John Wayne as a protective paternal figure

From: Emanuel Levy, John Wayne: Prophet of the American Way of Life, The Scarecrow Press, Inc.: Metuchen, N.J. and London (1988), page 1:

John Wayne was born as Marion Michael Morrison on May 26, 1907, in Winterset, a small town in Iowa. His father, Clyde L. Morrison, was a druggist of Scottish descent, and his mother, Mary Margaret Brown, of pure Irish stock... When he was six, the family moved to Lancaster in Southern California, where his father settled on a ranch...

Levy, page 161:

Wayne's sexuality [in his movie roles] is also monogamous; he neither betrays his screen wives nor flirts with married women. But his domesticity tends to be more familial than marital, family and children are at the center of his pictures. "The longer Wayne kept his promise, kept providing, stayed true, kept being there despite cancer and illnesses and age itself," Michael Malone observed, "the more valued the strength of his fidelity and the integrity of his identity came to be." Women's attraction to the values he stood for was so strong that in the 1970s even the feminists came to admire him as a protective paternal figure.