SHOW NOTES:
We’re starting this conversation with a little understanding of history, how the 1950s defined marriage and split-sphere gender roles as we know them today.
Together, we’ll consider this question: If Paul tells us in Romans 12:2 not to conform to the patterns of this world, then why does so much of what we’re taught today in the church reflect the culture of marriage in 1950s America rather than mirroring Christ?
Join Kensi Duszynski this fall as she facilitates a conversation around marital health, relational dynamics, and the proper place of gender roles in Christian marriage.
Conversations will take place biweekly.
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Welcome back to the Brave Marriage Podcast, a podcast for couples who want to grow as individuals, do marriage with intention, and live mutually empowered, purposeful lives. I’m Kensi Duszynski, a licensed marriage and family therapist and certified professional coach. And you are listening to episode 1 of season 2, where ready or not, like I said in the trailer, we will be diving into a conversation every other week around marriage, mutuality, and gender roles.
I know we have some new folks listening, so just to give you a little bit of background on who it is you’re listening to, I am someone who grew up in the church in a small town in Kentucky. I felt called to ministry as a teenager, was commissioned in that calling by my church body, and have spent my vocational life pretty much ever since in marriage ministry, if you will, which for me, has taken the shape of becoming a licensed practitioner and working with married couples in the Bible Belt. I studied at Focus on the Family’s Leadership Institute in college, where I learned about what has come to be known as biblical manhood and womanhood, I graduated from Asbury University, where we talked a lot about the integration of psychology and theology, I attended Asbury Theological Seminary where I learned evidence-based practices of couples therapy, and then I worked toward my license as a MFT for four years after grad school. And I’m getting to the age now where I can look back on my reading and study of marriage over the past 15 years or so and compare it to what I’ve seen in my work with couples over the past 8 years or so, and see what is actually helpful and actually true when it comes to helping couples and what’s not. So season 2 is really a passion project for me to synthesize all these ideas, and I appreciate you coming along for the ride!
As I’ve been thinking about where to start this series, I knew I couldn’t start with what’s good, what’s bad, and here’s why as a therapist, because I know, as someone who’s grown up in the Christian community, how deeply we hold some of our ideas about marriage and what it means to be a good husband or wife. I also know, having grown up in a rural area, that some can feel mistrusting of psychology and therapy and don’t even know how to conceptualize mental and emotional health as something as important as physical health. I know that when it comes to relationships, those of us who’ve grown up in conservative families and churches trust what we’ve been taught about marriage and gender roles there, even if we’ve also been influenced by the media and culture around us.
So instead, I decided to start this conversation about marriage, mutuality, and gender roles with a little understanding of history. Because when we’re inside of a certain context, like right now, as we’re living through history, it can be hard to step outside of it, to take a look at it, to examine it, and to evaluate it based on its strengths and weaknesses. But personally, when I began to understand marriage in the context of history, that’s the place where I was finally able to assimilate all these ideas and come to my understanding of what I’ve seen in the church, versus what I’ve seen in marriage therapy literature, versus what I’ve seen in my office.
So here’s what we’re gonna do: In order to examine marriage as we understand it today, we’re gonna start by taking a look at marriage in a decade before most of you listening were born: the 1950s. The first time I ever thought about marriage throughout history was in 2010 at the Focus Leadership Institute, where I had my first marriage and family studies course. Our professors, as kind of a warm up exercise, had written each decade from the 20th century on a piece of poster board, and spaced them out around the perimeter of the room. And they instructed us to go and stand in front of the decade in which we thought we’d most want to live, if we could—to choose the decade that we thought had the best that marriage and family life had to offer.
Okay, so there were 44 of us, and as 20-somethings who grew up in the ‘90s, most people ended up in front of the 1970s posters or later. I, on the other hand, had grown up watching reruns of I Love Lucy, Happy Days, and the movie remake of Leave It to Beaver, so I stood in front of the 1950s poster, along with one other classmate who chose that decade because she liked the idea of wearing pearls and poodle skirts, that was her reasoning. But when asked why I chose that decade, I said something about how it seemed like the 1950s held all these moral values that growing up in the church, I’d learned were a part of Christian living. And so, from what I’d seen on TV, it seemed like the 1950s were a pretty ideal place for Christian families to live.
…And that’s when I got my first education on just how little I understood about the history of Christian marriage in America.
So I would like to do a little exercise with you. I’d like you to use your imagination to travel back in time with me to the mid-1950s. Eisenhower is President of the United States, and we’re about 20 years removed from the end of the Great Depression, and about 10 years post-World War II. Compare that with the distance we are today from 9/11 and the recession of 2008. So understandably, between Truman and Eisenhower’s presidencies, lots of effort has gone into re-stabilizing society and the economy upon the return of millions of WWII veterans. This effort is seen in government programs like the GI Bill, which provided unemployment aid, education, and mortgage assistance to millions of American veterans. It’s seen in strengthening the image of America as a strong, militarized nation, armed with a capitalist economy and Christian family values. And it’s seen in the emergence of the ideal American family: the white, middle-class nuclear family with a breadwinning husband who works outside the home, and a stay-at-home wife, who works within the home to keep her family strong.
Can you bring to mind the image of Rosie the Riveter? Well, if she was the model picture of a woman in the 1940s, a woman who stepped up and served and worked to aid in the war effort on behalf of her country, then upon WWII veterans’ return, Rosie the Riveter was replaced with the image of June Cleaver as the ideal 1950s woman.
