Evangelical marriage advice framed female submission as repairing the husband’s threatened ego

Evidence

Morgan offered practical tips to help women “become the sunshine” in their homes, advice that included time management, more efficient meal planning (prepare your dinner salads right after breakfast), and weight loss. Most importantly, women just needed to stop nagging their husbands. If the examples Morgan cites in The Total Woman were in any way a reflection of the state of American marriages, things were in a sorry state indeed. Women and men lived in silent and simmering resentment. Marriage was drudgery and sex perfunctory, or nonexistent. Stay-at-home wives lived in constant fear of their husbands taking up with secretaries, and really, who could blame men for doing so? Morgan’s solution was simple: treat your husband like a king, revere him, and cater to his every need. This was especially important for working women, because a man’s “masculinity may be threatened by your paycheck.” A wife needed to let her husband know that he was her hero, and it was her job to put her husband’s “tattered ego” back together at the end of each day by admiring his masculine qualities—his muscles, or whiskers. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 142

Categorization

• XREF: Precursor mechanism for how female deference gets recast as emotional labor for male fragility, a strand that runs through later chapters on complementarian teaching. — connects to: Systematic humiliation by a wife can destroy a husband’s creative confidence — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1313