Saran-Wrap and Sodomites: The Complexities of Sexuality for New Christian-Right Women

In the context of the New Christian Right ascendency in the 1970s, prominent conservative women forged new sexual subjectivities by responding to contemporary sexual revolutions in two apparently paradoxical ways. First, they became especially vocal critics of the "sexualization" of American culture. In 1977, Anita Bryant was among the first to make homosexuality a national issue for the emerging religious right. Beverly LaHaye, who founded Concerned Women for America in 1979, became one of the most vocal critics of contemporary feminism, including what she perceived as feminist advocacy of sexual freedom for unmarried heterosexual women and lesbians. Second, conservative women expanded the bounds of appropriate evangelical sexuality in advice manuals that built on broader traditions of popular Christian writing. Accepting the framework of wifely submission, they wrote about sex and gender relations in ways that subtly shifted existing ideologies and expanded women's roles. Combining these two rhetorical threads in complicated and often surprising ways, conservative Christian women's writing about sex made space for them to claim leadership by pushing but not overstepping the bounds of appropriate femininity in conservative evangelical contexts. This project builds on the insights of scholars like Marie Griffith, Amy DeRogatis, and Seth Dowland, arguing that the shifting sexual discourses of conservative evangelicals in the last half of the twentieth century were central to the ways in which conservative Christian women claimed political leadership in a movement often dominated by bombastic men and strident defenses of “traditional” gender roles. Focusing on the writing of women like Anita Bryant, Beverly LaHaye, and Marabel Morgan, I examine the tensions in their work between permissible sexuality and a more vocal antisex discourse, between feminine submission and women's national political leadership.