Dominion Orientated Femininity - Part One

Well, I've misplaced my copy of Maidens of Virtue again.  I misplace most of the books I review on this blog at one point or another - but there is something about the Maidens of Virtue book that seems to make it disappear more.  I think it's because the copy I have is a hardcover book with a smooth cover so when I get frustrated and toss it across the room the book slides into weird locations.

I'm sure I'll find it.  Our house is not large and there are only so many places it can be.  Until I find it, I'm going to substitute a commentary on one of the Botkin Family podcasts available for free on their website at the Western Conservatory for the Arts and Sciences.   I picked "Dominion-Oriented Femininity" to transcribe in its entirety first because the topic sounded slightly more interesting than the other podcasts and because at 38 minutes it's about half as long as the other podcasts.

Transcriptions of speeches bring a few difficulties to the table.  Anna Sofia and Elizabeth are solid, if unremarkable, public speakers so I can usually figure out what they are saying.  I have not been able to determine which passages are given by which speaker because the two women's voices are very similar - a problem common among family members.   When converting speeches into written form, sentence fragments appear in the written form that were not glaringly obvious when spoken.  In other words, the flow of the transcripts is more clunky and less polished than the podcast itself.   In a similar vein, the choices of punctuation are mine.

The podcast itself is taken from a lecture given at a conference by the Botkin Family.  The lecture predates Anna Sofia and Elizabeth's second book as well as the collapse of Vision Forum (based on the glowing praise heaped on Doug Phillips in other podcasts).  The audience at the lecture is "family-integrated" or multi-aged because small children can be heard in the background occasionally.

Anna Sofia and Elizabeth are introduced by their father Geoffrey Botkins:

The following message is brought to you by the Western Conservatory of the Arts and Sciences.

 GB: I wanna introduce to you now two young ladies who have been giving some very serious thought to how they can even when they are in a family and even when they are under the jurisdiction of their father they can be leaders of society and culture. Not by lording it over men, not by teaching men but in the way that they carry themselves and the way that they speak. The way that they redefine things that have been grossly perverted in our day. Femininity. So now, ladies and gentlemen. Anna Sophia and Elizabeth Botkin on dominion oriented femininity.

I'm bummed.  I will never receive an introduction as overblown, fulsome and smarmy as that introduction.   Geoffrey Botkin announced that his daughters are societal leaders and cultural arbitrators because of their posture and clothing choices!  The irony is killing me. The Botkin Family holds themselves up as the pinnacle of homeschool education and neo-Calvinist theological reform - but immediately falls back on the idea that outer appearance is the most important characteristic for women.

Geoffrey has never read -or failed to comprehend - the basic ideas in George Eliot's works.  The beauty of a woman may cause men to attribute positive character traits to her that are not present.  I'd hate to think that Anna Sofia and Elizabeth Botkin are like Hetty Sorrel or Rosamond (Vincy) Lygate or even Mary Crawford from Jane Austen's Mansfield Park.

The rest of the transcript for today the speech of either Anna Sofia or Elizabeth Botkin.

One of the themes I'm sure you've noticed is that we need to be prepared to face hard times ahead. America is scheduled for judgement. This is something that my father talked about. We don't know how severe. We don't know what it's going to look like. We don't know what it it will consist of. The future is very very uncertain for us. This is a subject that the men have been talking a lot about but you young ladies in the audience you need to be thinking about this too. Because even though it sounds like manly subjects judgement, war, the economy, all of those things are going to affect us too. We live in the same world that our fathers live in. And when we're married we are going to live in the same world that our husbands live in and the hardships that they face we're going to face them too so these are topics that we are not too young to be thinking about. We're not too girly to be thinking about. We really need to be focusing on these things too.

Most CP/QF families can live within modern society, gently disdaining the rest of us, but not waiting with bated breath for the destruction of the United States of America.  Heck, sometimes I think mildly judgemental tolerance of others is a national characteristic. No, the Botkin clan and their ilk hopes for the day that the US society is thrown down so that these ambitious members of a very small religious minority will receive the recognition and adoration that they so deeply crave.

The Botkin Family must know on some level that they are woefully unready to become leaders in the society in which they live now.  Their theological qualifications are so weak that I can poke holes in their theological rationales - and I'm a theological bantamweight.   Their education is so flimsy that they would struggle in a basic college level course.  To the best of my knowledge, Anna Sofia and Elizabeth have never earned income at a job of any sort.   I suspect that the entire family is being supported between the income from T. Rex Arms - the younger brothers' CNC accessories for guns business - the residuals from the sisters' books and whatever freelance work the oldest three boys can cobble together.     That sounds grim - but I suspect many CP/QF families lives are quite grim financially.

The repeated statement that that women live in the same world as men jarred me at the beginning of the podcast - and it didn't get less jarring over time.   I am completely aware that I live in the same world as my father, brother, brothers-in-law and son do, thank you.  It's a world that I live in and am quite capable of navigating as well.

