I was sitting in a seminar room full of doctoral students. Most of them were training to be American historians, but they were taking my class Women and Religion in the North Atlantic World, 1300–1700. It was early in the semester, only the first or second week. We were discussing medieval perceptions of women. I had just made a passing reference to a medieval sermon about a woman who murdered her brother-in-law because she was unable to control her sexual desires. (I keep telling you, medieval history is far from boring.)
The story goes like this: Sex was considered impure, so medieval Christians were encouraged to abstain from sex during holy times (which was a lot of time on the medieval calendar). A woman wanted to have sex with her husband on Easter morning. He said no. She was so overcome by desire that she tried to seduce her brother-in-law, who also denied her. Mad with lust, she grabbed a sword and cut off his head. When her husband found her, standing with the sword dripping with blood, she declared, “Lo, all this I have done, you have made me do!”1
And, according to the medieval sermon, she was right.
The moral of the story was, yes, you should abstain from sex during holy times. But married people were also required to pay the marriage debt (sex), and the husband should not have denied his wife. The marital debt trumped purity regulations. Because of the natural weakness of the female body, medieval women were considered more prone to sin, especially sexual sin. The temptress in medieval lore was more likely to be a woman or a demon than a man. It was thus more important for the husband to meet the needs of his wife than to obey the prohibitions barring sex during holy times.2 In this case, had the husband done so, it would have prevented his brother’s murder.
The students were confused, because this woman was the opposite of what they knew about women from American history. You see, by the early modern era (at least in European and American history), the perception of women as more sexually lascivious than men had flipped. It was now men who were seen as less able to control their desires. Women had to be protected from predators and had to learn how to stop tempting the insatiable sexual appetites of men (such as through dressing more modestly). Historian Marilyn Westerkamp explains that, by the nineteenth century, “the average woman was no longer feared as a potential seductress; she was more likely to be seduced, since men were now seen as those more likely to indulge in sexual sin.”3 Innocence, instead, now characterized women.
As a medieval historian, women being depicted as sexual temptresses was such a norm for me that I had forgotten how foreign it would be to American history students. I had forgotten how much our understanding of women today is shaped by what happened after the Reformation.
Indeed, when we get down to it, the construction of modern biblical womanhood for Protestant women owes much more to developments after the sixteenth century than it does to all the centuries before. As we’ve discussed, during the Reformation era, “the ideological touchstone of holiness” changed. Instead of women finding holiness through virginity, they now found it in the marriage bed. The most sacred vessels were no longer the valiant men and women who rose above their sex to serve God; the most sacred institution was now the holy household. As Westerkamp powerfully writes, “In place of the special spiritual status granted to a few men and women by virtue of their celibacy and consecration, the mandate for marriage gratified all men. Each became a patriarch, to follow in Abraham’s footprints.” As for women? “Destined to be married, to labor in the household, and to subject themselves to the rule of their husbands.”4
I had my students’ attention. I realized, as I looked around the classroom, that I had just taught them something new. Patriarchy defined the lives of both medieval women and early modern women. But at some point, across that great divide, patriarchy shapeshifted.
Medieval women moved closest to equality with men when they were furthest from the married state. Virgins received the most points in the medieval spiritual economy, followed by widows, and finally by wives, who came in last place. After the Reformation, the spiritual economy flipped, so wives received the highest honors, followed by widows. This time, virgins—now demeaned as spinsters instead of celebrated as saints—brought up the rear. As historian Merry Wiesner-Hanks writes, “Protestant denominations—Lutheran, Anglican, Calvinist, and later Methodist, Baptist, and many others—differed on many points of doctrine, but they agreed that the clergy should be married heads of household and that monastic life had no value. . . . Thus there was no separate religious vocation open to women, who were urged to express their devotion within the family as ‘helpmeet’ to their husband and guide to their children.”5 Women, instead of encouraged to forsake their female bodies as the highest spiritual calling, were now urged to embrace their feminine distinctiveness as their best service to God.
As womanhood became redefined and the role of wife and mother sanctified in the post-Reformation world, so too did women’s subordination. Historically, women have always been subordinated to men, but now their subordination became embedded in the heart of evangelical faith. To be a Christian woman was to be under the authority of men.
