Scary Excerpt from Quiverfull: Part 4

I’ve been reading Kathryn Joyce‘s Quiverfull and several passages scare the living $#!& out of me.

Like this one, describing little girls teaching other little girls how to properly act like a woman:

On stage, the sisters explained to an audience of fathers and daughters, young women to very young girls, the ways in which daughters should go beyond a lukewarm acceptance of biblical femininity to a full-on embrace of a deliberately countercultural girlhood. They should be modest servants who don’t cause their brothers in Christ to stumble with temptation. They should “learn to ignore [their] comfort zone” in the interest of a higher calling, as Elizabeth, a formerly terminally shy child, describes her father’s insistence on her “godly boldness.” They should teach their younger sisters in the Titus 2 spirit and should honor and defer to their brothers — older and younger — in recognition that even young boys need to be treated as wise leaders by their older sisters in order to gain the confidence to be leaders of their future families. They should wear feminine clothes to prove to their fathers that they are virtuous women worthy of protection. They should not learn career skills as emergency “backups” to support themselves, as “learning to ‘survive’ can teach girls attitudes of independence, hardness.” They should understand that singleness is a very rare calling from God, and so they must prepare to marry and conduct war on “the home front”: in other words, they must understand there is no opting out of this revolution without turning their backs on the faith.

(p. 222-223)

Sleep well!

(My interview with the author is here.)

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Chal

Somebody please hold me…
BGboothA

you know reading these every day is not helping me get along with the inlaws. 🙂
Psychodiva

I say turn that back on the faith- what a load of misogynistic bullshit!
GG

I almost want to read the book. Almost. The desire may be evidence that I am looking for a new method of self-harming. 😉
Noadi

I seriously need a hug after I read each one of these, they scare me so much. They have such a warped view of the family and women that I’m not even entirely sure where it comes from. Decidedly not from my grandmother’s generation that they claim to admire so much, the Depression and WWII were not for weak willed women who had to be taken care of. Those were the women raising families in the 1950s, survivors of a terrible couple decades.
Julie Marie

I don’t think these are weak willed women–they are, on the contrary, very strong, to be able to force upon themselves something so unpalatable, in the belief that it is pleasing to God.

Sad, yes. Weak, no.
Darwin’s Dagger

Yeah, yeah, these people are batshit crazy. I think we get that.
Claudia

That didn’t scare me, but it does make me a little ill.

Basically these twisted bastards look to the Taliban and feel that their only true mistake is that they worship the wrong prophet. Women are to wholeheartedly embrace being completely subservient even to the youngest males and make sure they don’t have any means to escape should they ever have second thoughts.

My only doubt is to whose dignity is this more insulting: To women who are reduced to child-rearing mental slaves to their husbands, or to men who are assumed to be too weak and insecure to be able to handle a full fledged individual asserting personhood.
Jen

The way to be a proper Christian woman, if I understand this correctly, is to have no skills, no opinions, and no free will. Meanwhile, atheist women can be whatever they want. Hmmm, I have a choice to make.
abraxas2271

So I guess they would think that my late grandmother, who worked 25 years on 3rd shift,never missing a day of work,and raising 4 boys would be a bad person?

I’d like for one of them to say that to me personally.
Amy

These keep getting scarier. Makes me glad that I’m trying to raise my girls to be independent.

Like Claudia, I feel a bit ill after reading these.
CatBallou

Terribly frightening, and I can’t seem to imagine how we can counter this. I never like discussions about one group “outbreeding” others, because so often it’s a dog whistle for racism. But it disturbs me to think that religious fanatics are having such large families, and rational people are having small ones. There’s something hideously “survival of the fittest” about this!
Margaret Y.

“…should honor and defer to their brothers — older and younger — in recognition that even young boys need to be treated as wise leaders by their older sisters in order to gain the confidence to be leaders of their future families.”

So let me get this straight. God wants these boy/men to be patriarchs, but God didn’t endow them with self-confidence? Their sisters have to give it to them by defering to them?

What?