Ladies - This is NOT proving the point you think it is!

Here's a quick recap of the rationale behind the Stay-At-Home Daughter movement. 

The "theology":  Bible says that women need a male authority figure at all points so girls need to live at home under their father until they are handed off to their husband.  The theology is neither deep nor reflecting any portion of the Gospels, but no one seems to notice or care.

The educational correlation: Women are meant to be wives and mothers.  The main forms of post-secondary training in the Western world make women less likely to be wives and mothers so girls should avoid traditional education options once they graduate from homeschool.  The traditional works of women including cooking, basic household chores and childrearing are so complicated that a young woman who stays at home and helps her mother (or other Godly Woman (TM)) will end up so far ahead of women who attend college, receive vocational training or work after high school.  (No part of this section is demonstrably true, but no one seems to notice or care, either.)

I have a rather dark sense of humor and I've been enjoying watching the recipes published on the Maxwell Family's Titus 2 blog by Teri Maxwell or Sarah Maxwell along with Jill Dillard's published recipes on the Dillard Family site.  I'd call the recipes basic, but I feel like that's insulting the recipes found in real basic cookbooks.

I'm going to share my favorites by writer:

Teri Maxwell:

I have a sneaking sense of sympathy for Teri Maxwell.  I believe she really wants to be helpful to women who don't know much about cooking - but she's not great at explaining the theory that underlies the details.
How to Flash-Freeze Strawberries:

• The process she describes is not flash-freezing; it's just ordinary freezing.  
• There's no tips or anything that is noticeably different from what I have in the standard Ball Blue Book....
• The reason we half or quarter strawberries and other fruits is two-fold.  First, cutting a whole fruit into smaller pieces speeds the freezing time up markedly since the amount of time it takes to freeze is mostly dependent on the size of the fruit.  The second benefit is that smaller pieces can be packed more tightly when frozen.

Make the Most of Your Leftovers:

• This post demonstrates how to make a casserole out of leftover rice, pork spare rib meat, ham gravy with ham bits, and a few biscuits.   The resulting casserole sounds heavy for my tastes - but that's no sin.
• My bigger issue is that she doesn't - or can't - generalize that specific example into a broader idea.   I think the post would have been so much more useful if she explained that leftover meat and vegetables can be made into a casserole by combining them with a grain product like rice, tortillas, hearty breads or noodles and a condensed soup or sauce.  To assemble, put a layer of grain product on the bottom followed by the meat and vegetables.  Top with a shallow layer of grain product.  Pour sauce over top.   Cook at 350 for 30 minutes or until heated through.     
• For leftover chicken, I use tortillas, tomatoes, corn, ricotta cheese and green enchilada sauce to make enchilada casserole.  
• Leftover beef combined with egg noodles, cream of mushroom soup, a little bit of wine, and green beans makes a nice casserole, too..  
• I don't have a great leftover pork casserole - but pork fried rice is a household favorite.

Sarah Maxwell - the dedicated Amazon Affiliate writer:

How to Make Taco Meat in Your Instant Pot:

• That's a fascinating title.  An equally honest title would be "Brown meat.  Add commercial taco seasoning.  Buy an Instant Pot through our Amazon affiliate link so we get cash!"  The reason they didn't use that title is that there would be nothing left in the body of the post.
• An Instant Pot is a pressure cooker that can also be used as a crock-pot.  There are a lot of times that a pressure cooker is a great choice.  A pressure cooker speeds up working with dried beans, lentils and rice of all types.  Pressure cookers can do amazing things with tender foods that can get gross if over cooked like shrimp and eggs.   Using a pressure cooker/crock pot to brown hamburger or ground poultry makes NO sense.   That wastes so much energy that it is insane. 

How to Make a Pour Over Mocha

• I've always found this one painful due to Sarah Maxwell's angst seeping through the post.  The post is so clearly written to list six fairly expensive items in the Maxwell's Amazon affiliate links program.  The purpose is obvious - but Sarah also seems to realize that most of her most dedicated readers don't have around $100 to drop to buy a ceramic coffee dripper, coffee bean grinder, milk frother and reusable insulated tumbler to make the perfect cup of mocha.  But she needs to drum up the income and so we have this post.

This post feels like it has multiple writers involved so I'm assuming that Teri and Sarah were involved in this classic:

The Maxwell Burrito Recipe:

• An excellent recipe to use for an open house or any other party where you invited 500 people and forgot to ask them to RSVP.   
• Let's see: 70 cups of cooked pinto beans and 15 pounds of onions with 4 cups of spices/flavorings.  I have a well-supplied kitchen but this would overwhelm every pot, pan, bowl and cup I own in the process including my boiling bath canner and pressure canner pressed into service as really big pots.
• I have to give Sarah (or whoever wrote the post) credit for detailing all the steps the family goes through.  At the same time, the process is completely crazy!  The process of cooking the mountain of beans separately from the hill of onions and the peppers simply creates more dishes to wash and more time on the blender/mixer without adding anything to the finished recipe.  
• If they were to add some cumin, garlic and oregano to the burrito mix, it would change their lives.  Just saying.  It's a magical part of burritos.

At least the Maxwell recipes require some skill at cooking.  Jill Dillard seems to be specializing in creating/remembering recipes for children too young to reach the stove. 

Cinnamon Toast:

• Like Joseph Duggar, I enjoy cinnamon toast.  Unlike his sister, I've never even thought about writing out a recipe for adding sugar and cinnamon to a buttered piece of toast.  
• Do I get credit for "Honey-flavored Breakfast Cereal" if I explain how to drizzle honey on corn flakes?

Poor Man's Pizza:

• Tortillas, pizza sauce, and cheese.  Microwave for 1 minute.  
• If this is really for a meal instead of a snack, I'd substitute bagels instead of tortillas and bake in the oven for 20 minutes.  It's amazing - but probably not cheap enough for large broke families.

Jill Dillard's secondary theme is accidently exposing how huge families need to skimp on protein to feed everyone.  After all, Cinnamon Toast has very little protein and Poor Man's Pizza is only slightly better because of the protein in the cheese.  Here are some more:

Easy Chicken and Noodles

• This is a giant pot of egg noodles and diluted cream of chicken soup.  Using cooked chopped chicken is optional.   
• She notes that her family would eat it with homemade bread (ATI teaches that the line about "Give us this day our daily bread" in the Our Father means you have to bake bread daily), a big salad and fruit.  That sounds yummy - but unless the big salad is made with lots of hard boiled eggs or beans  - this meal is really low in protein.

Cheesy Chicken and Rice Enchiladas

• The Duggars got this recipe from a family friend.  It makes 20 enchiladas out of 20 tortillas, 5 cups of cooked rice, 4 cans of cream of chicken soup, four cups of cheddar cheese and one 12.5 oz can of cooked chicken.  Each enchilada has 0.6 oz of chicken in it; a serving of meat for a child age 5 and up is supposed to be around 3 oz.  My toddler routinely eats more than 0.6oz of meat at a sitting - and he's tiny!
  

I know I'm supposed to be a dunce at cooking since I went to college - but this week we've had citrus-stuffed slow roasted chicken with green beans for dinner one night followed by chicken soup made with the back, rib, wing, neck and thigh meat from the roasted chicken combined with fire-roasted tomatoes, corn, green peppers and zucchini. 

I think I'll stick to the cooking I learned from my parents.....

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.

Dominion Orientated Femininity: Part Five

I apologize for the late post. My husband was injured in a workplace accident and burned his arm. He's doing fine, but the burn got infected so he's had a lot more doctor's appointments than usual so I've had much less free time than usual. Thank God for antibiotics!

This post covers the seventh and eighth points on the topic of dominion-orientated women.  When I was in junior high, I was really into Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.  In DS9, a massive interstellar federation that could be contacted by traveling through the wormhole was called the Dominion.  Bluntly, I'd prefer to listen to a podcast of fanfic surrounding women from the Dominion than having to listen to the Botkin Sisters blather on about womanhood.

Number seven is a dominion woman thinks like a shepherd. Jesus said, "Do you love me? Feed my sheep." And this is a basic Christian duty that we have to make disciples of all the nations. And this for many of us young homeschooled girls this is going to involve overcoming obstacles like shyness and timidity. This can be very hard for us. I used to be extremely shy. I used to be so shy I had a hard time talking to a person one-on-one let alone even thinking about standing up on stage and speaking to over 500 people like I'm doing right now.

I have a mental block when thinking about how CP/QF adherents are going to make disciples of all the nations.  So many of their beliefs are interwoven with white middle-class values from the 1950's US that they struggle to convert new members and lose a good number of children born into CP/QF homes to other belief systems.   When they struggle this badly in their homeland, I can't imagine how this could spread to other nations.   Derick and Jill Dillard's abortive attempts at missionary work in El Salvador demonstrates many of the issues.  The Dillards had energy, youth and enthusiasm on their side.  Unfortunately, their lack of fluency in Spanish, minimal cultural appreciation, and absence of previous training or experience in launching a mission doomed their venture. 