Sanctifying Modesty
It was summer in the late nineties. We took our small North Carolina youth group, five girls and four boys, to a youth camp in a neighboring state. It was sticky hot. Our clothes clung to our bodies as we carried suitcases and sleeping bags to our bunks. The girls ran for the showers, trying to cool off before dinner and evening worship. Thirty minutes later we were clean and fresh and cheerful, walking across the campground. A young woman walked up beside me.
“Are you the leader for these girls?” she asked. “They need to change clothes.”
I stopped and turned to look at her.
“The straps on their tank tops are too thin. Their bra straps will show. We need them to cover up.”
I was in my early twenties. I hadn’t learned to sweeten my words yet. “We read the dress code. Sleeveless was fine,” I responded.
She wasn’t happy with me, but she let us continue.
That conversation was the beginning of a weeklong modesty battle with the camp leaders. After the worship service, one of the camp directors paid me a special visit to tell me that the girls needed to comply with the recently changed dress code. Tank tops were not allowed. I challenged him. Sleeveless was allowed. Our youth had only brought so many things to wear. I was unmoved.
Apparently the camp leaders were unmoved too. They showed up at my door that night with a box of extra-large T-shirts for the girls to wear. I think my mouth fell open. I was really upset. I returned the box.
The next morning, the girls and I were called into a special meeting. One of the young men working at the camp came to talk with us. It is really important, he told us, that beautiful young women be careful in their dress. Boys have difficulty controlling their imaginations, and when they see a bra strap, well, it can cause them to sin. Modesty honors God, and didn’t the girls want to honor God?
Once again, we were given a box of shirts. This time the message was clear—cover up, or we will ask you to leave.
We never went back to that camp.
The next year, when I was reading for my comprehensive exam in women’s history, I discovered that my youth-camp modesty battle had roots deeper than I realized. To be sure, purity culture took on a life of its own in the 1990s, leading to purity rings, disturbing rituals like teenage girls dancing in wedding dresses with their fathers, and a strange fear of visible bra straps. But it wasn’t the first time that Christians had obsessed about the sexual purity of women. During the nineteenth century, a similar fixation with female purity emerged—stemming from a new ideology about women, work, and family life—which historians call the cult of domesticity.
The cult of domesticity emerged as a phenomenon central to middle-class culture in Western Europe. It emphasized piety, domesticity, submission, and purity as characteristics of the ideal Christian woman. It cut across class and national borders, affecting peasant women and queens. It developed alongside narratives of imperialism and racial oppression. Historian Lynn Abrams tells us that “everywhere a girl learned to be a good wife and mother, a thrifty household manager, a willing worker, a chaste companion to her husband, and a dutiful mother to her children. A European woman of the nineteenth century was judged primarily by her role and deportment in her home.”6 The reason the teenage girls in our youth group were forced to put on baggy T-shirts wasn’t because Jesus cares that much about bra straps. It was because the leaders at that camp had confused nineteenth-century ideas about women’s purity (not to mention male culpability) with what it meant to be a Christian woman. Conservative evangelicals believed that the key to reducing sexual temptation for men was emphasizing purity for women. In Margaret Bendroth’s book Fundamentalism and Gender, she quotes a similar sentiment from a 1920s fundamentalist publication: “Every man has a quantity of dynamite, or its equivalent, in him. The matches have, as a rule, been in the hands of the world’s womanhood.”7 Seeing the bra straps of teenage girls, apparently, would have ignited the dynamite of the teenage boys at camp.
The youth-camp leaders banned tank tops and short shorts to help safeguard sexual purity. The nineteenth century, in turn, demonized prostitutes, working girls, and dance halls, elevating the home as the safest space for respectable women. The teenage girls in my youth group were given T-shirts to teach them about modesty and remind them of their Christian duty to protect men from lusting after their bodies; the purity lessons for nineteenth-century working-class women were harder. Those suspected of sexual immorality, or even considered high risk for committing a sexually immoral act, could be rounded up for rehabilitation in Magdalene homes. There, writes Abrams, “they were taught to be modest, silent, hard-working and subservient through religious indoctrination and training in domestic duties.” Washing clothes became a favorite occupation taught to these women—“as well as providing training for domestic service, it symbolised the cleansing of the girls’ shame as well as the dirt of the urban environment and was a potent reminder of the girls’ fall from grace.”8 Purity culture thus shamed women in the nineteenth century as it continues to shame women today.
