Evangelicals reframed 1970s economic shifts as a crisis of gender and authority

Evidence

Dare to Discipline had little to say about gender roles, but Dobson’s subsequent books made up for that omission. As the decade wore on, it became clear to Dobson that preserving distinct gender roles was critical to turning back the tide of social chaos. Dobson’s focus on gender can be explained in part by larger trends undermining “traditional” gender roles in the 1970s. The postwar years had been marked by economic gains that made it possible for many men to serve as sole breadwinners for their families. The global economic restructuring beginning in the 1970s, however, resulted in a decline of American manufacturing jobs and stagnation of male wages. The breadwinner economy had always been as much myth as reality, but by the 1970s, this aspirational ideal was becoming increasingly difficult to attain, even among members of the white middle class. In 1950, 37 percent of women worked for pay, but that number began to rise significantly in the 1970s. Linked in part to women’s growing economic independence, rates of divorce began to increase dramatically in the 1970s as well. All of this amounted to a “crisis” of the family, and for evangelicals, gender and authority, not global economic patterns, were at the heart of this crisis. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 190

Categorization

• XREF: Direct support for the reader’s stated contest point: Du Mez here does attribution-of-causality work, showing evangelicals misattributing economic crisis to gender breakdown — relevant to assessing her method’s argumentative weight.
• DEFINE: Establishes the ‘crisis of the family’ framing that anchors evangelical gender ideology — useful definitional groundwork for the book’s argument.