In our review of "Joyfully At Home" by Jasmine (Baucham) Holmes I've pointed out the issues with the views of feminism she held at age 19. The end of the first chapter connects the failings of modern feminism to the benefits that stay-at-home daughterhood (SAHD) brings to believers. Ms. Baucham begins by pointing out the difficulties of fitting single adult women into the CP/QF view of female life where all women fit into a subordinate position to men:
Still, where do single women fit into this understanding of mankind? Though hierarchy and marriage may seem ordered enough to you, even the most die-hard complementarians often shrug their shoulders when it comes to how unmarried women fit into our understanding of male / female distinctions. While young men and married man are both trained to be leaders and providers in society, often times, young women are trained in the same pattern as young man, then told that, once they marry, they are given a different world to occupy. (pg. 26)
Hmm. Why might die-hard complementarians fail to object to training young single women to be providers before marriage? Well, not all homeschooled conservative CP/QF girls are lucky enough to marry within a few months of turning 18. Since many - probably most - CP/QF families live below the federal poverty line due to a combination of very large families and limited career prospects of weakly educated men, sensible parents educate their daughters so that they can bring in income by their late teens or early twenties at the latest. No one has proposed a serious answer to who is supposed to support an unmarried adult woman once her father dies so I'd assume that even stay-at-home daughters who can live at home while their parents are alive will eventually need to work. For young women who marry, being able to earn money is still useful.
Let's be honest - the skills that make a good employee translate well to being a good wife and mother. Marriage is built around communication. Being able to communicate clearly can smooth relationship difficulties. Marriage requires cooperation. Marriage requires compromise. Marriage requires deciding which issues are worth a principled stand as well. I've been concerned for years at the idea that a wife is supposed to be submissive to her husband in every issue that is not a Biblical sin. The best outcome of that belief system in practice requires that a husband be able to make decisions that are always in the best interest of his family with minimal input from his wife. Why minimal input from the wife? Well, it's hard to be totally submissive if you're giving advice...so better to remain as a child without knowledge or life experience. The worse-case scenario has already been described in "Preparing To Be A Helpmeet" by Debi Pearl. A girl can be married to a man who moves the family every two years in search of his next big idea that will end their crushing poverty or to a man who expects his every whim to be catered to by his wife and children while he abuses them.
Parenting brings an entire different level of organizational skill into play - but that's no surprise, right? Oh! I always point out one fun factoid to the HS students I sub with: I totally used the math skills I learned in Algebra II to figure out how to make the exact amount of 24-calorie formula my infant son needed. The steady nerves I developed teaching in rough schools along with the manual dexterity I acquired from years of lab work made inserting an NG tube on my son easy. I was grateful for my years of experience managing the bureaucracy of education as I've managed the scads of different medical, educational and service agencies who work with my son.
[...] for a woman of my age - of the age of many of the young ladies reading this book - to still be single in Biblical times would be seen as an anomaly.
For a woman my age to be single fifty years ago would have been seen by many as an anomaly as well. (pg. 27)
For a woman my age to be single fifty years ago would have been seen by many as an anomaly as well. (pg. 27)
The first sentence is not entirely wrong. During Biblical times, people married very young compared to modern times with women marrying not long after puberty.
On the other hand, plenty of women in the Bible never married. They were slaves or concubines instead. With the much higher mortality rates, some number of women who married in their teens would be widowed by age 20. I immediately thought of Tamar from Genesis 38. Presumably she was married to Er when she was between 12 and 16 years old. Er died and his brother Onan married her but refused to get her pregnant so God killed Onan. Judah sends Tamar home to live with her father until Judah's one surviving son is old enough to be a husband. Genesis 38:12 says that Judah's wife Shua died after a long time - so presumably her son Shelah was quite a bit younger than Er or Onan. Tamar pulls off a honey-trap on Judah which seems quite risky if she was post-menopausal - but makes more sense if she was in her thirties. Two thousand years later, the nascent Christian community was still trying to figure out how best to care for young widows - and there must have been a decent number of them since the solution for their care was to require most of them to remarry.