The Gothardite/Vision Forum/ IBLP/IFB belief system has two separate issues that doom missionary work.  First, cults work best when members are highly indoctrinated in cult materials and marginally educated in other ideas.  The Wisdom Booklets are constructed to indoctrinate by exposing adherents to the same ideas repeatedly while selectively demonstrating outside facts that "support" the cult ideas.   The problem is that these ideas won't hold up well when adherents are exposed to a wider education which happens when people are immersed in a foreign language and culture.

The second issue is the idolization of large families of closely spaced children.  In my church, missionaries are primarily single adult men and women - generally priests or sisters.  Simply, single adults are easiest to embed in a new culture.  They are able and willing to focus intensely on determining the needs of the community, searching out culturally and economically sustainable solutions, and are able to bring specialized skills in medicine, education, engineering or agriculture.  They strive to be a benefit to their new home.  The issue with missionaries who have huge families is that supporting that many kids is a drain on the new church mission.  Additionally, the medical needs of actively reproducing women and young children are much different than a celibate men and women.   Jill Dillard faced an unenviable choice of traveling repeatedly between the US and El Salvador for prenatal care and delivery or utilizing a scarce resource in a developing country that was facing difficult times.  As her sons grew and became more mobile, they would need a series of expensive vaccines for typhoid and rabies.

Changing subjects abruptly, a lot of kids are shy especially around new adults in groups.  Being so shy that you remember struggling to talk one-on-one to other person sounds agonizing.  I can't help but wonder how much kept away from other people through homeschooling along with exclusion from community activities worsened the issue.  Thinking back over my campers when I was a counselor, I always had a few shy or introverted campers who needed a bit of help breaking the ice with the other girls - but that wore off pretty quickly both in the cabin and in workshop groups.

And I realized after a while that my shyness was a result of two things: excessive focus on self and fear of man. That's what shyness always is. And my father helped me understand that this was something that I needed to get over. And so he told me, "You need to focus on other people and when you do that, your shyness will go away. And he was right. It did. But if we're going to be shepherds, we have to learn to stop thinking about ourselves and we have to learn to love the other people we are supposed to be ministering to. We can't retreat into ourselves. We have to ignore our comfort zone and reach out to others.

My method for helping shy teenagers is to pair them up with friendly teenagers.  I'm going to stick with that method over telling the teenagers that they are being self-centered and need to get over themselves.   The Botkin girl who is speaking in this section clearly believes her father's method is great - but the story is creepy as hell to me.

The exhortation to reach out to others and avoid retreating into a personal comfort zone is surreal coming from a pair of sisters who have disappeared for months, if not years, from their website and social media.  They've withdrawn from all sorts of potentially discomforting arenas like advanced education, starting a career or forming their own family.  If they cannot branch out in the first steps to becoming independent adults when they are in their early 30's, how do they hope to convert everyone on the planet?

And the good thing is when we're thinking like that it gives us boldness in how we interact with people. Some girls have told us that they panic or they break out in a cold sweat when someone asks them, "So what do you do?" I'm sure you've all gotten that question and I'm sure you know it's an interesting question to be asked and I'm not sure why it's frightening for some girls. I guess because they're afraid of disapproval or confrontation. But instead I think we should look at this question as an opportunity to talk to people about the beauties of God's design. Why should we be ashamed? We have nothing to be ashamed of. God's ways are wiser than the heathen's ways and we should be happy whenever someone gives us the opportunity to explain that. Here's a verse I love in Deuteronomy 4. Moses has just given the Israelites several of God's Commands and says "Keep them and do them for that is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples who will hear all these statutes and say, 'Surely, this great nation is a wise and understanding people.' For what nation is there that has a God so near to it as the Lord Our God whenever we call on him? Or what nation is there that has statutes and judgements as righteous as this whole law which I am setting before you today?" Honestly, what nation is there that has statues and judgement as righteous as the law which we have?

 *waves*

Hi!  I'm one of those people who cannot entirely hide my disapproval of young women who leave education and career in order to "train" to be a wife and mother before they are married or pregnant.

I understand that sometimes people need to take time off for health or family reasons; that's part of life and NOT what I'm talking about here.  After all, I took time off from college to receive treatment for depression and anxiety and suspended my graduate school program to care for my premature son.  Sometimes life throws a curve ball and we just have to do the best we can to get through the tough times.

No, I'm thinking of the 17-year old woman who I met at a young adult Catholic event when I was 19 or so.  She had just graduated high school after being homeschooled and we were excited to hear about what she was planning to do next.  She replied that she was going to live at home until she got married and started a family.  Someone asked when she was getting married because we assumed that she was engaged.  She was not engaged.  In fact, she wasn't dating anyone.

The response of the rest of us was that being a wife and a mother was a great life goal - and one that she was very likely to achieve.  In the meantime, though, she should probably do something or learn something.  Most of us were concerned that a very young woman who was on the sheltered side who was focused entirely on marriage and motherhood would be far too likely to marry the first man who displayed any interest in her - regardless of if he was a good match.  We also worried about how boring living at home without any stimulation from a job or education might be for a young woman.

And we need to not assume that the other nations are going to be hostile or look down on us. Because they don't sometimes. A lot of people have responded very interestingly when Anna and I tell them what we're doing and why. A lot of girls actually.have responded very wistfully and said, "You know what? I wish I could do that. I would love nothing more than to be able to do that." A lot of people can see the wisdom in what we're doing but we have to be bold in our witness.

Let's discuss for a few minutes why those wistful girls can't stay home.

 If I had bounced that idea off my parents, they would have rejected it immediately.   There was no one in my home who needed me to give in-home care to and I was healthy enough to restart college within a few months after I was diagnosed with depression.  All of us kids had the option of working after high school or receiving advanced training.  Sitting at home for years while waiting for someone to marry sounds irresponsible from a parenting point of view.

The other issue I see is that the stay-at-home daughter movement expects parents to financially support unmarried daughters forever.  Most of the CP/QF families in my area are working-class families that won't be able to provide much more than room and possibly board for their adult daughters.  Paying for clothing, computers, travel, and all of the incidentals for a middle-class lifestyle is beyond these families unless the daughters are working.   I've never heard a coherent plan for how a stay-at-home daughter will be supported once their father has died.  Sarah Mally and Sarah Maxwell are in their mid-to late 30's.  Both women have income streams from self-published books and Sarah Maxwell does some work for her brothers' businesses - but I doubt the income for either woman is enough to support themselves independently let alone at the socioeconomic standard that they are used to.  Steven Maxwell seems to be withdrawing from at least one of the Maxwell Family businesses as he approaches retirement age while Anna is now prominently displayed as a call-service representative for Nathan's business.  The darkest outcome I can imagine for the Maxwell family is that Sarah, Anna and Mary's incomes are used to support the Maxwell parents during their retirement - and then the women are left without career skills or a nest egg when they are suddenly without a male income source when they are in their 40's, 50's or 60's.

Moving on to number eight. A dominion woman strengthens her arms and trains her mind. Now, one of the things that our family has been accused of is that we don't believe that women should be educated. I don't know how many times we can say this but we said it as many times as we possibly can. We believe that Christian women... Christian young women need to be the best educated women in the world in the right ways and for the right reasons. And a useful woman a dominion woman the kind we've been describing here today is one who has been equipped for the battle is ready for all the duties of life is ready for anything that life might bring her. She's ready to live in a 400 sq ft. almost finished house or she's ready to be the president's daughter or she's ready to live in a mud hut in Africa. She's ready for anything and everything.

The Botkin Sisters believe women should be highly educated - then immediately demonstrate their ignorance.   First, they highly qualify the standard of education to "the right ways" and "the right reasons".  They might as well just say, "We should be highly educated in cult materials." 

No one in their right mind should try and have two people living in one "almost finished" 400 square foot house.  That's a tiny space for two adults with all 400 feet being usable.  There's no room left for areas under construction.  Since people who are not using birth control have a 50% chance of getting pregnant within 3 months and 90% within a year, the family had better have have a plan for expanding that house rapidly.....

Let's not fall back on primitive stereotypes about Africa, ok?    Go read about 5 different African countries on Wikipedia.  Write a comparative essay on your findings. 

If the Maxwells and Mallys are looking down the barrel at future poverty, Anna Sofia and Elizabeth should be extremely worried.  Near as I can tell, the Botkin family has most of their income coming from the younger brother's T. Rex Arms.  That's not a lot of money to support six adults on let alone save up money for the Botkin parents' retirement or a nest egg for the girls.  I hope they are ready for that.

One thing that we need to be asking ourselves is "What is the goal of our education? What are we really preparing to do?" And here's a quote by William B. Sprague in a letter to his daughter that I really like and he says, "The object of education is two-fold: to develop the faculties and to direct them, to bring out the energies of the soul and to bring them to operate to the glories of the creator. In other words, it is to render yourself useful to the extent of your ability." So the purpose of our education is to equip us for the great assignment as women: to be helpers suitable to brave dominion men who have the task of discipling the nations and to be the mothers and teachers of the future generations of Christian warriors. And if we want to raise our sons to be the next presidents, preachers, filmmakers, writers, culture-changers, we're going to need to have an excellent education.

