Much
gratitude to the author of the article, Gina McGalliard, who I
believe extended great honor to the many earnest people who have
followed this lifestyle in earnest, in their desire to honor and
follow God. She didn't identify herself as a Christian, and I
believe that she showed great integrity in the writing of this
article a few years ago.
Recently,
Empirical Magazine
published another of McGilliard's articles entitled Homeschooling,
Creationism, and Citizenship. I
understand from the author that other more liberal publishers turned
it down because she was not willing to exploit Christian
homeschoolers in a negative way. I'm grateful to her integrity and
the respect she's shown to those who follow the practice. Bravo,
Gina!
Here
is Gina's seminal article from a few years ago about patriarchy's
model for daughters. (I finally decided since it now appears in so
many other venues, I would post it here.)
by
Gina McGilliard
From
Bitch Magazine, Issue
49 | Winter 2010, in an issue entitled Confidential
“Daughters aren’t to be independent. They’re not to act outside the scope of their father. As long as they’re under the authority of their fathers, fathers have the ability to nullify or not the oaths and the vows. Daughters can’t just go out independently and say, ‘I’m going to marry whoever I want.’ No. The father has the ability to say, ‘No, I’m sorry, that has to be approved by me.’”
There’s a lot of talk in American
mainstream media lately
about the diminishing role of men—fathers,
in particular. Have feminism and reproductive technology made them
obsolete?
Are breadwinning wives and career-oriented mothers
emasculating them?
No such uncertainty exists in the mind
of Doug Phillips, the man quoted above. The San Antonio minister is
the founder of Vision Forum, a beachhead for what’s known as the
Christian Patriarchy Movement, a branch of evangelical Christianity
that takes beliefs about men as leaders and women as homemakers to
anachronistic extremes. Vision Forum Ministries is, according to its
Statements of Doctrine, “committed to affirming the historic faith
of Biblical Christianity,” with special attention to the historical
faith found in the book of Genesis, when God created Eve as a
“helper” to Adam. According to Christian Patriarchy, marriage
bonds man (the symbol of Christ) to woman (the symbol of the Church).
It’s a model that situates husbands and fathers in a position of
absolute power: If a woman disobeys her “master,” whether father
or husband, she’s defying God. Thus, women in the Christian
Patriarchy Movement aren’t just stay-at-home mothers—they’re
stay-at-home daughters as well. And many of them wouldn’t have
it
any other way.
The stay-at-home-daughters movement,
which is promoted by Vision Forum, encourages young girls and single
women to forgo college and outside employment in favor of training as
“keepers at home” until they marry. Young women pursuing their
own ambitions and goals are viewed as selfish and antifamily;
marriage is not a choice or one piece of a larger life plan, but the
ultimate goal. Stay-at-home daughters spend their days learning
“advanced homemaking” skills, such as cooking and sewing, and
other skills that at one time were a necessity—knitting,
crocheting, soap- and candle-making. A father is considered his
daughter’s authority until he transfers control to her husband.
It
probably won’t surprise you to learn that the CPM shares much of
its philosophy with the Quiverfull movement [See “Multiply
and Conquer,” Bitch no.
37], which holds that good Christians must eschew birth control—even
natural family planning—in order to implement biblical principles
and, in the process, outbreed unbelievers. Although the CPM has been
around for the past several decades, with its roots in the founding
of the Council of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, and the teachings
of religious leaders like Bill Gothard and Rousas J. Rushdoony, the
stay-at-home-daughters movement seems to have gained traction in the
last decade. Kathryn Joyce, author of the 2009 book Quiverfull:
Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement,
estimates the CPM population to be in the low tens of thousands, but
the rise of evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity over the past
several decades makes it difficult to predict how large the CPM
following could eventually become.
Vision
Forum, for its part, is fully dedicated to turning back the clock on
gender equality. Its website offers
a cornucopia of sex-segregated books and products designed to conform
children to rigid gender
stereotypes starting from an early age.
The All-American Boy’s Adventure Catalog shills an extensive
selection of toy weapons (bow-and-arrow sets, guns, swords, and
tomahawks), survival gear, and books and DVDs on war, the outdoors,
and science. The Beautiful Girlhood Collection features dolls,
cooking and sewing play sets, and costumes. There’s no room for
doubt about the intended roles these girls will play later on in
life. Indeed, the Vision Forum catalog brims with yearning for a
simpler, supposedly more secure, and presumably more pious time, with
a number of items relating to Western frontier living, a
“Grandfather’s Classic Toys” collection, manuals on medieval
chivalry, and centuries-old titles about manners and modesty.