Understanding that purity obsessions were nothing new in Christian history didn’t decrease my frustration with the youth camp. But it did help me see how Paul’s call for Christians to strive for sexual morality became tangled up with historical changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution as well as age-old patriarchal concerns about controlling the female body. Just like with Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code (when many Christians fell for a bit of historical truth mixed with an action-packed fictional story), Christians had once again fallen for a little bit of biblical truth mixed with a lot of human effort poured into maintaining the patriarchal equilibrium of history.
As I think about my modesty battle with those overzealous camp leaders, I can’t help wondering what Jesus thought about the situation. Instead of condemning his disciples when they broke a rather strict law in Matthew 12, plucking heads of grain on the Sabbath because they were hungry, Jesus defended them from the Pharisees. Instead of condemning the bleeding woman in Luke 8, who reached out and touched him for healing without his permission, Jesus told her to go in peace—her faith had healed her. This Jesus—who let Mary learn at his feet like a male disciple, who chastised the disciples for missing the point of his message over and over while recognizing over and over the strong faith of women—would he have joined the camp leaders in shaming teenage girls for a slipping bra strap?
Once again, the world in which we live oppresses women, fighting to control their bodies from their “natural” fallenness.
Once again, the God we serve has always done the opposite. Jesus has always set women free.
Sanctifying Domesticity
“Of course!” I typed in response. The email was a request to provide a workshop on mentoring at the upcoming women’s retreat. It had been a while since I had gone to a women’s retreat, but the retreat committee had changed the format. Instead of relying on outside speakers, they were now running workshops facilitated by people in our community. I was excited to talk about the importance of mentoring and perhaps encourage a few more volunteers to help mentor teenage girls.
Then I saw the schedule.
The mentoring workshop was scheduled at the same time as a holiday cookie baking workshop. Mentoring was definitely going to lose out to cookies.
I wasn’t upset, just resigned. A handful of women did come to the mentoring session, but baking cookies proved much more popular. One woman apologized for not coming to the mentoring session. Her explanation reinforced what I feared about the priorities of many women in my evangelical world. She told me that mentoring other women was important (Titus 2, right?), but she didn’t see it as a priority. Her first job was to mentor her children, not people outside her family. Her family came first, and baking cookies was a great way for her to engage with her children. Plus, this was a retreat, and baking cookies with other women was fun.
No problem, I told her. I like cookies too.
I really do like cookies. I also like to bake. The teenagers I have been feeding for years, my own children, my students every semester, and the college students I now live with as a faculty-in-residence can all attest to this. Baking is high on my list of enjoyable things. I do not see a conflict between my feminist identity and my cooking skills. I don’t have a problem with women, or men, taking pride in domestic prowess.
What I do have a problem with is how we continue to teach the cult of domesticity to modern Christian women. Paul does remind us about the significance of sexual sin for Christians, as our bodies are the temple of God, but Paul says nothing about cooking or cleaning as having unique import for women. We love to hold up Martha and the Proverbs 31 woman as exemplars of the spiritual worth of domestic work. But, historically, these are bad comparisons. While domesticity has always been important for women throughout church history—like medieval women who baked the Eucharist bread and washed the altar linens—it wasn’t until the early modern world that domesticity became linked with women’s spiritual calling. Instead of just being something that women usually did, domestic prowess in the home (centered on the family) now became something that good Christian women should do because it is what we are designed to do. It is our primary calling in this world.
Domesticity, for evangelical women, is sanctified.