I agree with Sprague that education is about training people to be useful to society at large.  I don't think Victoria Botkin managed to do that with her daughters.    I was thinking about Anna Sofia and Elizabeth's lives while I was mowing the lawn.  They are in their thirties and have achieved none of the milestones that mark adulthood in CP/QF or wider society.  They've never held a job let alone a career.  They've never lived outside of their immediate family.  They've never had a long term romantic relationships.  They've never married.  They have no children.   I suppose they remain busy cleaning up after their two brothers who still live at home and I'm sure their sisters-in-law are grateful for the help they give in childcare - but is that really the fullest extent of their innate skills?  They update their website on a yearly basis.  They've written two books in 15-odd years.  They produced a thoroughly odd movie about stay-at-home daughters.   I'm not impressed.

Now, the question is, " Well, how do we....how do we go about that? How do we educate ourselves in these ways?" And I have another quote here that I really like by John Taylor Gatto who's a former New York Time Teacher of the Year . He says, "Close reading of tough minded writing is still the best, cheapest and quickest method known for learning to think for yourself. Reading and rigorous discussion of that reading is a way that obliges you to formulate a position and support it against objections. It is an operational definition of education in its most fundamental civilized sense." And I might say even better than reading books is writing books [laughs].

*cringes*  The self-referencial praise of people who write books grates on my nerves every time.

I find Gatto to be a bit iconoclastic - but I completely agree with his quote.  My high school English courses along with a phenomenally good Morality course my senior year were based around reading difficult material and discussing it at length with other students and the teacher.  This followed through into my (unfortunately few) college level Humanities and Arts classes.  Based on my memories of  "It's (Not) That Complicated", I doubt either of the sisters was reading at the depth or breadth expected in a college preparatory education.  I know I've forgotten a few novels we read, but I remember reading "Red Badge of Courage", "Lord of the Flies",and "The Odyssey" along with a large research project on a composer, sculptor, painter and in 9th grade.  The next year we read "The Crucible", "The Great Gatsby", "Grapes of Wrath",  "The Education of Little Tree", and "To Kill A Mockingbird" along with a research project on any topic relating to TKAM in American Literature.  Junior year we read "Beowulf", "Macbeth", and "Jane Eyre" for British Literature.  My senior year we read "Utopia", "Hamlet", "Beloved", "Jazz" before diving into cinema classics like "Citizen Kane", "Amadeus", and "Casablanca".    On top of that, we were reading scads of short stories and poems between each of the novels.   Heck, two of my friends and I made a rather horrible, but accurate film version of Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" for extra credit.   

I don't believe that the Botkin sisters have been exposed to close readings of works that would be critical of American exceptionalism or patriarchy in general.    I'm sure they've been kept carefully away from any feminist literature (well, except maybe "Jane Eyre" or "Little Women").  Have they read anything written by a person of color?   Have they really participated in an intense discussion where the outcome is not necessarily in line with their family's beliefs?

The self-serving reference to writing a book as a sign of education screams that the Botkin family doesn't really educate their children.  My project related to TKAM was on the Nazi Olympics of 1936 which was an extravaganza of highly organized propaganda for the Nazis.  The Nazis produced plenty of books and articles on why genocide was not only needed, but beneficial to humankind at large.   IOW, writing a book does not prove that the author is thinking critically at all. 

Let's be honest.  The Botkin Sisters two books are awful on so many levels.....

One thing that I think that I mentioned in the last part was novels and fiction and how young ladies can read too many of those and they can escape through them and they can become enraptured by them and that's not the only reason I would caution girls not to read them. The other reason is that there are so many other books that need to be read right now. Elizabeth and I have a reading list that's about a mile long and I don't know if we're ever going to get through it. Some of the subjects that we're studying right now are theology and worldview, writing and communication, history and understanding the times. There's so much to study. There's so much to learn. And I do believe that reading books is the best way to do that.

Mmm-k. 

"Worldview" and "Understanding the Times" are not exactly tricky academic subjects - and I really doubt either of the Botkin Sisters are digging deeply into authors who have any opinions that diverge from the party line. 

Theology, writing, communication and history are genuine areas of study - but it's rare that someone would be able to combine all four of those topics and study them deeply enough to be a real expert.  Perhaps if they were studying a specific theological doctrine and how it changed over time....that would lead to a paper of some sort....and I guess that the presentations on the final topic would be a form of communication...but I'm never going to see that from the Botkin Sisters. 

I feel sad reviewing this section because I know how much the Botkin Sisters have missed.  Imagine if they had attended a college or a seminary.  Imagine if they joined Toastmasters.  Imagine if they took a few community college classes on public speaking.  Imagine if they acted in a community theater or started a book club that read works by women, LGBT+ or people of color.  Imagine if they flipped burgers at the local greasy spoon or joined a literacy outreach to their local community. 

Imagine if they lived fully.

Dominion Orientated Femininity: Part Four

I think I've moved on beyond my disappointment that we will never know what Anna Sofia and Elizabeth's point number three is in their podcast "Dominion Orientated Femininity".   My guess for the third point is "A dominion woman doesn't waste time on proofing media" - but I am open to suggestions in the comments section. 

Let's see.  We can cover points 4-6 today.   I should warn you; I adore point six for so many reasons!  Let's jump in:

Point number four is: a dominion woman is invested in the family that God gave her. One verse that we love to look at about this is Psalm 144. And it says in verse 12 "Let our sons in their youth be as grown-up plants and our daughters as corner pillars fashioned as for a palace." This is an amazing piece of imagery we have here. One of the Webster's 1828 definitions of the word "pillar" is "A supporter that which sustains or upholds that on which some superstructure rests." And this helps us understand a little more about what the role of a daughter is in her family. She doesn't just have an ornamental role. She`s there actually to help hold up her family to help support her family. But the other thing that I get from this verse is this is not a crude, roughly hewn pillar that this girl is. She's been polished, very carefully polished, so that she not only gives strength to the home, but she also provides grace and beauty to the home.

Anna Sofia/Elizabeth seems to have gotten swept away in the excitement of the verse and forgot that it's a piece of imagery.  The next verse says "May our barns be filled with produce of every kind; may our sheep increase by thousands by tens of thousands in our fields!"  I doubt the Psalmist was creating lists of what types of produce was in the barn or how the number of sheep could increase by a thousand-fold. 

In terms of describing the human offspring of the family, the Psalmist was symbolically saying "may your children be healthy, fertile and beautiful".   Let's be honest: childhood mortality rates were atrocious. The only social safety net for old age was having living adult offspring to support you.  Having a pretty daughter (or two or three) could mean a better marriage, more grandchildren and a comfortable old age.

It's unlikely that the main interests of families raising girls during Biblical times was raising a daughter who could bring grace or beauty to a home.  A strong girl who was skilled at the tasks of keeping a home, preparing food, making textiles and caring for the ill would be far more useful than a girl who could make the house look nice by arranging flowers.

It's also interesting to me this verse seems to presuppose that a woman would be living at home with her family. But we need to realize that there's a way a girl can live in her home without really living in her home. Her body can be there, but her mind can be somewhere completely different. Her heart can be somewhere different. We've known girls who have removed themselves from the home in every way except physically. And I think the reason is because all families have problems and some girls see the problems in their families and they become sullen. They become bitter. They give up on making anything change and daughters can help make things change.

 Some girls give up and they withdraw into themselves and into their own little private world. Their dreams, their fantasies, their novels, whatever they like to use to help them escape. They are waiting for something better. They say, "We're waiting until we get married. That's when our life is going to really start. That's the family that will be our real family." And so they're not engaged in the home. They're not engaged in the relationships there. They are not engaged in the business of the home. They're not trying to improve the atmosphere of the home. Their energies are not focused on their families and sometimes we've heard them say, "Well, uhnh! Why should I get really invested in this family because I'm just going to be leaving soon?" Those are the girls who never leave. Because what young man is going to look at a young woman who is not invested in the relationships God gave her and say, "That's the kind of wife I want! That's the kind of wife I want helping me and raising my children!"? Those girls do not usually get married. And so we all need to be invested in the families the Lord has given us right now.

I'm skeptical about using an ancient song to discuss the role of daughters in the home because the daughters are described as pillars in a castle.   If we're putting that much emphasis on imagery, the fact that the daughters were castle pillars instead of pillars in a home implies that God wants women to be outside their family at maturity.

In CP/QF homes, unmarried adults daughters have no power in the family structure.  Their father is the head of the household.  Adult sons living at home at least bring in money which gives them some power.  The mother in the household still maintains primacy over raising the children and has a far longer standing relationship with the father.   Telling unmarried adult daughters that they should change the issues within their family is absurd; they have no power to make anything change.

