New post at Ms.:
Last week, The New York Times Magazine ran a feature article on “biblical womanhood,” a subject I wrote about extensively in my 2009 book, Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement.
In the far-right evangelical communities I reported on, “biblical womanhood” guidelines aimed to create a new evangelical, anti-feminist Renaissance Woman: a submissive warrior who obeys her husband, homeschools their children and “dies to the self” by putting aside her own desires to accept God’s plan for her as helpmeet to her husband.
Throughout four years of reporting on the subject, I found a great many women who defended the lifestyle of submission and patriarchy—their words—as not only biblical but also the best protection for women. I also found a lot of women who revealed, after they’d left patriarchal churches, that the culture of submission had enabled domestic violence at home, had left them stranded in a community where submitting to an unreasonable or tyrannical husband is lauded as a virtue or, in more pedestrian tragedies, had compelled them to sacrifice their own ambitions for those of their husband.
In the Times, however, author Molly Worthen only found biblical womanhood, or “complementarianism”—the theology that holds that God created the sexes not for equal functions but to complement each other—as a harmonious partnership that might “make feminists cheer.” In this image of benevolent patriarchy, women are protected by “servant-leader” husbands while separate-but-equal gender roles don’t preclude women following their dreams.
After a year of “grizzly-mama feminism,” what could logically follow but the argument that fundamentalist gender roles can be feminist, too?