So imagine you’re a married person doing life in this 1950s world. Some societal and economic stabilization has been achieved, and if you’re white and above the poverty line, you’re enjoying the benefits of this in a disproportionate scale to your black neighbors. I say this to indicate here that many black Americans weren’t granted equal access to things like VA mortgage loans or suburban housing due to some legalese in the GI Bill that placed federal benefits in the hands of the state, many of whom were still operating under Jim Crow laws and racial segregation in the south.
But on the whole, the economy is flourishing such that compared to what’s been called “the prosperous twenties,” the middle class in America has nearly doubled, as has your discretionary income. In the mid-1950s, this means wealth building, again, especially if you’re white and benefiting from government programs, and extra money for things like houses with separate bedrooms for everyone, a second car, a new TV, and modern kitchen appliances.
So you’ve just endured a few decades there of recession, of war, and of hardship. And in a matter of ten years after the war, you find yourself the recipient of a quaint little home in the new suburbs, with a church of your denomination not too far away. You can now rest easy in the assurance that you live in a safe, Christian nation, which you’re reminded of every time you say the Pledge of Allegiance, which now, includes the phrase “one nation under God,” or every time you spend your new discretionary income because of the recent addition of “In God We Trust” that’s been added to all US currency. I mean, compared to what you’ve known, this is ideal, this is the good life. This is the epitome of the American dream.
And as a middle-class couple living in the 1950s, you find yourself enamored with a couple of things: First of all, new and improved home technologies that you can now afford, like the washing machine, an electric dryer, a refrigerator/freezer combo, the vacuum cleaner, all things that promise to make your home life more convenient. K, this is like the Alexa or the Roomba of the 1950s. And on the topic of home life, the second thing you find yourself all consumed by is how to construct this nuclear family ideal that you’re seeing everywhere in mass media and pop culture. From TV shows and magazine ads, to family experts and marriage advice columns, it seems like all efforts are being aimed at solidifying and reinforcing rigid male-female gender roles.
From Hoover vacuums, you see ads that read, “She’ll be happier with a Hoover.” From a refrigerator company, you see a blindfolded mom holding the hand of a child while her husband presents her new fridge. The copy reads, “The surprise of her life…and the best!” From Edward Podolsky’s book, Sex Today in Wedded Life, you read, “Be a good listener, let your husband tell you all his troubles and yours will seem trivial in comparison. Don't bother him with petty troubles and complaints when he comes home from work. Let him relax before dinner. Discuss family problems after the inner man has been satisfied. Remember your most important job is to build up and maintain his ego; morale is a woman's business."
From his advice column, “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” in the Ladies Home Journal, Paul Popenoe maintained that a husband’s job was to work outside the home and provide for his family, while a woman’s job was to keep her husband happy, faithful, and successful at work. A man’s behavior was thought not to reflect his character, but to offer a window inside his home as to what type of woman he was married to, and what type of home environment was contributing to his behavior and success at work.
And a question I have is, why? Why were so many in the 1950s invested in creating and maintaining split-sphered gender roles?
Well, from a socio-ecological perspective, if you’re trying to restabilize a society that’s been marked for decades by men leaving the workforce and going to war, and women entering the workforce with higher paying wages than they’ve known before, and then suddenly, both men and women are trying to find their place again in the midst of a culture that looks quite different from the world before they left, then the way to give men and women a sense of purpose and patriotism after World War II is to promote these split-sphere gender roles as a way to continue to serve your country, especially during the Cold War, is by keeping the family strong. For men, the hope was re-entry into the workplace and back into their seat of influence, as before. For women, the hope was that the preoccupation with, and distraction of domesticity, would soften the blow of what they were losing by focusing on all they stood to gain: namely, a happy home, a happy husband, and the social rewards of playing by the rules and conforming to cultural marital scripts.
Back to the 21st century and messages we’ve received in the church: What messages like this linger? Does this advice seem absurd to you? Or does it seem in line with what you’ve been taught or internalized somewhere along the way?
Now, I want you to time travel back with me all the way to the early church in the 1st century, about twenty years after Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension into heaven. Imagine the legacy left by Jesus in the Greco-Roman world. Imagine trying to understand how to live according to the legacy of a man, who was God, who literally died for your eternal salvation but before that, challenged culture and the status quo by bringing life and health and wholeness and dignity to men, women, rich, poor, Jews, Gentiles, and the most marginalized in society. Imagine His influence as you consider this line which Paul writes to the Christians in Rome in Romans 12:2: “Do not be conformed to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” The New Living Translation translates it this way: “Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think.”
So my last question for you is, if we’re not to conform to the patterns of this world or copy its behavior, then why does so much of what we’re taught today in the church reflect the culture of 1950s America rather than mirroring Christ?
If you have thoughts, questions you’d like to eventually have answered on the podcast, or monologues you need to get off your chest, know that I can relate and I would love to hear from you. You’re welcome to email your innermost thoughts to kensi@bravemarriage.com. I’d really like to engage with you and hear where you are and what you’re taking from this season along the way.
That’s it for today on the Brave Marriage Podcast. I’m your host, Kensi Duszynski. Podcast editing is by Evan Duszynski. Thank you so much for listening and for your interest in learning. If you’ve enjoyed this episode and are excited for this series, please share it with someone else you think might be interested. I’ll be back in 2 weeks to pick up where we left off and I look forward to sharing with you again soon.
RESOURCES:
Marriage, A History, Stephanie Coontz
Jesus and John Wayne, Kristin Kobes Du Mez