The reason that unmarried daughters mentally withdraw from their families is that they realize how powerless they are.  Staying enmeshed in their family of origin doesn't help adult daughters find a spouse to marry.   There are plenty of examples of good CP/QF adult women who follow this advice and pass years or decades as unpaid au pairs in their parents' home and businesses like Jana Duggar, Sarah Maxwell, Sarah Mally,  and, oh yes, Anna Sofia Botkin and Elizabeth Botkin.

And that takes Anna to our next point which is number 5: A dominion woman lives in the real world.

And I want to talk about something that a lot of us young ladies have a tendency to do. We women love beautiful, feminine, romantic pictures, don't we? But let me tell you something about these images. This is not a picture of the real world. This is not even an accurate depiction of history. This is not what women looked like during the Roman and Greek Era or the Medieval Era. These are romantic depictions of history. Real life doesn't look like this. Real women don't look like this. Real houses don't look like this. But we young ladies can have a tendency to idolize these beautiful, feminine, romantic images and to lose ourselves in the beauty and the romance. But this is something that we need to be extremely careful about. And when we look around our world and we can see that it's unromantic. It's ugly. It's ungodly. It's perishing. It's so easy for us to want to escape into these beautiful, romantic pictures and want to just lie around "Oh, if only the world were liked this! If only homes looked like this! If only we looked like this! I'm sure that things were much more romantic in history. It's too bad things are so unromantic now." This is a very dangerous thing for girls to do. And girls can do this by looking at pictures. They can retreat into books. They can retreat into movies, romance novels. There are so many different avenues for young ladies to want to escape to.

Ooof. 

In the first few sentences, Anna Sofia manages to make a mish-mash of everything I learned in my history and humanities classes in high school and college.   I think she's talking about Romantic style paintings of events in Classical Greece, the Roman Empire and the Medieval Era.   I think that straightens out the first bit because the art types of Greece, Rome and Medieval Europe are not that similar.  Trying to make the images I remember from Greek and Roman art fit the description of "romantic" and "feminine" makes my head hurt.

Once I straightened that out, I realized that Anna Sofia was sharing the fact that paintings don't depict history accurately as a big, life-changing idea!  I'm both horrified and amused by that declaration.  My horror comes from yet another example of how frightening uneducated the Botkin family assumes their listeners are - and the Botkin presumably know that better than I do.  My amusement comes from the fact that my reaction is "No shit."   Have you seen a painting from those times that depicts smallpox scars?  How about women dying in or after childbirth?  How about crushed limbs from farming accidents?  Yeah, successful artists generally do well by selling what people like to see - pretty farmlands, healthy children, beautiful women - rather than what is really there.

If a person is lying around wishing they were alive in the 'good ol' days', they need to study history more.   Everyone enjoys physically taxing labor interspaced with disease and starvation, right?

And we need to be grateful for the battleground that God has given us. And not desire to live in a different sphere or a different generation or a different world or a world that never existed. It's not for us to wish that we could have authority in the gates. And it's not for us to wish that we could live in Jane Austen's England or Victorian high society and we really should not wish that we lived in Greek and Roman times. It's not for us to escape into fantasy worlds. This messed up world, this crooked and perverse generation, this America which is scheduled for judgement is the world that God chose for us. And it's the world that we need to be thankful for.

Got a Bible verse for this blanket condemnation of wanting to live in an easier time or place?  No?

The only sentence in that whole chunk that interests me is the one that discusses how women shouldn't want to have power in society or "authority at the gates".   The idea is out-of-place in the middle of a section on how women should be happy in the time and place that God put them because in Botkin-land women should never ever even aspire to be an authority.  I think that sentence gives a bit of insight into what life must be like for Anna Sofia and Elizabeth Botkin.  They've grown up in the mutual fantasy world that Geoffrey and Victoria Botkin have spun where the Botkin Family is destined for greatness.  The parents and sons have carved up separate spheres of influence and are waiting for the day that God destroys the US and hands leadership over to the Botkins and their ilk.  It's a disturbing vision - but how much more disturbing is it when the Botkin Sisters realize that they've been handed the most inconsequential portion of rebuilding society?  Their job is to reshape women's roles into "helper of men".  See, I just did their job for them in three words; it's not that complicated. :-P   Their other job is to birth and raise children - but Anna Sofia and Elizabeth's children are not counted as part of the Botkin patriarchal line so getting husbands for them is not a priority for Geoffrey Botkin.

Anna Sofia/Elizabeth inserts a random quote by Rushdoony about how bad it is when people don't want to follow God's Law.   I'm skipping it because it is long, I can't verify the quote, and I'm not entirely sure that the speaker doesn't reflect on the quote in the middle.

After that, we learn that Anna Sofia and Elizabeth have done research themselves - online even!

Part of the reason that girls seek to escape is because they're bored. Part of the reason girls seek to escape is because they are not satisfied with where God has put them and it's the easiest way to deal with hardship. This is something that I've had a tendency to do. This is something that Elizabeth has had a tendency to do. I think that is something that we all have a tendency to do. And we need to be very careful about this.

Elizabeth and I have done a lot of research online and talking to young ladies. One of the things that we've noticed is that they all have a tendency to escape into novels. We didn't realize that this was as big a deal as it really is, but 90% of the young ladies that we've talked to have at one point been addicted to romance novels even if they wouldn't call them novels. It's partly because as homeschoolers we love to read, but it can become an idol for us as it has for so many of the young women that we've talked to.

Allow me to propose that the real reason for boredom among young unmarried women in CP/QF families:  the girls know on some level that they are being held back from fully living the lives God gave them.  The CP/QF unmarried women authors I've read seem to have natural talents including intellect and a willingness to work.  If properly educated and allowed to follow their own interests, most if not all of these women would be well-established in a career by their late twenties.  Women who are in their mid to late thirties could be leaders in traditionally female occupations like teaching early childhood, working in community health or home-care aide.    Instead, these women are spinning their wheels in family-based "ministry" businesses where they often do most of the work but receive none of the accolades or praise. 

Anna Sofia's declaration that 90% of homeschooled stay-at-home-daughters become addicted to "romance" novels makes me giggle every time.   I'm trying to imagine the physical side-effects of withdrawal from romance novels.  Maybe the young women become overly skeptical and morose.

Everyone needs a break now and again - and I think SAHD need a break more than the average person.  Reading a book - especially something as un-edifying as a Christian romance novel - is a tame way of rebuilding energy.

Now, I unveil my favorite point: Number 6!!!!  I love number six!

One of the attributes of a dominion woman - number 5 - was she lives in the real world.

Number six is a dominion woman embraces a hard life. And a dominion woman loves a hard life.

That's it. 

There is no more discussion, information, or elaboration on what a "hard life" is or what "loving a hard life" looks like. 

I suppose this lack of elaboration is because they didn't want the entire female component of the audience to start crying or defensively arguing.   From an outsider point of view, women in CP/QF have a brutally hard life from start to end.   They are trained from infancy to ignore their own wishes, wants, desires and talents in exchange for acceptance in their family.  Their academic education is minimal and undercut by implying that learning to do daily chores is the same thing as learning math or science.  Young girls are taught that physical and emotional purity is the cornerstone of their worth as a person.  The young women are indoctrinated that anything other than an early marriage that produces many children is a failure - but they are also prevented from socializing with the young men who would marry them.   If they marry, they will spend their lives juggling the impossible tasks of running a home and school on little predictable income while being pregnant or nursing.   On top of that, many married CP/QF women attempt to bring in income through an additional home-based business.  How the women manage to do that with all of the other work - and without making their husbands seem like poor providers - is beyond me.   Those who married young and continue having children into their 40's will be raising children until they are in the mid-sixties.   On the other hand, some women never marry and live with their parents their whole life.  Even in a healthy family, supporting one or more unmarried adult daughter can be a financial strain.  In an unhealthy family, the daughter(s) are continually exposed to the whims and caprices of their parents.  At the same time, the daughter is aware that she has failed to fulfill God's single, uniform plan for women: to marry and bear children.

Life is hard - but CP/QF creates crushing burdens for women.

Dominion Orientated Femininity: Part Three

This post covers all of the second point in Anna Sofia and Elizabeth Botkin's podcast "Dominion-Orientated Femininity".   The Botkin Sisters are solid public speakers, but would greatly benefit from one or two classes in public speaking.  The lecture/conference breakout session/podcast covers the ten most important points about dominion-orientated femininity - but the discussion of two of the points take up half of the time.  Since the introduction to the topic took 25% of the podcast's running time, this left seven topics to be covered in about 6 minutes. 

Somewhere in the melee, point three got lost all together.

I'm really curious - but will likely never know - if the error occurred at the original conference and no one noticed in post-production....or if point three was lost during post.   I find it depressing that a family that prides themselves on starting an alternative media empire missed a mistake as obvious as this one.  Was it too much effort for one of the brothers to listen through the entire 37 minute podcast and pay attention?

