Right-wing Women

Love. Love is always crucial in effecting the allegiance of women.

The Right offers women a concept of love based on order and stability, with formal areas of mutual accountability. A woman is loved for fulfilling her female functions: obedience is an expression

of love and so are sexual submission and childbearing. In return,

the man is supposed to be responsible for the material and emotional well-being of the woman. And, increasingly, to redeem the cruel inadequacies of mortal men, the Right offers women the love

of Jesus, beautiful brother, tender lover, compassionate friend, perfect healer of sorrow and resentment, the one male to whom one can submit absolutely— be Woman as it were— without being sexually violated or psychologically abused.

It is important and fascinating, of course, to note that women

never, no matter how deluded or needy or desperate, worship

Jesus as the perfect son. No faith is that blind. There is no religious or cultural palliative to deaden the raw pain of the son’s betrayal of the mother: only her own obedience to the same father,

the sacrifice of her own life on the same cross, her own body nailed

and bleeding, can enable her to accept that her son, like Jesus, has

come to do his Father’s work. Feminist Leah Fritz, in Thinking Like

a W oman, described the excruciating predicament of women who

try to find worth in Christian submission: “Unloved, unrespected,

unnoticed by the Heavenly Father, condescended to by the Son,

and fucked by the Holy Ghost, western woman spends her entire

life trying to please. ” 3

But no matter how hard she tries to please, it is harder still for

her to be pleased. In Bless This House, Anita Bryant describes how

each day she must ask Jesus to “help me love my husband and

children. ”4 In The Total Woman, Marabel Morgan explains that it is

only through God’s power that “we can love and accept others,

including our husbands. ” 5 In The Gift o f In ner H ealing, Ruth Carter

Stapleton counsels a young woman who is in a desperately unhappy marriage: “T ry to spend a little time each day visualizing Jesus coming in the door from work. Then see yourself walking up

to him, embracing him. Say to Jesus, i t ’s good to have you home

N ick. ’” 6

Ruth Carter Stapleton married at nineteen. Describing the early

years of her marriage, she wrote:

After moving four hundred fifty miles from my first family

in order to save my marriage, I found myself in a cold, threatening, unprotected world, or so it seemed to my confused heart. In an effort to avoid total destruction, I indulged in escapes of every kind. . .

A major crisis arose when I discovered I was pregnant with

my first child. I knew that this was supposed to be one of the

crowning moments of womanhood, but not for me.. . . When

my baby was born, I wanted to be a good mother, but I felt

even more trapped.. . . Then three more babies were born in

rapid succession, and each one, so beautiful, terrified me. I did

love them, but by the fourth child I was at the point of total

desperation. 7

Apparently the birth of her fourth child occasioned her surrender

to Jesus. For a time, life seemed worthwhile. Then, a rupture in a

cherished friendship plummeted her into an intolerable depression.

During this period, she jumped out of a moving car in what she