes as a third wave crested in the 1990s. Though difficult to precisely define, third-wave feminism was typically characterized by sex-positivity and heightened awareness of the ways gender intersected with class and race to shape (and limit) women’s agency.