Patriarchy & Gender: Before 1940

The Victorian doctrine of 'separate spheres' — men in the public world of work and politics, women in the private world of home and family — was not a biblical category. It was a product of industrial capitalism that evangelical theologians baptized with scriptural language and declared eternal. The Pauline texts most often cited to restrict women's authority — 1 Timothy 2, Ephesians 5, 1 Corinthians 14 — had been read in a variety of ways throughout church history. In the late nineteenth century, a specific reading hardened into a test of orthodoxy, coinciding precisely with the emergence of the suffrage movement. Some prominent evangelical and fundamentalist leaders explicitly opposed women's voting rights. They did not frame their opposition in political terms but in theological ones: female authority over men, in any sphere, violated the divinely-ordained order of creation. Critics argue the theology of gender hierarchy and the theology of racial hierarchy drew on the same doctrine of fixed, God-ordained social order. Historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez traces a second inheritance alongside male headship: a promise of happiness through surrender. Hannah Whitall Smith's holiness classic The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life (1875) taught that total surrender to God's will brought holiness and happiness; Du Mez argues that over the following generations this was recast as a wife's total surrender to her husband, with the same promises attached. In the same years New Thought, the belief that the mind shapes reality, spread through American religious life, and in the 1920s and '30s a New Thought publisher, the Psychological Press, issued booklets titled Fascinating Womanhood. Du Mez argues these strands later fed both the prosperity gospel and the 'biblical womanhood' books of the 1960s and '70s. By 1940, the infrastructure for institutionalized evangelical patriarchy was fully built: seminaries that trained male-only clergy, denominations that formally excluded women from leadership, and a body of theological literature that presented male headship as the irreducible core of Christian family life. The men who would later build the complementarian movement and the purity culture industry did not create this theology. They inherited it.

Themes this entry appears in

• Patriarchy

Connections from Patriarchy & Gender: Before 1940

• influenced → Elisabeth Elliot (1976) — Du Mez traces a line from Hannah Whitall Smith's The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life (1875), which taught that total surrender to God brings happiness, to later evangelical women writers including Elisabeth Elliot, whose Let Me Be a Woman (1976) taught acceptance of God-given feminine roles.
• influenced → Fascinating Womanhood & The Total Woman (1963) — Fascinating Womanhood (1963) was derived from booklets published in the 1920s and 1930s by the Psychological Press. Du Mez argues that Andelin's book and Marabel Morgan's The Total Woman (1973), whose author had taken a class based on Andelin's book, added Bible verses to that New Thought advice and carried forward Hannah Whitall Smith's holiness promise that surrender brings happiness.

Sources

• Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation — Kristin Kobes Du Mez (2020)
• The Making of Biblical Womanhood — Beth Allison Barr (2021)
• Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made — Kristin Kobes Du Mez (2026)