Dominion Orientated Femininity: Part Six

Whoo-hoo!  THIS is the end of the review on the Botkin Sisters' podcast "Dominion Orientated Femininity".

I have received three (3) honest-to-God benefits from this podcast.  Benefit one: I am quite confident with the listen-and-type mode of my transcription software.  Benefit two: the Botkin Sisters have covered a few of the more pernicious idiotic ideas in stay-at-home daughterhood for me to discuss.  Benefit three: I learned how to spell "femininity" which is one of those words that I never use and cannot remember what vowels go where.  Ironically, I have similar problems with the word"amateur" and the prefix "pseudo" and I use both of those frequently.

The Botkin Sisters adore point number 9; it's one of the centerpoints of the stay-at-home daughter movement as well as emotional purity.  In spite of that, they get off the topic as fast as they can.  Presumably because after watching various young women from "Return of the Daughters" get married, the Sisters realized that point nine sounds good - but is confusing as hell in practice:

Number nine is a dominion woman is doing her husband good during these years of her life. In Proverbs 31 it says the Proverbs 31 woman is doing her husband good and not evil all the days of her life and it's interesting to me that it doesn't say she does him good and not evil as soon as she married to him. But it actually says she's doing him good and not evil all the days of her life. That means now. That means today we can be doing our husbands good even if we don't know who they are. And one of the ways we can be doing that is to be diligently amassing the skills and the character and the knowledge that our husbands are going to need to have behind them to help them in the dominion task they have ahead of them.

Alrighty then.  I'm going to take the sisters at the word. 

Anna Sofia, Elizabeth, please give me two specific examples of skills and knowledge that your future husbands need from you - and explain in detail how those skills are different from the general soft skills (like communication or problem-solving) and household management/child rearing skills that all CP/QF daughters are expected to bring to a marriage.

I'm in no hurry; I want this to be done thoughtfully. 

*pulls out current crochet project and gets to work while they hem and haw*

That's the tricky bit, isn't it?  Girls (and their parents) can't read the future to be sure that the "skills" they are picking up at home are the ones that their husbands need.  Anna Sofia and Elizabeth love to boast about their skill set which are heavy on amateur film and written media production along with worldview - but how likely is it that a man needs that from his wife? 

My husband needed a wife who could understand cows, help manage the emotional labor of a family and help him communicate his needs clearly.  That sounds straightforward - but I've chased cows in amazingly undignified ways while wearing horrifyingly clashing outfits.  I delivered a calf in a professional dress and sandals.  I spent a few hours at night in achingly cold, windy conditions midwinter helping rescue steers who had fallen into a manure pit - but really I was there to make sure someone kept an eye on my husband's grandfather who was in his mid-80's.  I was concerned that if he fell somewhere no one would notice he was missing until he was hypothermic - and that's kills elderly people in climates like Michigan.  I can spend hours at a bedside in a hospital with ill or elderly people while bringing lunch or dinner for the immediate family members.  I'm raising a son who came with a whole satchel of unexpected medical needs - and I don't mind saying I did a damn good job managing all of that.   I'm getting better and better at knowing when my husband needs someone to comfort him - and when he needs someone to give him a swift kick in the ass.  I listen avidly to his newfound fascination with refrigeration and air-conditioning units - and I silently thank God that I took enough chemistry and physics to understand what he's talking about just like I thanked God that my biology background made understanding cow biology fairly straightforward.

A lot of us have fairly high standards for our husbands. But how high are our standards for ourselves? If we have a list of requirements that's a mile long for our husbands, we better have a list that's two miles long for ourselves. So I think we need to ask ourselves why would a man like the kind we would like to marry want to marry a woman like us? And the correct answer isn't "Well, because I'm a woman. I'm a young woman and I like children and I can cook and what more would a man want?" The thing is a man who is fighting the important battles is going to need a little more than that. He's going to need a wife who can be a wise counselor to him. He's going to need a wife who can help sharpen him as iron sharpens iron.

.
Hell, no.

If you are a CP/QF unmarried woman, your list for a future husband should be twice as long as your list for yourself because YOU ARE SIGNING A BLANK CHECK.   You have minimal marketable skills, marginal education, a belief that divorce is impossible regardless of spousal behavior and potentially one child every 1-2 years from the date of your marriage until you are 40.   As a woman in that society, you are in a dependent position - so you better be damn sure that you are marrying someone who is kind, loving and a phenomenal provider.