To explain how this happened—how domesticity became embedded in the identity of Christian women—we have to go back a few centuries to the aftermath of the Reformation. The Reformation, if you remember, elevated the status of wives and mothers, imbuing them with spiritual dignity and even some authority. The advance of medical science, combined with the belief that women’s physical bodies are made in the image of God, finally pushed women beyond Aristotle. No longer were women regarded as deformed men; now they were uniquely created by God to complement men. As historian Catherine Brekus writes, “Instead of viewing women as lesser versions of men—incomplete men whose sexual organs were turned inside out—clergymen and scientists portrayed the sexes as essentially different in both biology and temperament.”9 It is pretty much the start of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. Not only are women and men different; they are very different.
But, hey, I remind my students, at least women are no longer monstrous and deformed, right?
By “different” from men, however, early modern thinkers meant much more than sex organs. In the chapter “Learning to Be a Woman,” Lynn Abrams provides several examples from contemporary sources of what “different” now meant for women. For example, Vicomte de Bonald, a political writer in France, wrote in his 1802 treatise on education that “women belong to the family and not to political society, and nature created them for domestic cares and not for public functions.” As such, he continued, “everything in [girls’] instruction should be directed toward domestic utility, just as everything in the education of boys should be directed toward public utility.” I always pause on his next statement when teaching class as it provokes great conversation among students: “It is a false education,” Bonald wrote, “that gives one’s inclinations a direction that goes contrary to nature, that makes the sexes want to exchange occupations just as they would clothing.”10 Science declared women so different from men that the differences affected every aspect of their lives, including education and occupation.
Doesn’t that sound just like what many evangelical women hear today? That women are designed to stay in the home, with paid work outside the home being temporary—that is, only when needed.
Abrams provides an example from an Irish preacher in 1856. The Reverend John Gregg preached that women are designed to be different from men, which included occupations. Men work outside the home in the “great and weighty business of life”; women work inside the home because they are not “fitted” for the work of men. As he said,
We have features peculiar to us as men, and we also have our peculiar capabilities and responsibilities. The great and weighty business of life devolves on men . . . , but a most important portion of the duties of life, especially of private life, falls to the share of women. God has adapted our sex to the peculiar duties to which we are especially called, and for which you are not so well fitted. . . . Society does best when each sex performs the duties for which it is especially ordained.11
Being different for women meant being ordained for the private sphere—family life. It meant staying out of leadership and economic and political roles. It meant literally to do what John MacArthur told Beth Moore to do: “Go home.”12
The Historical Roots of Sanctified Subordination
Where did these ideas come from?
First, they came from the Enlightenment. Historians Katherine French and Allyson Poska provide an excellent overview in Women and Gender in the Western Past. They draw attention to how the Enlightenment, like the Reformation, could have created greater equality for women as women were no longer considered deformed men but, rather, humans and, just like men, capable of rational thought. Unfortunately, these “radical views of human equality” were tempered by the emerging theory of complementarity.13 Patriarchy, in other words, shapeshifted again. A new theory emerged to keep women under the power of men. Isn’t it interesting that it is called complementarity? French and Poska explain, “Complementarity provided the basis for the idea that women were built for domesticity and child-rearing, and men were built for rule, rationality, and public duties. This understanding of sex differences justified the different educations and political rights that men and women received.”14 Perhaps the most famous early proponent of complementarity was the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In his famous text Emile, he expounded his philosophy of education for women, arguing that “the search for abstract and speculative truths, for principles and axioms in science, for all that tends to wide generalization, is beyond a woman’s grasp; their studies should be thoroughly practical.”15 Women, according to Rousseau, are simply not as smart as men and therefore should not bother with more advanced learning. They are better suited to domestic work.
Second, early modern science reinforced the idea that women are so different from men that they are preordained for domesticity. Women’s physical exams suggested that women were smaller and weaker than men, including having smaller heads, which in that time meant smaller and weaker brains. Women were considered to be biologically more similar to children than to men, possibly because women were less evolved than their masculine counterparts. In his 1871 Descent of Man, Charles Darwin explained that desirable evolutionary traits were “transmitted more fully to the male than to the female offspring. . . . Thus man has ultimately become superior to woman.”16 Not to mention that in this brave new scientific world, because women’s bodies are designed for childbirth and mothering, childbirth and mothering should be women’s primary occupation.