Well, here we go:

Point number two is: a dominion woman understands what the difference is between real femininity and false femininity. This is important.

There are a lot of theories of femininity going around that we need to examine Biblically. For example, some people say, "Femininity is the opposite of masculinity". Well, certainly, we are supposed to be different from men, but that doesn't necessarily mean opposite.

Another one is some people think femininity is whatever the feminists have rejected. Well, that's bad hermeneutics. "Cause we have to be careful that we don't build our philosophy of womanhood or of anything else on a knee-jerk reaction to something bad as though the thing that's bad is what actually determines our morality. The Bible is our only standard and it should be our motivation to do right.

Some people say that Biblical femininity is any picture of womanhood that was around before the Woman's Suffrage Movement. Well, the thing is feminism has been around since the garden of Eden and it's had advocates in every single century.

This is entirely personal preference on my part - but do not give counter-examples before giving me the working definition. 

I agree that morals and principles should be defined positively instead of in reaction to negative things.

I've been thinking really hard about Genesis 1 +2 and I have no idea why Eve's decision to eat the apple counts as a feminist act.  No idea at all.   Adam ate the apple, too, then attempted to shift blame to Eve.  Does that mean failure to own and accept responsibility for one's actions is a masculine trait?  (You know, in CP/QF land, the answer to that question might be "yes" - and that scares me even more.)

So the actual meaning of femininity is really extremely simple and we see it in the first couple of chapters of the Bible. So here in Genesis 2 God reveals to us the essence of femininity when he shows us how Eve was meant to correlate to Adam. He said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make him a helper suitable for him." So, here we see the woman was made for the man like it says in 1 Corinthians 11:9. We see she's a different creature. She's made for a different purpose and her role is different which we see in Genesis 3. She is supposed to look different as we see in Deuteronomy 22:5. And we should rejoice in that difference because that is the difference that makes us complimentary to the man. And the purpose of this difference which we call femininity is to help masculinity and to suit masculinity. To compliment it and complete it. And the two of them together will be fruitful and multiply and fill the Earth and subdue it. We could sum up by saying, "True femininity is about helping men fulfill their calling. "

Who's up for a round of Bible Bingo?

Anna Sofia/Elizabeth Botkin starts out by quoting Genesis 2:18 - which is a strange choice out of all the options in that chapter.  The next action that follows God's statement isn't the creation of Eve, but the creation of animals meant to be partners for Adam.  None of the animals are suitable partners for Adam so God created Eve from his rib.   When Adam awakes, he doesn't proclaim "I've got a helper!".  No, he recognizes and rejoices that he has another person who is made of the same flesh and bone as him.    The major moral I've always heard from that story is that males and females are partners in doing God's will since God commanded Adam to care for the garden - and created Eve because humans need friends.

No discussion of female submission is complete without 1 Corinthians 11:9 "Neither was man created for the sake of woman, but woman for the sake of man."  Oddly enough, people who pull the previous verse generally miss 1 Corinthians 11:11-12 "Nevertheless, in the Lord woman is not independent of man or man independent of woman.  For just as the woman came from man, man comes through woman; but all things come from God."  Equally important, verses 2-16 are discussing which genders should keep their heads covered during prayer.   The full argument follows that God created Adam in God's image, but Eve was created in Adam's image only so men who are the image of God should keep their heads uncovered during prayer while women who are images of humans should cover their heads.     Since Genesis 1:27 explicitly states that God created male and females in the image of God, we can safely disregard the questionable logic within 1 Corinthians 11:2-16 about female submission.

I'm very worried about what I'm going to find in Genesis 3 because I think Anna Sofia/Elizabeth has confused the gendered curses for eating the forbidden fruit with God's purpose in creating humans. 

*drums fingers nervously while waiting for a page to load*

Yup.  Yup.  Anna Sofia/Elizabeth has confused women's curse of the pain and danger associated with pregnancy and childbirth and men's curse of physically crushing subsistence agriculture with God's purpose for creating men and women.   I'm blushing on behalf of Anna Sofia/Elizabeth right now; I would have gotten marked down SO badly if I screwed that interpretation up in a high school essay.  I can't even imagine the level of embarrassment if I did that in my one college level religion class. 

OT: English needs a word for the emotion of embarrassment felt on behalf of another person who is completely oblivious to the fact that their action was awkward or inappropriate.  Do we have that word? 

And, yes, Deuteronomy 22:5 does state that men and women should wear different clothing.  That's the same chapter that states that it's immoral to plow with a donkey and an ox yoked together, immoral to plant a second crop in a vineyard and that linen-wool blend clothing is also immoral.  So...yeah.  Some Biblical precepts are not as universal as others.

The definition of "femininity" is "helping men do stuff".   How does that work in day-to-day life -even CP/QF life?  When a guy helps his friend do a project, is the first guy behaving femininely?  Is every man who works for wages feminine? 

I don't think the Botkin Sisters have really thought this definition out very well. 

Any departure from this is a departure from Biblical femininity. Throughout the Bible and throughout history we actually only see two kinds of womanhood. The kind that devotes its identity to helping men fulfill their calling and the kind that wants power over men. The first one lives a life of self-sacrifice; the later wants to have its own way. The later is what we call feminism.

 A lot of us think of feminism as being ugly and androgynous, but feminism appears in many guises throughout history. Sometimes it's trying to subdue masculinity with its womanly wiles and charms. Sometimes feminism is vain and narcissistic and self-absorbed. It's ornamental. It's useless. And it's not interested in helping men take dominion. It's interested in itself. And sometimes, it's trying to compete with masculinity and out man it. But there's one thing that consistent in all of these manifestations. Feminism is always independent and always self-seeking and its desire is to weaken and dominate men.

The Botkin definition of feminism is "women who want their own way in a self-important method for the aim of weakening and dominating men."   (That's the best working definition I can cobble together from the word salad in the last section of the podcast.)  In Botkin-land that definition makes some sense because they treat all rights as being a zero-sum game.  If women gain the right to vote, men lose.  When women work outside the home, men lose.  Clearly, that's not how the world works.  When women became voters, men had more potential voters to motivate to support ideas that were important to the men.  Having women in the workforce benefits male employers through the largest possible pool of qualified candidates and benefits male workers who are married by having a second income in the family economy. 

The argument that feminism is never self-sacrificial makes it clear that the Botkin Sisters have never cracked a history book open.   Issues that everyone agrees are feminism issues like voting rights, property rights and economic rights for women moved forward because groups of women were willing to sacrifice their time, energy and talents for the greater good of the movement. 

Of course, in writing the last two paragraphs, I've put more thought into the subject than the speaker ever has.  My rationale for that is that Anna Sofia/Elizabeth claims that CP/QF women believe that feminism was "ugly and androgynous."  That is a shallow and trite description even if feminism was horrifying evil that stretched over millenia that the Botkin sisters attempt to make it. 

On the other hand, perhaps the lack of depth in the description reflects cursory education of the speakers.  That might be more disturbing.

I generally listen to the podcast straight through at least twice while walking before trying to transcribe it.   I remember very clearly listening to this part and thinking, "Is she going to make a reference to Delilah?  She's not walking into that trap, right?"

Understanding this is extremely helpful when it comes to sorting through all the images around us. And there are two in particular that we believe are leading girls away from Biblical femininity. One is floozy femininity which uses its beauty to show off and try to gain power over men. It's what the world call femininity, but we cannot let it confuse us. It's distinct from masculinity, but it's not gentle and quiet. It's not modest and discreet. We should ask ourselves, "Is this an asset to mankind or is it a liability? Is it like Mary the Mother of God or is it like Delilah?" If we ask these questions and judge by these standards, it becomes clear that this kind of femininity is not Biblical femininity.

And then in the opposite camp, we've known girls who have turned away from femininity because they learned from Barbie dolls that femininity is for bimbos. And so they become bitter about their God-given femininity. They become ashamed of it. They try to hide it under men's clothes. Sometimes they become bitter towards men as well. And they're not complimenting men and filling that which is lacking.

Femininity is the process of getting things done for men (as defined before) - so why does gentleness, quietness, modesty and behaving discreetly have anything to do with femininity?  Sometimes a problem needs someone who can be loud and assertive.

Putting Mary the Mother of God as an opposite to Delilah is a hoot.  To her neighbors, Mary was an engaged woman who got pregnant by someone who was not her betrothed.  Later in life, Mary ordered Jesus to turn water into wine at a wedding after he had specifically said it was not time for him to reveal himself yet in John 2:3-5 and brought his siblings along to meet with him once he was preaching in Mark 3:31-35.   That's hardly the quiet, docile woman idolized by the Botkin Sisters  Delilah, on the other hand, was completing the job given to her by the leaders of her people the Philistines; she was finding out how to defeat the best warrior of her enemies according to Judges 16:4-6.   As near as I can tell, this means Delilah was a dominion-oriented woman since she helped men achieve their goals and Mary was a raging feminist because she placed her goals ahead of Jesus.