Integral to Vision Forum’s belief
about female submission is making sure women are not independent at
any point in their lives, regardless of age; hence the organization’s
enthusiasm for stay-at-home daughterhood. The most visible proponents
of this belief are Anna Sofia and Elizabeth Botkin, sisters and
authors of the book So Much More: The Remarkable Influence of
Visionary Daughters on the Kingdom of God (published by
Vision Forum), and creators of the documentary film Return of
the Daughters, which follows several young women staying home
until marriage, and details how they spend their time serving their
fathers. One woman, Melissa Keen, 25, helps put on Vision Forum’s
annual Father-Daughter Retreat, an event that’s described on Vision
Forum’s website in terms that are, in a word, discomfiting. (“He
leads her, woos her, and wins her with a tenderness and affection
unique to the bonds of father and daughter.”) Another, 23-year-old
Katie Valenti, enthuses that her father “is the greatest man in my
life. I believe that helping my father in his business is a better
use of my youth and is helping prepare me to be a better helpmeet for
my future husband, rather than indulging in selfishness and pursuing
my own success and selfish ambitions.” (A video of Valenti’s 2009
wedding to Phillip Bradrick shows her father announcing into a
microphone that he is “transferring my authority to you, Phillip.”)
In So Much More, the Botkin
sisters claim women were much happier before being legally considered
men’s equals, although, unsurprisingly, they reference no studies,
scholarship, or evidence for this. They do, however, quote
extensively from girls described as “21st-century heroines of the
faith,” or “the young heroines of the underground feminist
resistance
movement,” who claim following submission teachings
changed their lives. A stay-at-home daughter named Sarah, for
instance, aspired to be an attorney before realizing that her career
ambitions displeased God; Fiona left home for college at 18, only to
return five years later having experienced much “grief and
depression.”
Many of the Botkins’ fellow believers
have taken to the web to extoll the virtues of the stay-at-home-
daughter life, spreading their archaic views via the most modern
technology. On stayathomedaughters.com, which recently ceased
operating, Courtney, one of the authors of the website’s blog,
describes herself as “learning to run and care for a home while
under the training of my dear parents.” The section “What We
Believe” states that “Stay-at-home daughters are defying cultural
standards by purposing to fulfill their role at home, with their
family, and under their father’s roof and authority until marriage.
We are anti-feminism, and we are counter-cultural.”
Another
blog, Ah
the Life,
is written by “Miss Kelly and Miss Andrea,” who list among their
interests “homemaking, theology, hospitality, and femininity.”
Their favorite movies include Return
of the Daughters and The
Monstrous Regiment of Women,
the latter a film that inveighs against feminism via soundbites from,
among others, Phyllis Schlafly. (On Hillary Clinton: “She’s angry
about a lot of things.”) And the blog Joyfully
at Home was
until recently maintained by Jasmine Baucham, daughter of preacher
Voddie Baucham, whose 2009 patriarchy primer, What
He Must Be If He Wants to Marry My Daughter,
has chapters titled “He Must Be Prepared to Lead” and “Don’t
Send a Woman Out to Do a Man’s Job.” Jasmine, who was featured
inReturn
of the Daughters,
wrote on her blog that she “chose to forgo the typical college
experience so that I could live under the discipleship of my parents
until marriage,” but her bio nevertheless notes that she is
completing a degree in English literature.
The number of these blogs and their
followers may be surprising to mainstream women, who would likely
find the tenets the bloggers live by disturbingly retrograde, if not
just plain disturbing. For instance, stay-at-home daughterhood means,
among other things, subsuming one’s own identity into the family
unit. The Botkin sisters write in So Much More that
loving your parents means agreeing with all their opinions. “When
your parents have your heart you will truly ‘delight in their
ways,’” write the sisters in one blog post. “You will love what
they love, hate what they hate, and desire their approval and company
and even ‘think thoughts after them.’”
The Botkin sisters aim to validate
living a life of confinement with staunch, if unfounded, opinions and
beliefs regarding college. “College campuses have become dangerous
places of anxiety, wasted years, mental defilement and moral
derangement,” they write. Although neither of the sisters has
attended college, they also claim universities are hotbeds of Marxism
that forbid a free exchange of ideas and seek to indoctrinate
students in leftist thinking. Elsewhere, they quote a document from
the pro-patriarchy website Fathers for Life that states that the
“prime purposes of feminism are to establish a lesbian-socialist
republic and to dismantle the family unit,” echoing Pat Robertson’s
notorious statement that feminism is a “socialist, anti-family
political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands,
kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and
become lesbians.”
