The ongoing economic crisis –as well as the broader, longer transformation of America’s economic landscape– is having a profound effect on the relative positions of men and women in the USA.
In the last few decades, median female income has been tracking real GDP per capita much more closely than median male income. This trend reflects a series of converging factors. The rate of participation in the labor force has been increasing strongly for women and slightly decreasing for men. Female education levels have risen dramatically while male levels have been relatively flat.
While the labor market has been placing a higher premium on creative, analytic, and interpersonal skills, technological change and globalization have reduced the number and share of high-wage, low-skill production jobs that were once the province of male breadwinners. The post-industrial world tends to be a more feminine one.
It’s tempting to relate this phenomenon to an intriguing new trend in the Christian Right: the doctrine of “Christian submission”, the idea that the Lord asks wives to be humbly submissive to their husbands. Michelle Bachmann, the raging diva of the Tea Party, has been deeply influenced by this specific fundamentalist subculture.
A few years before running in the Republican primaries, Bachmann explained to a faith-based audience that she had become a tax lawyer, in spite of her absolute lack of interest in this profession, because her husband had asked her to do so. She had to be “faithful to what [she] felt God was calling [her] to do” through Marcus Bachmann’s guidance. Later, her husband told her that politics was her godly mandated vocation. She reluctantly but obediently decided to run for Congress.
In 2009, over 6,000 women met in Chicago for the “True Woman Conference,” whose founding manifesto claims that “when we respond humbly to male leadership in our homes and churches, we demonstrate a noble submission to authority that reflects Christ’s submission to God His Father.”
One of the main leader of the “True Woman” movement is evangelical “motivational speaker” Nancy Leigh DeMoss. This best-selling author offers her pious readership “a 30-Day True Woman Make-Over to discover and experience God’s design and calling for your life,” complete with helpful links, printable downloads and recommended resources. Leigh DeMoss has built a lucrative empire with her numerous publications, conferences and Internet crash courses.
Another favorite author of the Christian submission theology is Mary Pride. Her book, “The Way Home: Beyond Feminism, Back to Reality”, deeply inspired the Quiverfull Movement, named after Psalm 127:3-5, in which families with “a quiver full of children” are said to be blessed since children are “as arrows are in the hand of a mighty man.” Pride advocates big patriarchal families and homeschooling, public schools being – she says - dens of secular perversion.
According to some Quiverfull activists, girls should not attend college because it might destroy their faith. Daughters should stay at home after they graduate from homeschooling and be a “helpmeet” to their fathers, as well as to the husbands God will send their way. Pushing this Saudi-like consistency to its extreme consequences, some Quiverfull women are not allowed to drive.
Bachmann is a long time activist of the evangelical homeschool movement. At Oral Roberts University, a fundamentalist Christian college she attended in the eighties, she helped a professor named John Eidsmoe build a database of state homeschooling statutes. She later worked as his research assistant on a book called “Christianity and the Constitution.”
Eidsmoe accuses feminists of “violating the normal order” by pretending that “it is ‘demeaning’ and ‘unfulfilling’ to be a housewife.” A man “who planned all this life to be a traditional husband and father,” writes Eidsmoe, “feels threatened, insecure, and resentful about these changes. That wasn’t what he bargained for when he entered the marriage.”
But what is the relation between those reactionary rants and the crisis in lower middle-class male skills and wages? Here’s my theory. First, there is a major irony in the fact that high-profile hyperactive public women such as Leigh DeMoss, Pride or Bachmann can encourage other women to stay home and submit to their men while they themselves are building corporate empires or making very ambitious political power bids.
Then, it’s extremely unlikely that, in the midst of a cruel recession, any of the pious middle-class and lower middle-class wives targeted by the Christian submission movement could afford to quit their jobs. Which makes one think that the whole thing might well be a desperate ideological overcompensation, rather than a serious doctrine.
I suspect that “Christian submission” is not really about women staying at home or blindly obeying their husbands. It’s about making token gestures to soothe their bruised egos and their injured male pride. As such, it is pure rhetorical smoke and in the long run, it will not help “traditional husbands and fathers” feel less “threatened, insecure, and resentful.”
The views expressed in this article are the author’s and may not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.
Left at the Crossroads: Walking around Tahrir Square
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Left at the Crossroads: AfPak and America’s war weariness
Left at the Crossroads: The last communist Brahmins
Left at the Crossroads: Obama, Netanyahu, and the game of pretense
Left at the Crossroads: Democracy and sectarian strife in Egypt
Left at the Crossroads: Doubts and certainties in Peru’s presidential race
Left at the Crossroads: Asad’s broken promises
Left at the Crossroads: Obama’s disappointing Latin trip
Left at the Crossroads: Pakistan’s schizoid path to darkness
Left at the Crossroads: And what about Iran?
Left at the Crossroads: Revolutions and the new media
Left at the Crossroads: The tiger and the cage
Left at the Crossroads: Tunisia and the quality of Arab despair
Left at the Crossroads: Turkish paradoxes
Left at the Crossroads: The last tango in Delhi
Left at the Crossroads: Cuban reform and the international scene
Left at the Crossroads: Asian ambiguities and the new Great Game
Left at the Crossroads: Pension reform – what the French really want
Left at the Crossroads: World’s next hotspot – Kashmir
Left at the Crossroads: Ogling the poor
Left at the Crossroads: Remaking the mob in Latin America
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Globalization might already sound like a stale catchword, but the new interconnected reality it describes still has surprising tricks up its sleeves. So what do you do when you’re a leftish French writer born in Africa and living in South America, with a background in Slavic Studies, a worried fascination for emerging Asian powers, and interests ranging from classical political philosophy to Bollywood film music? Read, travel, wonder. And send scattered dispatches from modernity’s frontlines.
Marc Saint-Upéry is a French journalist and political analyst living in Ecuador since 1998. He writes about political philosophy, international relations and development issues for various French and Latin American publications and in the international magazines Le Monde Diplomatique and Nueva Sociedad. He is the author of El Sueño de Bolívar: El Desafío de las izquierdas Sudamericanas (Bolivar’s Dream: the Left’s challenge in South America).