So this is the challenge of trying to rediscover Biblical femininity, trying to sort through all the images and stereotypes from the past. Looking for good examples. There are many great legacies for us in history if we can find them. We have to remember no era and no image is perfect.

We have an amazing opportunity before us right now to build a new culture of femininity. Something completely new and different on the foundation of the Bible alone. Now, Reverend William Einwechter who's one of our favorite theologians, he explains, "The Hebrew word for help - as in helpmeet - ezer- comes from two roots. The first meaning "to rescue or save" and the second meaning "to be strong". It indicates one who is able and who has what it takes to come to the aid of someone who is in need. Thus God created the woman so that she would be able to come to the aid of the man and be his support and help". She's only going to figure out her purpose if she realizes his. "And thus it is absolutely keeping with Biblical womanhood, imperative even, for a woman to understand and appreciate men and their world."

One request to the universe: I never, ever want to read another CP/QF book that includes a discussion of the root basis of the Hebrew word for "help meet".   Those kind of discussions can be fascinating when there is some disagreement over the basis of the word or when there isn't a great English equivalent for the word.  When the words "help meet" is pretty darn close to "ezer", the author is simply wasting time and increasing the word count. 

And so people have often asked us, "Is it feminine for girls to be inspired by the masculinity of their brothers and their fathers and to enjoy the things that their brothers are doing?" I would say the answer is yes. I think it's feministic for girls to grow up having a contempt for those things. And girls who are trying to understand their position as women need to eschew the false notion that women live in different worlds. We were created to be different, but we live in the same world we have the same goal. And in our pursuit of being women, we need to make sure we don't abandon our men and one thing we need remember is that brave adventurous men need women who can come alongside them in the rigors of their lives. And sometimes that means going outside and helping your brother build a tree fort. Sometimes it means when you're married helping your husband build his house. Femininity is not all about staying inside the house and feeding upon sugar and cream and and cross-stitching. That's another thing that Elizabeth and I had to figure out along the way.

Anna Sofia has painted herself into a corner again.  The Botkin definition of femininity is "helping men do dominion-oriented tasks" so presumably the definition of masculinity is "initiating and doing dominion-oriented tasks."   Female humans of all ages are supposed to feel inspired by men who do dominion-oriented tasks and should lend a hand.   I can follow the logic - such as it is - up to this point.  But why shouldn't women also initiate and complete dominion-oriented tasks?   According to Anna Sofia, women do not have a unique set of skills like being sheltered and cross-stitching that needs to be preserved.  If that's the case, why shouldn't a girl build a tree fort even if her brothers aren't into that? 

I think Anna Sofia and Elizabeth have only worked out part of the puzzle and I hope they figure out the rest this side of heaven. 

Dominion Orientated Femininity: Part Two

The first part of Anna Sofia and Elizabeth Botkin's podcast "Dominion-Oriented Femininity" was a fun little ramble through their minimal understanding of the lives of Pilgrim women interspaced with fantasies about how much everyone will adore them when the US is destroyed by God.   In my Bible reading right now, I just finished the major prophets and am moving into the minor prophets of the Old Testament.  Unlike Anna Sofia and Elizabeth Botkin, the prophets were not excited on any level about the suffering and destruction that comes when their people were conquered.  I assume the prophets felt fear and desperation about the judgement that God told them was coming because the prophets did not want to see the people they know go through pain and fear.

Anna Sofia/Elizabeth Botkin  (AS/EB) shares their views on the effects that feminism has had on women...kind of...sort of...

Feminism has separated us from the historical legacy that we had and has left us desolate and confused. Two or three hundred years ago a young lady would be taught to act like a strong woman by her great-great-great grandmother, great-great grandmother, great-grandmother, mother. We don't have that legacy any more. Feminism just broke that link. So now I kind of feel like we're living on an island. We don't have examples to look to; we have our mothers but most of our mothers did not have examples to look to. They didn't have mentors. They didn't have grandmothers and great-grandmothers that they could look up to.

I've met very few young women in their late teens or early twenties who are desolate  and none of those were desolate because of a lack of female role models from their own family line.   I've met far more who are confused - but I think that's a normal state of affairs when people are actively deciding important items like who they are attracted to, what they want from a career and what they want from the world.

"Two or three hundred years ago" is a huge time period.  That's the difference between 2018 and 1918.  If the Botkins sisters had even a rudimentary understanding of American history, they would recognize that the US looked very different in 1600, 1650, 1700, and 1750.   And, you know, some women lived to be great-grandmothers in 1600 or 1800 or 1900 - but a lot of women counted themselves as blessed to survive to be grandmothers.  Many more women died in the process of becoming mothers or before their children were grown.   It's been quite rare in human history for a young woman to have an unbroken line of three older maternal relatives alive - let alone an unbroken line of 4 or 5 women.

Huh.  I missed the geography module that discussed how islands lack cultural continuity.   That's really ironic from two young women who lived in New Zealand.  Under that model, I would expect that Iceland, Japan, Madagascar, Sri Lanka, England and Ireland all have identical cultures - and yet 30 seconds with an encyclopedia shows the Botkin girls to be wrong.

I actually see this as a great opportunity because when you think about it it's going to be up to us to rebuild the culture of strong, real womanhood in the world. And we have the chance now to build it afresh on the foundations of sola scriptura. And this will require examining every stereotype, every picture, every example, every image. We can look at them. We can disregard the bad and learn from the good but this really is an incredible opportunity and when you think about it when we live in a culture that doesn't understand what womanhood is you young ladies are going to be the models of this next generation. They're going to be looking to you to set the new standard. This is an incredible opportunity. And what Elizabeth and I will be doing in this lecture is that we will be examining 10 characteristics that constitute the kind of strength and character that our generation will need to face the hardships that are coming and we'll need to rebuild what we've lost.

Well, I now understand why Anna Sofia and Elizabeth have dropped off the face of the planet.  They are cataloguing every stereotype, form and example of womanhood from all of history.  Every_single_one.  This means that we will never see them again.  Becoming comfortable with one much more narrow humanities subject at the PhD level takes an average of 12 years to complete.  If AS/EB started on all cultural images and stereotypes of white, upper class women who lived in the US from the time of the Pilgrims to modern day, they would each use up their entire (God-willing long) lifetime and still not be done.  Multiply this by each socio-economic status and each minority status in the US - then by all of the culture in written history. 

Vaya con Dios, queridas.....

Number One: A dominion woman is a woman of God.

When it comes to becoming the sort of woman that we want to be the first thing that we need to understand is that what we want really doesn't matter. Around the time that we started writing our book - and I'm sure that you young ladies have experienced this as well -people would be asking us, "Ok, so what do you want to do? What are you going to do with your life? What do you want to do?" And I actually know that that's a loaded question. It... it doesn't just mean what kind of career do you want to have; it really means what causes will you be giving your life for? What God are you going to serve? What are you going to live and die for? What is your life going to count for? That's really what the question means. And it comes down to this ultimately: are we going to pursue what we want for our lives or what God wants for our lives?

There is nothing that I enjoy more than when young people inform me that a question that is truly a form of small talk is actually deeply loaded.   When acquaintances ask, "So what are you going to do now that you've left school?", they are simply giving a young person a chance to discuss their near-to-the-future plans.   Believe me, responding with "Well, I've decided that God has called me to protect the future of narwhals.  I'm certain that that's the cause I'm supposed to live and die for" will stop the other person dead in their tracks - and not only because they're not 100% sure what a narwhal is.

Most religions do not imbue using the aptitudes or skills given by God as being selfish or turning away from God.   Anna Sofia and Elizabeth Botkin have abdicated all responsibility for choosing a career onto their father.  Oh, sure, they wrap the idea in a lot of flummery language about authority and protection - but they've essentially decided that they have no responsibility to determine how their skills could be used to further God's kingdom.  Likewise, the girls behave like girls in that they will not challenge their father on his failure to find them a spouse.  The Botkin family believes in a courtship/engagement/marriage series that is much closer to an arranged marriage than couple-initiated style of the US.  That's fine - as consenting adults, if the Botkin sisters want arranged marriages, I support their right to do so.  The problem facing Elizabeth and Anna Sofia is that the trade-off in an arranged marriage is that the children give their parents the right to arrange a match in exchange for being presented with one or more suitable option of spouse.   Geoffrey Botkin has utterly failed to hold up his end of the bargain and needs to either find spouses for the girls or free them to choose their own spouses.  That will not happen unless the Botkin sisters stand up for themselves.