Likewise, the second sentence isn't entirely wrong - but I think Ms. Baucham made a claim based on a faulty understanding of history and statistics.
Let's discuss statistics first. The US median age of first marriage for women has been between ages 20 and 22 from 1890 to around 1980. Median measure the central tendency of a data plot - so we can say that around 50% of women were married by ages 20-22. Ms. Baucham's claim that she would have been an anomaly as an unmarried 19 year-old in 1950 is a stretch.
Statistics have the advantage of presenting large data sets in a concise form - but the concise form by definition loses the finer grain of the data. We have the median age for first marriage - but we don't have the total range of the data or the first and third quartile points that would give a better idea of when people were marrying. Let's think about two examples. In the first example, half of the women in the US married between the ages of 18 and 22 while 49.9% of women were married at ages 23-26 years of age. In this first society, a 30-year old single woman is unlikely to find a marriage partner who is not divorced or a widower - and this is pretty much what the US was like in the 1950's and early 1960's. In the second society, 50% of women are married at ages 14-22, but the next 49.9% of women who marry do so between the ages of 23 and 50. In this society, being unmarried at 30 doesn't mean that a woman has no chance of being married - and this is pretty much what the US has been from 1890-1940 and 1970-1980.
This next paragraph is an example of how Ms. Baucham was better grounded in reality than the Botkin Sisters at a similar age:
Stay-at-home daughterhood - the practice of living at home, under your father's authority and parental discipleship until marriage - was normative during biblical times. While the passages that talk about daughters in this context are limited in God's word, they certainly do seem to point to the biblical validity of staying home more than they do to striking out on your own. However, it is difficult to make a case that not staying home between high school graduation and marriage is a sin. Moreover, because of the fallen world we live in, for many young women, stay-at-home daughterhood in the sense that I will be talking about it in this book is an impossibility because of your family situation. (pg. 28)
Yup. Being a SAHD was normative in biblical times. So was slavery, death in childbirth and foreign occupation for people who are keeping track of their normative biblical trends.
Making a case that a single woman living outside of male authority is a sin is more than difficult; it's impossible if you read the Book of Ruth.
And yes - being a SAHD is impossible for ever so many women. It's just not financially possible for many families - and I would argue that it's irresponsible for any family that can't create a trust fund that can keep each daughter at the same socioeconomic level for the rest of her life. Each year that the Botkin Sisters, the Mally Sisters and the Maxwell Sisters are out of workforce, the less likely they are to be able to be integrated into the workforce when their parents die. Fair or unfair, many women spend some time out of the workforce due to caregiving for children or the elderly - but these seven women have no work experience outside of niche-market family businesses. I suffer secondhand embarrassment on their behalf when imagining them trying to explain what they've been doing for the last two decades of their life. After all, we've all got family members or friends who have self-published stories, novels or poems while still managing to hold down a traditional job - so what have these women being doing?
Let's end on that upbeat note.
The beginning of Chapter Two is one of the sections that I believe Mrs. Holmes finds difficult to re-read as a wife and mother - because 19-year-olds often have so very little life experience......
"Each year that the Botkin Sisters, the Mally Sisters and the Maxwell Sisters are out of workforce, the less likely they are to be able to be integrated into the workforce when their parents die. Fair or unfair, many women spend some time out of the workforce due to caregiving for children or the elderly - but these seven women have no work experience outside of niche-market family businesses. I suffer secondhand embarrassment on their behalf when imagining them trying to explain what they've been doing for the last two decades of their life." Very much waiting for the first prominent SAHD to write a tell-all.
ReplyDeleteI'd read it - but unless they are one of the Duggar kids - very few people would understand or care. CP/QF is a loud subgroup - but they are still a relatively tiny subgroup all the same.
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