One of the things that concerns me most about America's future is the fact that most women - but not all - do not know how to be strong any more. And they are not ready to deal with hard times. And they are not ready to deal with hardships the way they used to be. When you look at pictures of the Pilgrim mothers and of the woman that settled the Wild West and the woman that settled Plymouth you see strength and you see virtue, something that women don't have today. Women just don't have the moral stamina to face the trials and the hardships that they faced two hundred years ago. We've lost the strong moral character and the sturdiness that American women used to be known for.

Whoo-boy!  Let me get this straight.  In terms of strength and moral stamina, the Pilgrims come first, the Botkin girls et al. come second, and I come in last.

Nope.  Not even close, ladies.

I am hard-pressed to come up with two young women with less practical strength or moral stamina than the Botkin sisters.  Neither Anna Sofia nor Elizabeth has ever had to stand up for their beliefs in in the secular world.  See, they pride themselves on standing aloof from a society that reviles and hates them - but that's giving far too much importance to their views.  Let's say that both young ladies are forced to earn a living starting tomorrow.  They could get a job at the local grocery store as cashiers.  I'm sure they would breathlessly explain how important it is for both of them to dress modestly in long skirts - but how would they respond to the normal response of "Yeah, that's fine as long as it's khaki or black"?  I'm sure they would enjoy explaining the minutia of their beliefs about emotional purity to the coworkers at break time - but what happens when the coworkers say, "Oh, that's nice" and move on to a more interesting topic.    I'm sure they would eagerly await positive feedback from coworkers when their coworkers recognized them as the authors of two ground-shaking books.    They expect adoration or hatred - but can they deal with boredom, apathy and mild pity?

Strength and stamina aren't built when two young women are the unquestioned princesses of a religious movement; those are built when hard times are faced and overcome.

Let me talk about the Pilgrim women for a minute because the fact that we even have an America to talk about it's a testimony to the dominion oriented femininity of the Pilgrim women who sacrificed their lives for other people that they would never see. And they were willing to go through hardships that we cannot even imagine we selfish spoiled women in the 21st century cannot even imagine the hardship that they went through. They cared more about people they would never know than they did about their own comfort. That's something that cannot be said about women of today. They were willing to make their lives harder for the eternal good of those who would be coming later. And if you go to Plymouth, there's a monument to the Pilgrim mothers which is inscribed with these words right here, "They brought up their families in sturdy virtue and the living faith in God without which nations perish"

Two centuries later when Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville came to the United States in the 1830s he was struck by the superior strength and character of the American women and this is what he said about them, " If I were asked now that I am drawing to the close of this work in which I have spoken of so many important things done by the Americans to what singular prosperity and growing strength of that people ought mainly be attributed I would reply, ' To the superiority of their women"."

Perhaps we could imagine the hardships better if Anna Sofia or Elizabeth told us about the hardships.  Oh, wait.  That never happens.   Learning about those hardships would require reading a book or two or looking at an encyclopedia before writing this speech - and Lord knows they don't do that.

Surprisingly enough, I do know about the hardships that the Pilgrims faced - and why they left the Netherlands in the first place.  The Pilgrims were not as worried about mythical future generations as they were worried about their children who were growing up to be more Dutch than English.  The Pilgrims faced the perennial concerns of immigrant parents who worry about children growing up in a culture that is foreign.  Unlike most immigrant parents, the Pilgrims decided risking their families' lives in a new settlement was worth it because they would have more control over the upbringing of their kids.  (Not quite as noble and sexy when it's laid out like that, is it?)

The Pilgrims faced a lot of problems - and a good portion of them were of their own making. They landed in the US in the fall and didn't have enough food for the winter.   The Pilgrims were not farmers, but they were dependent on their own farming efforts for food. (This is a point that the pastoralist-idealizing CP/QF families should think long and hard about.)  Disease and deaths in childbirth were always a risk prior to the advent of modern medicine, but malnutrition and famine worsen the death toll.  The Pilgrims were strangely slow to realize that Native Americans were going to be vital allies in a colony where help from Europe was over a year away.  (And let's be honest.  If the population of Native Americans west of the Mississippi hadn't already been decimated by European diseases brought by previous European expeditions, Europeans never would have landed a foothold on the Western Hemisphere.)  Even without those problems, life as a colonist was physically crushing.  Everything required manual labor and there was rarely enough food to offset the sheer amount of physical labor done.

I adore how the Botkin Family cannot keep to their own reconstructionist history.  The Botkin Family history of Calvinism goes as follows.  Calvin good.  Europe lost Calvinism which was kept by the Pilgrims.  Pilgrims good.  The second generation of Pilgrims were losers who destroyed US Calvinism. Boo. US becomes the heathen birthplace of all that is wrong with the world.  Fast forward to Geoffrey and Victoria Botkin who independently rediscovered Calvinism. 

Throwing a quote from de Tocqueville in the 1830's messes up the whole story.  How horrible could the US be if he thought the women were amazing?    What exactly intervened in the US between 1830 and now that destroyed everything?

