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 the Dairy Queen, this clash between cultural trends and religious ideals is reflected in Catherine Grace Cline’s communal and familial spheres. Her home economics teacher preaches that a “good wife and mutha will always have a tomata on hand” (11); the town disparages Gloria Jean Graves’s independent lifestyle and history of divorce; and Marshall Cline (Daddy) hides the truth of his wife’s abandonment and his sexual relationship with Miss Margaret Raines. Catherine Grace is raised to fear the repercussions of acting outside of her family’s, church’s, and community’s expectations. She wants to have sex with her first boyfriend and live a liberated life instead of starting a family, but is wary of inciting Ringgold’s judgment. 

In these ways, the novel explores a pivotal moment of cultural change. Via Catherine Grace’s coming-of-age narrative, Susan Gregg Gilmore examines the exchange between emerging feminist ideas and religious and social structures of the rural South.