Learning critical thinking and
immersion in a diversity of viewpoints and opinions—a chief goal of
the college experience—seems to be what the Botkin sisters truly
fear. Well, that and Satan—the sisters use the age-old image of
women as helpless to resist temptation as another argument against a
college education: “Recall that Satan targeted a woman first, too.
God’s enemies have recognized that women are not only the weaker
vessels, and consequently more easily led, but they are incredibly
influential over their husbands (think of Eve again) and
children, and they make excellent and loyal helpers,”
claim the sisters [italics theirs]. The story of one misled college
attendee, the providentially named Evangeline, is instructive. A
homeschool graduate attending a Christian college away from home,
Evangeline recalls, “I will never forget the night I sat on my bed
reading [So Much More] until 4 in the morning, weeping over
it.” She continues, “My heart had ached for a protected mission,
a biblically sound mission, an ancient mission. And here it was! What
joy! What relief! I was not designed to be an independent woman, but
rather a part of a man’s life, a helper.”
But not all stay-at-home daughters
accept their lot so unquestioningly. A young New Zealander named
Genevieve, profiled on the Botkin sisters’ blog, decided to live at
home until marriage after trading in her dreams of becoming her
country’s first female prime minister for ambitions to become a
Christian homeschooling wife and mother. Now the author of the
Isaacharican Daughters newsletter, Genevieve exemplifies how young
women in this lifestyle are encouraged to subsume their own thoughts
and identities into those of whichever male figure in their lives
currently acts as the authority. In writing about the process of
swapping her father’s “vision” for her new husband’s, she
notes that a woman having independent thoughts is evidence of Satan
gumming up the works.
My loyalties have had to undergo a change. I was used to thinking Dad knew best. Now I needed to learn to think that Pete knows best. I used to do things and invest my time in projects according to what I knew Dad would want me to do. Now I needed to be guided by what Pete wanted me to do. When faced with a problem or option I couldn’t think “What would Dad have done in this situation?” Now I had to think “What would Pete do in this situation?” These were exciting times and difficult as during this state of flux—learning to replace one man’s vision with another—the devil would come around and say, “But what about what you want? What about what you think?”
Genevieve’s words are worth noting
because most stay-at-home daughters can’t truly be said to have
chosen this lifestyle—they are often brought up in homes where
feminism, college, and a woman’s independent choices are vilified,
and they rarely interact with those who think differently. One has to
wonder if Genevieve, with her childhood dreams of national politics,
bought into the myth that feminism is antimotherhood and antifamily,
and thus feels she must choose between having a family and her own
personhood, something most would consider a false choice.
Although submitting to either your
father’s or your husband’s authority may seem like perpetual
childhood—or indentured servitude—to modern, first-world women
who value their ability to do things like vote, go on dates, and
determine the course of their lives, the Botkin sisters have a
different take. “The sign of our maturity and our adulthood is when
we willingly submit ourselves to God-given authority and therefore to
God Himself,” they write in one blog post. “This is a struggle,
and it requires strength, wisdom, responsibility and spiritual
maturity.” And though one presumes these women’s enthusiasm for
submission means they come from safe, loving, and abuse-free homes,
there are potentially chilling consequences to the spread of their
beliefs to those who may not be
so lucky.
Furthermore, the stay-at-home-daughter
movement holds that girls are only ready to marry when they’ve
completely tamed individualistic traits—when, as the Botkins put
it, they’ve learned to “submit to an imperfect man’s ‘whims’
as well as his heavy requirements. To order our lives around another
person. To esteem and reverence [sic] and adore a man whose faults we
can see clearly every day.” Fathers are never to be criticized or
even teased: “When you speak of him to others, you shouldn’t talk
about his mistakes, but of the good things he’s done. When you
speak of him,
instead of criticizing and nagging him for his
faults, you should tell him how much you admire his strengths,” say
the Botkins. Stay-at-home daughter Ruth says she honors her father by
finding out his favorite colors and wearing them; Kelly says she
finds that her father’s convictions “are becoming my convictions,
his passions my passions.” Although it’s likely that many women
would find such an existence frustrating and unhappy, if not
completely infantilizing, within the context of the Christian
Patriarchy Movement it’s not difficult to see the appeal. After
all, women raised in the CPM are brought up to believe that the world
outside their community is sin-filled, godless, and dangerous; opting
for stay-at-home daughterhood represents a lifetime of safety.
