The next excerpt I want to share from my upcoming book, Beyond Authority and Submission, is from Chapter 6: “Later Feminism and the Conservative Christian Response.” Part of the history that I cover in the book is the various waves of feminism and how society and the church responded to them. And how the response to feminism has shaped our beliefs about women and men.

Beyond Authority and Submission: Women and Men in Marriage, Church, and Society will be available September 3. You can click the links to pre-order on Amazon or Barnes and Noble. A Kindle version will be available on the release date.

It’s not that conservative Christians believe that the feminist movement didn’t do any good. They do—but they also believe that women were content until the feminist movement. As one complementarian book explains, “Male-dominated culture, or patriarchy, isn’t the problem that feminism made it out to be. It’s not the real reason women were unhappy, if they really were unhappy. Why not? Because if it were, women would be happier after the feminist movements successes, but they aren’t.”[1]

Much of what’s being taught about the nature of women and men and gender roles in marriage, church, and society started out as a response to the feminist movement—or at least to aspects of it. For example, the belief that feminism makes men effeminate and turns women into “‘men’ who happen to be biologically capable of having children”[2] has led to particular definitions of masculinity and femininity.

As the anti-suffrage postcards did, some conservatives today depict feminists as being loud and aggressive, demanding of their own way, ambitious, and career-oriented. This goes against what they believe women were created to be, as we will see in the next chapter. Let’s see how this reaction to feminism has influenced conservative Christian teaching on the nature of women and men.

[1] Mary A. Kassian and Nancy Leigh DeMoss, True Woman 101: Divine Design; An
Eight-Week Study on Biblical Womanhood (Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2012), 137, nook.

[2] Voddie Baucham Jr., What He Must Be: . . . If He Wants to Marry My Daughter (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2009), 152.

[3] See Kassian and DeMoss, True Woman 101, 118–20.