Welcome to the thirteenth chapter of Jasmine Baucham's "Joyfully At Home"!
This chapter is all about Jasmine's second attempt at rebuffing questions that will be asked of young adult women who live at home with their parents without working or obtaining career training or advanced education in the absence of an illness.
This chapter is the best chapter in the whole book from a standpoint of personal amusement for me. Jasmine has been a stay-at-home daughter for a few years at most when she wrote this book - and she's still struggling to answer well-meant questions.
Sensibly, she starts off the with question that most adults will immediately ask - if staying at home is about preparing you for marriage, what happens if you never marry?
And, you know, if she had stopped right there, the entire section would have been fine. The easiest defense of being a stay-at-home daughter (SAHD) is to state that being a stay-at-home daughter works for this girl and this family right now and that future circumstances will be faced as they come.
People will still ask questions about how that daughter will be supported as her parents age and eventually pass away - but "It works for me" is pretty hard to tear apart.
The issue is that Jasmine immediately derails into a page-and-a-half spiel about how her understanding of logic is better than the rest of us (which I excluded from the quotes in the ellipse passages) and a frantic, impassioned explanation that she's going to be married, goddamnit!
The first assumption isn't an assumption; it's a conditional situation. Her blog reader asked a sensible question about what options Jasmine would have as a mature single adult if she's not needed at home.
And, really, that's a question that parents and young adult SAHDs should think long and hard about. Even the most fertile woman eventually stops having babies and those babies grow up. Having one or more unmarried adult daughters around the house must be helpful when the 10th-15th children are aged 5,4, 2,1 and infant. The importance of those daughters, though, declines when that same cluster of kids are 15, 14, 12, 11 and 10 and the chances of that daughter marrying when she's 30 instead of 20 is much lower as well.
Instead of talking about ministries that are appropriate for unmarried women of all ages, Jasmine pretty much screams "I WILL BE MARRIED! MARRIAGE IS FOR ME!"
As a data person, I have one question about all of those courtships, engagements and marriages of 18-40 year olds. What is the shape of that data set? Of all unmarried women, are the chances of a 40-year old woman getting married the same as an 18 year old? I suspect that the chances of marriage after age 24-25 drops strongly for single women in CP/QF land - and there's very little the women can do about that. The reason is simple; it's easier for men to leave CP/QF than women and it's easier for men in CP/QF to find partners who are CP/QF adjacent than it is for women to do the same thing.
What about women who are 41? Is marriage impossible for them?
Honestly, I don't believe marriage is the beginning of life as an adult for women. I do not believe it is essential for a happy life or a good life. CP/QF beliefs, though, only allow one life path for adult women to follow - and that makes a rough road for women over the age of 25 who haven't married yet.
I don't understand Jasmine's first assumption. Is she trying to be sarcastic? (I guess I'm missing context because I read it trying to figure out who Johnny was).
ReplyDeleteI guess she's making fun of people who panic at the thought of not getting married by a certain age, is that it?
You know, it seems like a common thread among the QF/CP crowd that they create expectations and pressure on people (women and girls especially), and covertly as well as overtly reinforce certain beliefs, and then mock them or deride them for having logical thoughts and fears.
This, my friends, is what we call Gaslighting.
"Johnny" is her future husband. She referrences him every now and again.
DeleteI guess she's making fun of those people - but she's also the one who flew off the handle at a question about what she'd do if she was unmarried by 30 which is weird.
I agree wholeheartedly that CP/QF land is one long exercise in gaslighting.
People are just trying to ask what the contingency plan is and she can't answer. I wish that had made her pause and reconsider, but I guess when you think you are on a path laid out by god himself you can just assume these questions are a test if faith or something.
DeleteMinda - that's the bit I find disconcerting, honestly. I am not opposed to people - male or female - living at home until they marry if it works for them and their families. Where you live is a morally neutral choice to my way of thinking.
DeleteMy concern is that a small subset of people who live anywhere will want to be married but be single due to a myriad of reasons. I don't think it's a major betrayal of being a stay-at-home daughterhood to think "Huh, what are some options for me to do at 30, 35, 40, 50 if I am single and do not have dependents at that age? Is there training I can get right now at home so that I am ready to do _______ in the future?" If that was a major portion of SAHD books, I'd be much less concerned. Hell, if it was a minor portion, I'd be less concerned.
The problem is that few authors admit that SAHDhood is an unspoken contract that young women will trade off doing anything that makes them look like they are planning for a future career other than a stay-at-home wife and mother for a perceived higher chance of an early marriage to a single income earner who can keep them and their large family in upper-middle class comfort. It's a perceived higher chance -which is different from an actual higher chance. Because around 86% of women have been married at least once by age 40, it's hard for any alternate lifestyle to make a high odds higher. On the flip side, it's pretty easy to drop those odds if your lifestyle actively separates young people from each other since that decreases the likelihood that a SAHD will be found by an eligible young man - and also by making the criteria for an eligible young man onerous.