Finally, we must understand the effects of the Industrial Revolution. Enlightenment beliefs about women’s physical differences went hand in hand with a world changed by machines. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the transformation of work in the West. Machines and factories sped up everything from the creation of goods to food production. Technological innovation changed not only the time it took to complete work (things got done a lot faster) but also the space in which work was done—moving it from the household to the public sphere, separating domestic space from work space.
The impact on women was significant.
On the one hand, the Industrial Revolution provided women with more job options and allowed them to earn an independent living. In factories, women often worked together in similar positions, enabling them to forge new female communities like labor unions. French and Poska note that in 1830 “three thousand female workers in a tobacco factory in Madrid rioted for five days against a wage cut and poor working conditions.”17 On the other hand, the Industrial Revolution hardened gender restrictions. While the Industrial Revolution certainly created a boom in jobs, and even precipitated the hiring of high proportions of women during the early stages, it didn’t improve women’s wages. Indeed, it seemed to provoke arguments that women deserved to be paid lower wages than men simply because they were women. As James Mitchell, a British factory commissioner, declared in 1833,
Some persons feel much regret at seeing the wages of females so low . . . , but perhaps such persons are wrong; and nature affects her own purposes more wisely and more effectually than could be done by the wisest of men. The low price of female labor makes it the most profitable as well as most agreeable occupation for a female to superintend her own domestic establishment, and her low wages do not tempt her to abandon the care of her own children. Nature therefore provides that her designs shall not be disappointed.18
Women should be paid less, Mitchell argued, because that would discourage them from working too much outside the home, which is where they belonged.
Beliefs that women were ill-suited to factory work because of their weakness and that their primary job should be in the home resulted in laws passed throughout Europe that shortened women’s work hours, forced them to take unpaid maternity leave, and even—in some places—prohibited them from working at all. French activist Paule Mink defended women, claiming that “by denying women the right to work, you degrade her, you put her under man’s yoke and deliver her over to man’s good pleasure. By ceasing to make her a worker, you deprive her of her liberty, and thereby, of her responsibility, . . . so that she no longer will be a free and intelligent creature, but will merely be a reflection, a small part of her husband.”19
I always pause at this point in my lecture. Mink argued that by forcing women to remain in the home, by denying women the right to work if they so desired, women would lose not only their freedom but their identities.
Sanctifying the Cult of Domesticity
This brings us full circle to the cult of domesticity.
By the early nineteenth century, the separation of work from home, scientific claims about female distinctiveness and weakness, and Christian teachings emphasizing the role of wife and the natural piety of women melded together. The cult of domesticity was born. It’s hard to pin down its birth date, but it had definitely emerged by the early nineteenth century. Again, the four main components of the cult of domesticity, first articulated by historian Barbara Welter and summarized here, are as follows:
Don’t these characteristics sound familiar? Doesn’t it seem that the cult of domesticity is written into the core of modern evangelicalism? Indeed, doesn’t biblical womanhood just seem like an updated version of the cult of domesticity? Instead of biblical womanhood stemming from the Bible, it stems from a gender hierarchy developed in the wake of the Industrial Revolution to deal with the social and economic changes wrought by work moving outside the home. As French and Poska unequivocally state, “Industrialization created the cult of domesticity.”21
When I first learned about the cult of domesticity, all I could think about was James Dobson. His book Love for a Lifetime made a lasting impression on me. I clearly remember reading how women were designed to be more passive than men, how women were physically weaker and more prone to emotional instability, how women preferred the safety of the home and a breadwinning husband over the harsh working world of corporate America. Suddenly, his attitude made sense. What Dobson was teaching about women’s natures wasn’t biblical. It was rooted in the cult of domesticity and ancient ideas about the biological inferiority of women. Dobson was simply preaching the nineteenth-century cult of domesticity, the only difference being that he had now sanctified it.