What does that say about the women of today? When we think about the state of America now if you were to ask me now to what I would attribute the growing apostasy and weakness of America I might say, "To the selfish and pettiness of their women." And the products of feminism 21 century women - that's us - we're not just lesser or weaker in so many ways we are the opposite of these women. We are weak in all the ways that they used to be strong. When these women used to make sacrifices, daily sacrifices for their children, women of today sacrifice their children killing them in the womb as a sacrifice to their own selfishness and it's just it's really sad. We need to understand how much we've lost.

Excuse me a moment.  *hands baby to her husband and ties her hair back into a ponytail* 

You want to question my mothering ability? Come at me if you're hard enough.   I'm dead serious.

You know nothing of sacrifice. 

To keep my son alive, I left him at a hospital for 107 times.  I'd recite "Good night, NICU!" to him, tell him I loved him, made sure he was all snuggled up in his bed, give him one last pat (when he was in the isolette) or a kiss, and didn't cry until I was in the hallway out of sight and hearing.

When my son was having a bad day, I spent hours sitting with my hands cradling my son inside the isolette while staring blankly at the dinosaur pattern on the fabric cover of the isolette.  He became agitated whenever we lifted the cover to look at him so I sat hunched over with my nose an inch away from a blue brontosaurus. 

When my son was having a good day, I'd do skin-to-skin for as long as he tolerated it which was generally 3-4 hours.  Since he was still on a ventilator, I had to keep his head in alignment with his ET tube.  To do that, I had to sit perfectly still.  I eventually learned how to shift the position of my legs a bit, but my torso needed to stay in the same spot.  Since I was breastfeeding him via pumping, by the end my breasts would be overly full, aching, and dripping.  Hearing his alarms go off - and Jack loved to set alarms off - and not being able to move sent my anxiety creeping upward. 

For three months after Jack came home, my life revolved around him.  Oh, some of it was the normal demands of a newborn - but most of it was making sure he had 24-7 coverage of an adult in the same room who was infant CPR trained.   I slept.  I got a daily walk without him.  The rest of the time I was "on" because if Jack had one of his choking attacks I needed to get him breathing again. 

What have you sacrificed?  Nothing except becoming an adult woman.  You live comfortably without the work of earning a living.  You hide behind "emotional purity" and "courtship" to prevent potential heartbreak in falling in love.  You receive accolades for self-publishing two books and wearing pretty clothing. 

Grow up before trying to give advice to real adults.

And most of us in this room would probably like to say that we've rejected feminism but I've I bet we all wrestle with the weakness and myopia that we've inherited from that legacy. It's hard for us to think 200 years ahead. It's hard for most of us to want to even think about living the way that Pilgrim women lived. To think about the sacrifices that they made the hardships that they went through. And when it comes right down to it, we're still confused about the most basic principles of family relations, gender roles. And even the very meaning of womanhood. God has put us into a very unique time in history. We are living in a generation that has no concept of what it means to be a woman. This is singular. I've never seen this in any other generation. Even the word "femininity" means nothing any more.

Pfft. 

It's a piece of cake to think about 200 years in the future; that's fantasy. Your father created an entirely fantastical Excel document where he plotted out the estimated dates of the births and marriages of his future descendents.  Since he's at least 10 years out, how accurate was his fantasy world?   

It's a piece of cake to dream of living like the Pilgrim women; their greatest fears of death by illness or starvation have been conquered in the US.

Anna Sofia/Elizabeth's assertion that we're living in a singular time is a great example of how trifling their education has been.  Women have gone through several cycles of greater freedom and participation in the economic world and times of reduced freedom in the twentieth century alone.  These cycles happened during the 19th, 18th, and 17th centuries as well.    This isn't a big secret.  The Botkin sisters would have figured this out if they embarked on an in-depth study of US history.  For most people, finding time to read college texts and all of the scholarly publications written for mainstream audiences before diving into primary sources would be an issue.  The Botkin Sisters, though, should have several hours free a day to pursue academic research - even if they are helping out at the family business, keeping the family home up or caring for their nephews or niece.

This next bit is priceless especially when I was transcribing it at half the speed of the original MP3; the reduced speed made the speaker sound drunk.

I can remember when Elizabeth and I were working on our book and we kept putting the word "femininity", "Biblical femininity" just all through the book and Mom came and said to us, "I don't even know if I like the word femininity. What does it mean anyway? And it has such bad connotations. What does it mean? And Elizabeth and I thought, "Ummm, uh, I don't know." It's an interesting thing.

Really, that paragraph is less unsettling if the speaker was drunk. 

One of the Botkin Sisters just admitted that they were dropping the jargon "Biblical femininity" all over "So Much More" while having no idea what it meant.   That's disturbing on a whole number of levels - but not surprising if you've read their books.

The next post in this series begins the process of unraveling what "Biblical femininity" means....kind of.