Looking For Salvation at the Dairy Queen

In the mid-20th-century American South, the Southern Baptist church was the social and moral center of small-town life. The church culture prescribed a specific path for women, emphasizing marriage, domesticity, and submission to patriarchal authority. As Susan M. Shaw asserts, “Since the Southern Baptist Convention’s founding in 1845, Southern Baptists have had a complicated history with women” (Shaw, Susan M. “Sexism has long been part of the culture of Southern Baptists.” The Conversation, 2019). In the 1970s, the church saw an uptick in women’s involvement in Southern Baptist leadership; but the community still forbade women preachers, emphasized traditional roles for women in the home, and spoke out against sexual freedom. The Southern Baptist Convention remained in conflict with the concurrent second-wave feminist movement. In feminist literature of the time like The Feminine Mystique (1963), Betty Friedan elucidated “the problem that has no name”—or the widespread unhappiness of women confined to domestic roles. While second-wave feminism championed education, professional ambition, and personal fulfillment for women beyond the home, the Southern Baptist Convention “specifically […] worked to reverse women’s progress in church and home” (Shaw).

In Looking for Salvation at