When it comes to the evangelical endurance of the cult of domesticity—the idea that women are created for the home while men are created for public work and leadership—it seems that I should modify Judith Bennett’s observation. She writes, “Patriarchy might be everywhere, but it is not everywhere the same.”22 This is usually true, but the cult of domesticity seems to be an exception. Patriarchy is everywhere, and sometimes—as in the case of the nineteenth-century cult of domesticity resurrected as modern biblical womanhood—patriarchy is the same.
How Women Adapted
I had the privilege of hearing historian Kate Bowler speak twice before she became a household name. The first time was in 2015 at a meeting of the American Historical Association. I was the upcoming program chair for the 2016 Conference on Faith and History, and I listened to Bowler present on her then-new book Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel. I immediately asked her if she would be a plenary speaker for our 2016 program.
Because of a bizarre turn of events during the conference—a Donald Trump rally suddenly gathered at the Christian college campus that was hosting our event—the second time I heard Bowler speak was even more memorable than the first. We had been kicked out of the buildings originally assigned for the conference, as they were too close to the Trump rally, and reassigned to the campus chapel. This meant that Bowler gave her presentation standing behind Pat Robertson’s pulpit at Regent University in Virginia Beach. I am happy to report that I too got to speak from that same pulpit as I introduced her. I wasn’t brave enough to raise my arms in the air, just like the stained glass Jesus behind the pulpit, but Kate Bowler was.
The second reason Bowler’s presentation was memorable was because of her topic: how conservative evangelical women have carved out religious authority in traditions that prohibit women’s leadership. Her research was later published as The Preacher’s Wife: The Precarious Power of Evangelical Women Celebrities. In a rather entertaining section of her talk, she described her spreadsheet of Twitter profiles for evangelical women. Words like coffee, yoga pants, and hot mess, I wrote down in my notes, were favorites, but wife and mother were common identities expressed. In her book, Bowler provides the examples of Ann Voskamp, “Wife to the Farmer: Mama to 7,” and Lauren Chandler, “wife to matt. mother to audrey, reid + norah.” They both emphasize their role as wife first and mother second.23 Being a wife and mother gives evangelical women credibility. As Bowler writes in the introduction to The Preacher’s Wife, “A famous megaministry woman . . . drew fame from the familial role she held as a mother, sister, daughter, or, most often, wife of an important godly man. . . . Most women built on the poured foundation of marriage and family.”24
Because of Bowler’s work, I often think about what the Twitter profiles would be for the medieval women I study who preach and teach. They would be rather different from Bowler’s evangelical women, I think. Margery Kempe’s would definitely include the word creature. Maybe “Creature of God, professional crier, pilgrim, secondary virgin, vowess.” I doubt Kempe would include any reference to her family or her husband. Julian of Norwich’s would be easier to guess: “Enclosed nun, servant of God, visionary, spiritual adviser, lives alone.” Probably, though, Margaret of Antioch’s would be my favorite: “Defiant virgin, impervious to torture, dragon slayer, evangelist, miracle worker, friend of God.” Neither marriage nor motherhood would figure significantly in the Twitter profiles of these medieval women; they wouldn’t bother highlighting domestic skills either.
By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Twitter profiles of preaching women would look a lot more like the examples Bowler brings up. Their status as wife and mother would probably be expanded to “virtuous wife” and “loving mother.” They would likely highlight their domestic prowess as “household manager” or “family Bible reader,” and they would definitely reference their feminine distinctiveness, describing themselves as a “gentle sister,” “long-suffering mother,” “prophetic daughter,” “quiet spirit,” and perhaps even as the “weaker sex.”
Women adapt to the ever-changing rules of patriarchy. The patriarchal equilibrium endures, but it is defined by the culture around us. The rules of patriarchy change as history changes (although the endurance of the cult of domesticity might be an exception!). Rejecting feminine distinctiveness authorized women’s voices in medieval Europe, but that no longer worked in the post-Reformation world. Embracing feminine distinctiveness now became the best way forward for women called to preach. “Instead of justifying women’s right to preach on the grounds that they had transcended their gender—that they were neither male nor female,” writes historian Catherine Brekus, “a new ideology of female virtue” emerged, grounding women’s authority in their feminine distinctiveness.25
We can take heart.