Still, they’re not safe from
everything. Although the Botkins and their stay-at-home sisterhood
believe that women have a duty to be obedient, if men fail in their
endeavors—their work, their marriages, their faith—guess who’s
responsible? “If our men aren’t successful, it largely means that
their women have not made them successful. They need our help,” the
Botkins write. Wives, claim the Botkin sisters, have the ability to
“win” over their husbands with respectful and submissive
behavior, for when the husbands observe this, they will become
“ashamed and repentant.” (The sisters are strangely silent on
what to do if this isn’t effective.) And daughters have the same
responsibility: “Before you can accuse your father of being
unprotective, ask yourself: ‘Do you make it clear to him that you
are a woman of virtue, worthy of his special protection? If your
behavior was more gentle, feminine, respectful and lovely would he be
more inclined to be protective of you?’” Relationships with
mothers, by contrast, get little consideration within the literature
and blogs of the stay-at-home-daughters movement. Mother-daughter
dynamics are mentioned in the Botkins’ book and film only in the
context of readers becoming future mothers.
The
stay-at-home-daughters movement has inevitably inspired controversy
and dissent, much of it among dedicated Christians who consider the
movement to be a dire misconstruction of their religion. According to
Cindy Kunsman, a survivor of what she terms “spiritual abuse” and
the author of the blog Under
Much Grace,
stay-at-home daughters who have exited the lifestyle are—despite
what the rest of us might presume—usually well prepared
academically, but lack certain key skills for success in life. “Those
young women who received excellent training have an easier time
acquiring job skills when pursuing college and healthcare training,
as many of them have done quite successfully,” said Kunsman in an
interview. “However, because [these young women] were required to
abdicate all significant problem-solving to another agent while in
their families of origin, they lack skill and practice in critical
thinking and planning... They must work to build integrity,
self-reliance, autonomy, and trust in themselves, which they were
taught to derive from the identity of the family.”
One
of the most outspoken counter-CPM blogs is Quivering
Daughters—the
name a play on the phrase “Quiverfull”—authored by Hillary
McFarland. “Increasing numbers of women in their late twenties and
thirties remain ‘safely’ at home, patiently waiting for husbands
to find them,” writes McFarland in her bookQuivering
Daughters: Hope and Healing for the Daughters of Patriarchy.
“As unmarried adult daughters continue to perfect the art of
homemaking, help to mother and school young siblings, and learn to be
a godly helpmeet, many through spiritual discipline strain to
cauterize wounds made tender with disappointment.”
Despite the assertion of stay-at-home
daughters that they are “protected” (albeit in a country where
they have every legal right to walk away from their families and
churches), it’s difficult not to view them as being extremely
vulnerable. After all, men who grow up
believing that women were
created to serve their whims are generally the ones who are just as
likely to abuse the women they see as “theirs” as to protect them
from others.
Such sexist views of women’s roles
are certainly not limited to the Christian Patriarchy Movement. But
unlike other extremely conservative religious groups such as the
Amish or fundamentalist Mormon polygamists, which are typically
closed off from the rest of society, the stay-at-home-daughters
movement and the CPM might be capable of seeping into the
already-booming populations of evangelical and fundamentalist
churches and Christian homeschoolers, which already advocate a
less-rigorous version of female
submission. In this sense,
stay-at-home daughters might feel that they are the most pure, and
most righteous, of Christians.
In a complex world where women have
more choices than ever, perhaps the appeal of this lifestyle for both
men and women is perpetual female childhood. Men make all decisions
and are never told they are wrong, always getting their way, while
women are free of any decision-making: a markedly different, albeit
less complicated relationship than one between two equals. Only time
will tell how far this new movement will spread. In the meantime,
those of us who were lucky enough to have fathers who delighted in
our accomplishments and growth as individuals—rather than believing
our existence was to serve their own needs—should count our
blessings.
Gina
McGalliard is a San Diego–based freelance writer whose work has
appeared in @UCSD, Sport Diver, Conscious Dancer, Dance
Studio Life, San Diego City Beat, San Diego Family Magazine, and
the San Diego Union Tribune. She would like to give a
shout-out to her feisty Italian grandmother, who spent the 1970s and
’80s breaking down barriers for women, for raising her to be a good
feminist, and introducing her at a young age to the writings of
Gloria Steinem.