The Botkin Sisters' privilege as middle children in a relatively small, well-spaced quiverfull family is showing again.  Women who space their babies at least 2-3 years apart with a family size of under 9 may have some time to be a wise counselor to their husbands.  That spacing allows a decent chunk of time for a woman to recover from pregnancy, childbirth, lactation and the sheer work of keeping a newborn alive before starting the cycle over again.  Less than two years apart - and especially under 18 months apart - and women are under extreme metabolic stress.  For me, pregnancy was a mix of mood swings, moderate nausea, exhaustion and hip pain.  Lactating got rid of the hip pain and exhaustion, had fewer mood swings and less nausea - but kept an equally sensitive sense of smell with feeling like I was planning my life around pumping sessions.  Having my son as a newborn was harder because he was medically complicated - but I was so exhausted that I spent most of the time in a vaguely upbeat mental fog. Life had compacted down to two goals: keep son alive and sleep.   I started to feel like pre-pregnancy self around 9 months after my son was born; the thought of being pregnant before that is daunting.

Anna Sofia/Elizabeth jumps into a rare real life example:

My favorite example of this is my mother. I love watching my mother's relationship with my father. In addition to being a loving mother and a wonderful cook and a wonderful housekeeper, she is a wise counselor. She's a delightful companion. She's a very stimulating conversationalist. She's constantly reading and always has fascinating things to tell my father that he can put into his speeches and into his teaching that he does. She models all of the things that Dad has always wanted his family to be known for: dominion focus, ingenuity, creativity, courage, a pioneer spirit, entrepreneurialism, love of learning. This is why my father's heart can safely trust in her. She delights him with her company and her conversation. She sustains him with her strength. She stimulates him and sharpens him with her wisdom. She emboldens him with her praise. She boisters him with her constant cheerfulness in spite of whatever's going on. She comforts him with her love and she heartens him with her courage. Wives like this are a source of constant good to their husbands so we need to be working today - diligently - to become this kind of woman.

*waves*

Hi, Victoria Botkin!  I'm glad you had some say or influence in raising your daughters.  Honestly, your husband and daughters talk a lot about how much Geoffrey Botkin has taught the girls - but so little about what you did.

Let's see.  Victoria Botkin according to her daughter is the mother, cook, and housekeeper desired by all CP/QF men (ignore the fact that the speaker or her sister were deriding young women who thought cooking, cleaning and rearing children were the main goals of marriage ten seconds ago) - plus her husband finds her amusing.  A "pioneer spirit" feels like a coded way of saying that Victoria can do a lot of things that Geoffrey can't be bothered to do for the family.  "Entrepreneurialism"  strikes me as a nice way of saying that Victoria parlayed her homeschooling experience into a small amount of income for the family.  Since Geoffrey has always been more interested in playing at being a kingmaker and prophet than earning income, the words "ingenuity" and "creativity" make me think that she's had to beg, borrow, scrimp, save and go without to get enough room, board and clothing for herself and her family.

Notice the conspicuous absence of examples of how Victoria acts as iron to sharpen Geoffrey by opposing him in any way.   Nope - Geoffrey doesn't need any of that kind of thing.  Now, the girls' future husbands will  probably need some sharp iron times until they get with the Botkin program....

Another thing we can do to be doing our husbands good is to be developing a selfless instead of selfish view of marriage. It's not about making us happy. It's about serving God. It's about helping our husbands to take dominion. And so instead of filling our minds with these rosy romantic ideas of how our husbands are going to meet our needs, we need to be thinking about how we can meet their needs so we're not going to be needy discontent complaining wives.

That sounds like a miserable marriage in the making.  Nothing is about making anyone happy!  Families exist to take dominion for GOD! 

Being married takes a lot of work from time to time - but a couple should have fun times, too.  A healthy couple does things for each other that makes their partner happy just because they can.

Don't get into a marriage that is miserable.