Women, despite patriarchy’s ever-moving goalposts, have always found a way to preach and teach the Word of God. In one of the most encouraging appendixes to an academic text that I have ever read, Brekus charts each woman she could find in the records who preached and exhorted in American churches between 1740 and 1845. One hundred twenty-three names. One hundred twenty-three women who felt God’s calling on their lives and responded. One hundred twenty-three women from approximately twenty Protestant denominations: Almira Prescott Bullock, who founded a new Baptist sect with her husband, Jeremiah, in 1821; Zilpah Elaw, who preached in an African Methodist church in 1827; Ellen Harmon White, who founded the Seventh-Day Adventists in 1844. White women and Black women preached across the landscape of American Christianity. Brekus powerfully concludes, “By preserving their faith in a world that seemed to scorn them, by trusting in the goodness of God, they hoped to inspire future generations of evangelical women to claim the pulpit as their own.”26 And as a Baptist woman, I love that about thirty of the preaching women in Brekus’s appendix are Baptist.
But we can also be disheartened by this information.
In order for these women to preach, they had to conform to expectations. Turning the cult of domesticity to their advantage, women claimed that their superior piety and God-given nurturing roles empowered them to preach: “Pastoral work is adapted to women, for it is motherly work,” explained Methodist preacher Anna Oliver. “As a mother spreads her table with food suited to the individual needs of her family, so the pastor feeds the flock.”27 This certainly speaks to these women’s persistence in fulfilling God’s calling. But it also shows how the rules changed again for women. God’s calling on women’s lives never seems justification enough for women to preach; they have to justify their right based on their historical context of patriarchy. For nineteenth-century women, this meant using their feminine distinctiveness to authorize their voice.
The cult of domesticity infiltrated America from its British roots and seeped into what became modern evangelical culture. From the popularity of magazines like Godey’s Lady’s Book in the 1850s (which instructed women on how to turn a house into a home) to Marabel Morgan’s 1973 book The Total Woman (which argued that the key to a perfect marriage was for a woman to abjectly submit to her husband) to the modern True Woman conference led by Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, the ideal evangelical woman was one who protected her sexual purity, stayed home, nurtured the spirituality of her family, and submitted to her husband. What evangelicals have failed to realize, explains historian Randall Balmer, is that the “traditional concept of femininity” that we believe to be from the Bible is nothing more than “a nineteenth-century construct.”28
All we have to do is read a selection from Happily Ever After, a book of marriage devotionals by John Piper, Francis Chan, and Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, among others. “He sacrifices, she submits. He leads, she follows. He initiates, she affirms. He reflects Jesus, she reflects Jesus.”29 To my women’s history–trained ears, these words might have come straight from the Enlightenment writings of Rousseau: “The man should be strong and active; the woman should be weak and passive; the one must have both the power and the will; it is enough that the other should offer little resistance.”30 Women are the passive partners, submitting, following, affirming, and yielding to the strength of their husbands. The only difference between Rousseau and the Happily Ever After marriage devotional is that now Jesus sanctifies these differences.
All we have to do is read any post on The Transformed Wife blog to see that, in some places, the cult of domesticity is in hyperdrive. Take, for example, the flowchart made by Lori Alexander—the woman behind The Transformed Wife—which compares stay-at-home moms to working moms. The chart, titled “Should Mothers Have Careers?,” went viral in 2018. Her answer, clearly, was no. In Alexander’s opinion, a stay-at-home mom has a “fulfilling life” and “her husband and children rise up & call her blessed,” whereas a working mom has a life that is “falling apart.” When Alexander worked as a teacher, she says she didn’t “feel like . . . a good wife or mother,”31 and she extrapolates from her experience to assert that all women feel this way—or should feel this way.
All we have to do is look back at the Barna poll discussed in chapters 1 and 2. The poll numbers show how resistant evangelicals still are to women’s leadership. As Barna Group says about its 2017 poll results, “Within the Church—among evangelicals, especially—support for women in leadership and acknowledgment of the challenges women may face lags significantly.”32
History matters, and for modern evangelical women, nineteenth-century history has mattered far more than it ever should have.