Evangelical leaders dismissed sexual harassment claims as feminist hypocrisy

Evidence

In the pages of Christianity Today, Charles Colson argued that the Thomas hearings were the result of feminism run amuck. Feminists insisted that women should be sexually liberated (“read promiscuous”), use explicit language (“read obscene”), and freed from “the burden of childbearing” (to compete in the workplace), yet now they complained when men used explicit language when talking to women in the workplace. “The very people who deliberately tore down older codes of chivalry and deference to women now want the protection they offer,” he groused. It wasn’t just the family that was under attack, but something even more fundamental: “the very notion of what it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman.” What Americans were seeing was the result of confusion sowed by militant feminists, and since God was “not the author of confusion,” something diabolical must be at work. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 337

Categorization

• QUESTION: The anti-harassment position is framed as feminist hypocrisy for having torn down chivalry — an argument worth examining for how it lets men off the hook for workplace conduct.
• SEED: This is a clean exhibit for any piece on how the ‘chivalry vs. feminism’ frame was weaponized against women’s harassment claims in the 1990s.
• XREF: connects to: Women church members could publicly withhold endorsement from ministers who exploited them — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 810