There's an ancient saying that I first read in Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" which goes like this, "What every woman wants most is to have her own way." I think that's true. And I think this statement captures the essence of feminism. It's a desire to be a law unto ourselves. It's a desire basically to usurp God's authority and to determine what is right and wrong for ourselves. It's a desire to be God. Or to be a goddess. And it's stands against God's Law his law of hierarchy and authority and ultimately against God Himself. And the dominion oriented woman is submitted to God. And she's submitted herself entirely to what his will for her life will be. She said, "I am not God; you are God. Not my will be done but your will be done." And the way that she know what His Will is is that she seeks the Scriptures diligently on her own for herself. She doesn't wait for someone else to tell her what to do or how to live and the principles that Elizabeth and I are about to bring to you today really aren't going to make sense and they're not going to work if you don't have this attitude.  If you don't fear God. And they might sound like good ideas, they might sound romantic, they might sound practical, but if you don't have the right attitude, if you don't truly fear God as your sovereign, as your head, then they are really not going to work for you. So dominion oriented femininity requires understanding that we've been bought with a price we do not belong to ourselves it's not our way it's God's way. And now I think Elizabeth's bringing us number two.

I hate how the Botkin Sisters drop quotes from famous works into their speeches and books.  The intended implication is that Anna Sofia and Elizabeth are educated to standards that far exceed public school education.  The problem occurs when someone who knows the work hears the quote.  Anna's point in this section of the speech is that feminism over turns God's Divine Plan for humanity which is that women are subservient to men.  To support that theme, she picked lines 111-112 from the Wife of Bath's Tale which I have as "Some say the things we most desire are these / Freedom to do exactly as we please".  (I'll assume that they have a very different translation that ignored meter and rhyme....)  And that's the issue.  If Anna Sofia had really read "The Wife of Bath's Tale", why didn't she pick lines 214-216 " A woman wants the same self-sovereignty / Over her husband as over her lover, / And master him; he must not be above her." Those verses are spot-on for the overall theme - but they would require having read the work since the second set of verses don't have the wide appeal that the first set does.

What really kills me is that "The Wife of Bath's Tale" is an easily accessible piece of literature.  It was written in Middle English so reading a Modern English translation is perfectly acceptable outside of advanced post-secondary studies.  The story is relatively short and snappy.  There's not a lot of obscure references or ideas that need to be ferreted out; the Wife of Bath is a breezy, bawdy old woman who is reminiscing over her husbands, her choices on who to marry and how to live in marriage, and what women inside a patriarchal society really want.   It's an easy, fun read for high school students - so why didn't the Botkin Sisters read the Tale?

The idea that a dominion-oriented woman doesn't wait for other people to tell her what to do is deeply, though unintentionally, ironic.    A dominion-orientated woman will spend her entire life doing what a man tells her to do.  She will follow her father's orders prior to marriage and her husband's orders after marriage.  Sure, AS/EB will expect women to so completely absorb their father's or husband's goals that the women can act independently to fulfill that goal - but that's not really the sign of independent thinking. 

I think I'm going to start adding the caveat that any advice I give other humans will only work if the other humans are right with God.  That's such an amazingly universal cop-out that it will cover any horrible advice I give.  My advice caused the engine of your car to seize into a ton of solid metal?  No, that happened because you weren't right with God.  Your boss fired you when you responded to a normal office request by screaming, "I am not in submission to you!  THIS is the hill I'm going to die on!" as I told you to.  No...you'd still be employed if you were right with God.   

The next post on this topic is long - and it's not my fault.  From this point on in the podcast, AS/EB are expounding on the 10 characteristics of dominion women.  The issue is that point number two is discussed for an insanely long period of time....and in the process they skip point three entirely.  Whoops.

Dominion Orientated Femininity - Part One

Well, I've misplaced my copy of Maidens of Virtue again.  I misplace most of the books I review on this blog at one point or another - but there is something about the Maidens of Virtue book that seems to make it disappear more.  I think it's because the copy I have is a hardcover book with a smooth cover so when I get frustrated and toss it across the room the book slides into weird locations.

I'm sure I'll find it.  Our house is not large and there are only so many places it can be.  Until I find it, I'm going to substitute a commentary on one of the Botkin Family podcasts available for free on their website at the Western Conservatory for the Arts and Sciences.   I picked "Dominion-Oriented Femininity" to transcribe in its entirety first because the topic sounded slightly more interesting than the other podcasts and because at 38 minutes it's about half as long as the other podcasts.

Transcriptions of speeches bring a few difficulties to the table.  Anna Sofia and Elizabeth are solid, if unremarkable, public speakers so I can usually figure out what they are saying.  I have not been able to determine which passages are given by which speaker because the two women's voices are very similar - a problem common among family members.   When converting speeches into written form, sentence fragments appear in the written form that were not glaringly obvious when spoken.  In other words, the flow of the transcripts is more clunky and less polished than the podcast itself.   In a similar vein, the choices of punctuation are mine.

The podcast itself is taken from a lecture given at a conference by the Botkin Family.  The lecture predates Anna Sofia and Elizabeth's second book as well as the collapse of Vision Forum (based on the glowing praise heaped on Doug Phillips in other podcasts).  The audience at the lecture is "family-integrated" or multi-aged because small children can be heard in the background occasionally.

Anna Sofia and Elizabeth are introduced by their father Geoffrey Botkins:

The following message is brought to you by the Western Conservatory of the Arts and Sciences.

 GB: I wanna introduce to you now two young ladies who have been giving some very serious thought to how they can even when they are in a family and even when they are under the jurisdiction of their father they can be leaders of society and culture. Not by lording it over men, not by teaching men but in the way that they carry themselves and the way that they speak. The way that they redefine things that have been grossly perverted in our day. Femininity. So now, ladies and gentlemen. Anna Sophia and Elizabeth Botkin on dominion oriented femininity.

I'm bummed.  I will never receive an introduction as overblown, fulsome and smarmy as that introduction.   Geoffrey Botkin announced that his daughters are societal leaders and cultural arbitrators because of their posture and clothing choices!  The irony is killing me. The Botkin Family holds themselves up as the pinnacle of homeschool education and neo-Calvinist theological reform - but immediately falls back on the idea that outer appearance is the most important characteristic for women.

Geoffrey has never read -or failed to comprehend - the basic ideas in George Eliot's works.  The beauty of a woman may cause men to attribute positive character traits to her that are not present.  I'd hate to think that Anna Sofia and Elizabeth Botkin are like Hetty Sorrel or Rosamond (Vincy) Lygate or even Mary Crawford from Jane Austen's Mansfield Park.

The rest of the transcript for today the speech of either Anna Sofia or Elizabeth Botkin.

One of the themes I'm sure you've noticed is that we need to be prepared to face hard times ahead. America is scheduled for judgement. This is something that my father talked about. We don't know how severe. We don't know what it's going to look like. We don't know what it it will consist of. The future is very very uncertain for us. This is a subject that the men have been talking a lot about but you young ladies in the audience you need to be thinking about this too. Because even though it sounds like manly subjects judgement, war, the economy, all of those things are going to affect us too. We live in the same world that our fathers live in. And when we're married we are going to live in the same world that our husbands live in and the hardships that they face we're going to face them too so these are topics that we are not too young to be thinking about. We're not too girly to be thinking about. We really need to be focusing on these things too.

Most CP/QF families can live within modern society, gently disdaining the rest of us, but not waiting with bated breath for the destruction of the United States of America.  Heck, sometimes I think mildly judgemental tolerance of others is a national characteristic. No, the Botkin clan and their ilk hopes for the day that the US society is thrown down so that these ambitious members of a very small religious minority will receive the recognition and adoration that they so deeply crave.

The Botkin Family must know on some level that they are woefully unready to become leaders in the society in which they live now.  Their theological qualifications are so weak that I can poke holes in their theological rationales - and I'm a theological bantamweight.   Their education is so flimsy that they would struggle in a basic college level course.  To the best of my knowledge, Anna Sofia and Elizabeth have never earned income at a job of any sort.   I suspect that the entire family is being supported between the income from T. Rex Arms - the younger brothers' CNC accessories for guns business - the residuals from the sisters' books and whatever freelance work the oldest three boys can cobble together.     That sounds grim - but I suspect many CP/QF families lives are quite grim financially.

The repeated statement that that women live in the same world as men jarred me at the beginning of the podcast - and it didn't get less jarring over time.   I am completely aware that I live in the same world as my father, brother, brothers-in-law and son do, thank you.  It's a world that I live in and am quite capable of navigating as well.

One of the things that concerns me most about America's future is the fact that most women - but not all - do not know how to be strong any more. And they are not ready to deal with hard times. And they are not ready to deal with hardships the way they used to be. When you look at pictures of the Pilgrim mothers and of the woman that settled the Wild West and the woman that settled Plymouth you see strength and you see virtue, something that women don't have today. Women just don't have the moral stamina to face the trials and the hardships that they faced two hundred years ago. We've lost the strong moral character and the sturdiness that American women used to be known for.

Whoo-boy!  Let me get this straight.  In terms of strength and moral stamina, the Pilgrims come first, the Botkin girls et al. come second, and I come in last.

Nope.  Not even close, ladies.