Last up: a rousing finish that somehow manages to combine a reminder of the soon-to-be-coming collapse of society with a quick reminder that Jesus told his disciples to stick close to home and care exclusively for their families:

Ok. Now here's our final point here. Number ten: a dominion woman understands the times. I explained some of the problems we're facing in our generation at the beginning of the speech. And a lot of you young ladies are probably thinking, "Well, what am I gonna do about it? Well, what can I do?" And part of the reason girls do escape through the different avenues - romance novels, films, images, or just our own sinful imaginations - is because they have no idea what they can be doing. And one of the principles that our father taught us when we were younger is that we needed to be looking for the needs of the moment actively looking for the needs of the moment there are so many things that young women can do if they have their eyes open. And the first place to be looking is in your own family. Be looking around your families for the needs. How can you be helping your mother? How can you be helping your father? Have you gone to him and asked him. "Daddy, how can I help you?" Have you done this with your mother? Have you looked at your siblings? Have you looked at ways that you can be supporting them and ways that you can be helping them? And then beyond your family, your church communities are there young ladies in the church that need encouragement that need someone to talk to? Are there mothers in the church that need help because they have so many children. There are so many needs. We just need to open our eyes and see them.

Wait.  What do you mean Jesus didn't tell his disciples to stay at home and help our nuclear families exclusively?   How did I miss that in my hours of daily Bible reading?

I can't count preaching to my friends at church as following Jesus either? Even if I explain in great detail how their choices in dress and interactions with young men are sinful?

*wails in anguish*  Oh, God!  Why do you make this so hard?

I will give them props for helping out young mothers in a church because society tells women that they are supposed to care for their homes and children effortlessly.  Jesus, though, wouldn't want them to work exclusively with church members.  He was really big on reaching out to the margins of society - which in CP/QF land means unwed mothers and divorced parents.

Ooh.  What if they took a really big step and helped out elderly women who were not members of their church too?   Man, that could be life-changing - and their lives need changing badly!

I want to leave you with hope. Please do not underestimate the importance of what you're doing in your home. It really is making a difference. The world really is a different place because of stay-at-home daughters. And I want to get you excited about this. You may not know it but there's a battle raging around you and you are in the thick of it right where you are. It's tempting for us to think that the interesting and important things are happening somewhere else but actually they're happening on the home front. They're happening in homes and in families. I can't think of another battleground that's thicker than the one that you have in your home right now. Because the state of a nation is always determined by the state of the home.

Normally, I'd write this off as overwrought frippery - but then the Duggar family's casual statement about how they know a lot of families where sexual abuse is happening haunts me.   I'm afraid that some or many of the young women listening in the audience of that podcast do live in a battleground where they are under siege by abusive family members.

This is exciting, too. You... you may think that the stay-at-home daughter movement is a little hole in the wall movement that nobody knows about, but actually that's not true anymore. Elizabeth and I got into a feminist forum one time, a very well known feminist forum, and guess what they were talking about? They were talking about us. They were talking about you. And you know why? Because they are afraid. Because they see you as a threat. And they understand that the stay-at-home mommy movement while it's important women can stay at home for selfish reasons and for reasons of convenience but the daughters who are choosing to stay at home and serve the families are up to something. And they're scared. So you can be excited about that. We're not a invisible movement any more. People know about us. This is an exciting time to be alive. The future is changing and there are great opportunities that come with that. And I wanna leave you all with a quote by Abigail Adams. Abigail Adams was writing to her son John which was during the Revolutionary War which were very turbulent difficult times kind of like the ones that we're facing now and she said, "`These are the times in which a genius would wish to live. It's not in the still, calm of life or in the repose of a pacific station that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties.

I think this is a reference to the time the Botkin Sisters got smacked down on Rachel Held Evans website - but I'm not sure.

Either way, the Botkin Sisters have badly misread larger society's feelings about stay-at-home daughters.  We're not afraid of you; we are terrified for you.   Look, it is no loss to me if a tiny fractional subset of young women choose to forgo all educational or vocational training past high school to play at being an unpaid maid, sous chef, and teacher's assistant until a guy shows up to marry you.  With a bit of luck - or conscientious planning by your parents - most SAHDs will transition to wives and mothers who will have access to a man's income and be in charge of their homes.  Sure, the former SAHDs are at higher risk of poverty simply due to their lack of ability to raise any income for their families, but at least they have some control over their lives.  The women I worry most about are "volunteering" as family maids, chefs, and parapros as well as underpaid family business workers while waiting to get married in their thirties or beyond.  The implicit promise is that in exchange for giving up education, career and romance, a SAHD will receive a glorious marriage and abundant children - not be the lowest authority person in her family of origin forever.

And leave Abigail Adams out of this.  She was a full-on feminist in her time; she'd find the idea of  women abdicating education, career and romance abhorrent.