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.