I am hard-pressed to come up with two young women with less practical strength or moral stamina than the Botkin sisters.  Neither Anna Sofia nor Elizabeth has ever had to stand up for their beliefs in in the secular world.  See, they pride themselves on standing aloof from a society that reviles and hates them - but that's giving far too much importance to their views.  Let's say that both young ladies are forced to earn a living starting tomorrow.  They could get a job at the local grocery store as cashiers.  I'm sure they would breathlessly explain how important it is for both of them to dress modestly in long skirts - but how would they respond to the normal response of "Yeah, that's fine as long as it's khaki or black"?  I'm sure they would enjoy explaining the minutia of their beliefs about emotional purity to the coworkers at break time - but what happens when the coworkers say, "Oh, that's nice" and move on to a more interesting topic.    I'm sure they would eagerly await positive feedback from coworkers when their coworkers recognized them as the authors of two ground-shaking books.    They expect adoration or hatred - but can they deal with boredom, apathy and mild pity?

Strength and stamina aren't built when two young women are the unquestioned princesses of a religious movement; those are built when hard times are faced and overcome.

Let me talk about the Pilgrim women for a minute because the fact that we even have an America to talk about it's a testimony to the dominion oriented femininity of the Pilgrim women who sacrificed their lives for other people that they would never see. And they were willing to go through hardships that we cannot even imagine we selfish spoiled women in the 21st century cannot even imagine the hardship that they went through. They cared more about people they would never know than they did about their own comfort. That's something that cannot be said about women of today. They were willing to make their lives harder for the eternal good of those who would be coming later. And if you go to Plymouth, there's a monument to the Pilgrim mothers which is inscribed with these words right here, "They brought up their families in sturdy virtue and the living faith in God without which nations perish"

Two centuries later when Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville came to the United States in the 1830s he was struck by the superior strength and character of the American women and this is what he said about them, " If I were asked now that I am drawing to the close of this work in which I have spoken of so many important things done by the Americans to what singular prosperity and growing strength of that people ought mainly be attributed I would reply, ' To the superiority of their women"."

Perhaps we could imagine the hardships better if Anna Sofia or Elizabeth told us about the hardships.  Oh, wait.  That never happens.   Learning about those hardships would require reading a book or two or looking at an encyclopedia before writing this speech - and Lord knows they don't do that.

Surprisingly enough, I do know about the hardships that the Pilgrims faced - and why they left the Netherlands in the first place.  The Pilgrims were not as worried about mythical future generations as they were worried about their children who were growing up to be more Dutch than English.  The Pilgrims faced the perennial concerns of immigrant parents who worry about children growing up in a culture that is foreign.  Unlike most immigrant parents, the Pilgrims decided risking their families' lives in a new settlement was worth it because they would have more control over the upbringing of their kids.  (Not quite as noble and sexy when it's laid out like that, is it?)

The Pilgrims faced a lot of problems - and a good portion of them were of their own making. They landed in the US in the fall and didn't have enough food for the winter.   The Pilgrims were not farmers, but they were dependent on their own farming efforts for food. (This is a point that the pastoralist-idealizing CP/QF families should think long and hard about.)  Disease and deaths in childbirth were always a risk prior to the advent of modern medicine, but malnutrition and famine worsen the death toll.  The Pilgrims were strangely slow to realize that Native Americans were going to be vital allies in a colony where help from Europe was over a year away.  (And let's be honest.  If the population of Native Americans west of the Mississippi hadn't already been decimated by European diseases brought by previous European expeditions, Europeans never would have landed a foothold on the Western Hemisphere.)  Even without those problems, life as a colonist was physically crushing.  Everything required manual labor and there was rarely enough food to offset the sheer amount of physical labor done.

I adore how the Botkin Family cannot keep to their own reconstructionist history.  The Botkin Family history of Calvinism goes as follows.  Calvin good.  Europe lost Calvinism which was kept by the Pilgrims.  Pilgrims good.  The second generation of Pilgrims were losers who destroyed US Calvinism. Boo. US becomes the heathen birthplace of all that is wrong with the world.  Fast forward to Geoffrey and Victoria Botkin who independently rediscovered Calvinism. 

Throwing a quote from de Tocqueville in the 1830's messes up the whole story.  How horrible could the US be if he thought the women were amazing?    What exactly intervened in the US between 1830 and now that destroyed everything?

What does that say about the women of today? When we think about the state of America now if you were to ask me now to what I would attribute the growing apostasy and weakness of America I might say, "To the selfish and pettiness of their women." And the products of feminism 21 century women - that's us - we're not just lesser or weaker in so many ways we are the opposite of these women. We are weak in all the ways that they used to be strong. When these women used to make sacrifices, daily sacrifices for their children, women of today sacrifice their children killing them in the womb as a sacrifice to their own selfishness and it's just it's really sad. We need to understand how much we've lost.

Excuse me a moment.  *hands baby to her husband and ties her hair back into a ponytail* 

You want to question my mothering ability? Come at me if you're hard enough.   I'm dead serious.

You know nothing of sacrifice. 

To keep my son alive, I left him at a hospital for 107 times.  I'd recite "Good night, NICU!" to him, tell him I loved him, made sure he was all snuggled up in his bed, give him one last pat (when he was in the isolette) or a kiss, and didn't cry until I was in the hallway out of sight and hearing.

When my son was having a bad day, I spent hours sitting with my hands cradling my son inside the isolette while staring blankly at the dinosaur pattern on the fabric cover of the isolette.  He became agitated whenever we lifted the cover to look at him so I sat hunched over with my nose an inch away from a blue brontosaurus. 

When my son was having a good day, I'd do skin-to-skin for as long as he tolerated it which was generally 3-4 hours.  Since he was still on a ventilator, I had to keep his head in alignment with his ET tube.  To do that, I had to sit perfectly still.  I eventually learned how to shift the position of my legs a bit, but my torso needed to stay in the same spot.  Since I was breastfeeding him via pumping, by the end my breasts would be overly full, aching, and dripping.  Hearing his alarms go off - and Jack loved to set alarms off - and not being able to move sent my anxiety creeping upward. 

For three months after Jack came home, my life revolved around him.  Oh, some of it was the normal demands of a newborn - but most of it was making sure he had 24-7 coverage of an adult in the same room who was infant CPR trained.   I slept.  I got a daily walk without him.  The rest of the time I was "on" because if Jack had one of his choking attacks I needed to get him breathing again. 

What have you sacrificed?  Nothing except becoming an adult woman.  You live comfortably without the work of earning a living.  You hide behind "emotional purity" and "courtship" to prevent potential heartbreak in falling in love.  You receive accolades for self-publishing two books and wearing pretty clothing. 

Grow up before trying to give advice to real adults.

And most of us in this room would probably like to say that we've rejected feminism but I've I bet we all wrestle with the weakness and myopia that we've inherited from that legacy. It's hard for us to think 200 years ahead. It's hard for most of us to want to even think about living the way that Pilgrim women lived. To think about the sacrifices that they made the hardships that they went through. And when it comes right down to it, we're still confused about the most basic principles of family relations, gender roles. And even the very meaning of womanhood. God has put us into a very unique time in history. We are living in a generation that has no concept of what it means to be a woman. This is singular. I've never seen this in any other generation. Even the word "femininity" means nothing any more.

Pfft. 

It's a piece of cake to think about 200 years in the future; that's fantasy. Your father created an entirely fantastical Excel document where he plotted out the estimated dates of the births and marriages of his future descendents.  Since he's at least 10 years out, how accurate was his fantasy world?   

It's a piece of cake to dream of living like the Pilgrim women; their greatest fears of death by illness or starvation have been conquered in the US.

Anna Sofia/Elizabeth's assertion that we're living in a singular time is a great example of how trifling their education has been.  Women have gone through several cycles of greater freedom and participation in the economic world and times of reduced freedom in the twentieth century alone.  These cycles happened during the 19th, 18th, and 17th centuries as well.    This isn't a big secret.  The Botkin sisters would have figured this out if they embarked on an in-depth study of US history.  For most people, finding time to read college texts and all of the scholarly publications written for mainstream audiences before diving into primary sources would be an issue.  The Botkin Sisters, though, should have several hours free a day to pursue academic research - even if they are helping out at the family business, keeping the family home up or caring for their nephews or niece.

This next bit is priceless especially when I was transcribing it at half the speed of the original MP3; the reduced speed made the speaker sound drunk.

I can remember when Elizabeth and I were working on our book and we kept putting the word "femininity", "Biblical femininity" just all through the book and Mom came and said to us, "I don't even know if I like the word femininity. What does it mean anyway? And it has such bad connotations. What does it mean? And Elizabeth and I thought, "Ummm, uh, I don't know." It's an interesting thing.

Really, that paragraph is less unsettling if the speaker was drunk. 

One of the Botkin Sisters just admitted that they were dropping the jargon "Biblical femininity" all over "So Much More" while having no idea what it meant.   That's disturbing on a whole number of levels - but not surprising if you've read their books.

The next post in this series begins the process of unraveling what "Biblical femininity" means....kind of.