Saturday, March 7, 2020

Joyfully At Home: Chapter 12 - Part Four

Chapter Twelve in Jasmine Baucham "Joyfully at Home" is a slow slog of bad apologetics over how young women who are stay-at-home daughters (SAHDs) are going to be just fine in the absence of advanced education or career-building because God wants them to be wives and mothers.

The irony wasn't quite as acute when the book was written since the older members of the first generation of SAHDs were in their late twenties.  That's putting off marriage very late in CP/QF land - but marriage still seemed in reach for most of the adherents.  Reading the same passages over a decade later stings more since a good number of famous SAHDs are old enough that their chances of marrying a CP/QF man are nearly zero and the chances of having a biological child are rapidly evaporating. 

For women in the larger society, being unmarried at 35 is not the end of the world.  In CP/QF land, a unmarried adult woman is treated as a half-adult for the rest of her life.

With that background, Jasmine's next question of "Shouldn't a woman be self-sufficient?" has a different ring.   For most people, that question means "Look, not everyone is going to have a 60+ year marriage starting at age 20 where the woman can be certain of being a stay-at-home wife and mother.  Why shouldn't we encourage our daughters to be able to support themselves in a career for when our daughters are single, widowed or divorce or the family needs more income?"

Jasmine's response is "WE ARE TOTALLY GETTING MARRIED!  Stop jinxing me by talking about single women!"  
I think that a woman should be incredibly confident, resilient, and reliable.

(...)

The wife is not independent of her husband; she is to submit to him, not because he is necessarily smarter or even more spiritual than she is ( 1 Peter 3: 1- 6); she is to submit to him as unto the Lord. The submission does not mean letting go with her feigned independence ( the independence that none of us can truly boast, since God is Lord over all things), but it does not mean that she is not competent.

(...)

Suitable. Fit for the purpose. Adequate.

These are all words that remind me of the term;  "helpmeet".  A helper suitable.

A suitable helper should be one of the most competent, intelligent, and driven women around. She should not be sitting around waiting for her every romantic women to be filled , wringing her hands when asked to do something that she might not know how to do, set upon a shelf is something that is merely ornamental, but not useful. The home is her domain ( Titus 2:3-5), and she should be able to run it smoothly and efficiently. (pgs 144-146)
(The ellipse sections are rambling sections about how the US values individualism, and chunks of the 1828 Webster's dictionary to clarify that Jasmine didn't understand the difference between the words "independent" and "competent" - which worries me a bit.)
A married woman shouldn't be a caricature of a Victorian wealthy woman who has vapors at the thought of washing her own laundry.   Cool beans.

This book, however, isn't being written for married women.  It's being written for stay-at-home daughters who are being told that 1)they don't need advanced education or career training to be a wife and mother, 2) the best training for a wife and mother is to live at home until marriage and 3) there is never, ever going to be a need for a wife to bring in substantial income after marriage. 

Those assumptions of how life is going to be after marriage are not true - not even for very good CP/QF girls who do everything right.   When I first ran into CP/QF culture, there was a set of four mom-bloggers who wrote weekly posts about questions that readers had.  Of those four bloggers, two have been in situations where female income has been needed badly. 

 InAShoe was a family of 12 whose father Perry was employed by Vision Forum before the ministry collapsed.  With the loss of Perry's income, his wife Kim had to earn a living - and thankfully she had the credentials needed to do online ESL teaching while they got their Amazon-based business up and running.  The family looks like it has left CP/QF teachings behind. 

 Prior to January 2020, the Headmistress of the Common Room found out that her husband of 37 years had been having affairs.  The family was in the middle of planning for a move to Malaysia - and the husband was planning on leaving his wife and their severely disabled daughter in Malaysia when he moved to the country his mistress lived in.  The Headmistress wasted no time in getting her husband out of her life - but she's still financially dependent on him due to being out of the workforce for over 30 years and because her daughter needs full-time care.

I don't think young Jasmine's advice is particularly helpful for women who do have a lifelong marriage - but following her advice could have tragic effects for women whose marriages hit rough patches due to a husband losing a job or the end of a marriage while the woman is still young.

10 comments:

  1. Read the headmistress of the common room's post. Wow, that is a sad story.

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    1. Yeah I read it too. It's heartbreaking but honestly I'm so impressed that she's just speaking out the truth. A lot of people would blame themselves or try to believe it's not real and that they should forgive him.

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    2. @Healing Brush - It's heartbreaking. Just straight up heartbreaking - and scary.

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    3. @Shelflife - I give her props for standing up to the elders in her church who were giving her husband 'support' while not bothering to reach out to her. He's the one who was LITERALLY planning to abandon his wife and daughter in a foreign country. That's a level of casual cruelty that doesn't deserve help in the absence of demonstrated actions to support said wife and daughter without any expectations of benefit to him.

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    4. Those horrible people were supporting HIM? What's wrong with these insane churches? So proud and glad that she stood up to them all.

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    5. @Jenny - The only mitigating factor I can think of is that I really, really doubt the elders were getting the whole story from the husband. "My wife found out that I am addicted to porn and I don't know if she'll stay with me" is technically true - but misses the much larger of betrayal of "oh, and she found out that I was going to abandon her and our severely disabled daughter in a foreign country that she hadn't lived in before for another woman in a third country...and I was abandoning her in a country that she had no previous life experience in and that I had made her do fundraising to support us with rather than return to the Philippines where my mission was self-supporting."

      People who live double lives don't just lie to their partners; they lie to everyone.

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  2. Yeah hoping for the best as your Plan A is great, but when there is no Plan B and you actively avoid preparing for a Plan B it's just nonsensical. There is no way, as long as this life and the world around us contains things out of our control, for us to know Plan A will work.

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    1. @Shelflife - If you talk about Plan B, you jinx Plan A from ever happening. It's like calling "MacBeth" by its name on stage or carrying a black cat over broken mirror shards under a ladder on Friday the 13; you cause bad things to happen by discussing them.

      CP/QF land feels very steeped in superstition hidden as Christianese in my humble opinion.

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    2. Have you seen Roll to Disbelieve's series on how toxic positivity sorry of took over the Evangelical church? That's what this reminds me of. Jasmine seems to think that preparing for a time when she might have to earn an income might not just jinx it but offend God by being untrusting or something. The CP/QF god is very easily offended you know.

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    3. @Minda - I hadn't seen that, but wow! Yeah, that's really going on in CP/QF land.

      I heard it called "whistling in the dark" when I was a kid. You know, you are walking in the dark and hear something strange. To keep the fear from overwhelming you, you whistle a happy tune to drown out the strange noises.

      That works well if you are in a safe place and the only thing you have to fear is fear itself. It fails miserably if that fear comes from a warning of an attacker or a fire starting or any number of other things - but instead of assessing the next step to get to safety, you hope the danger doesn't exist.

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