A Year of Biblical Womanhood

by Rachel Held Evans

  Leah delivered two more sons and at least one daughter. Rachel finally gave birth to Joseph, Jacob’s favorite son, and Benjamin, whose life would mean her death. It was only in their burial that the women achieved the status they so desired, for Rachel’s tomb on the road to Bethlehem would be regarded as a shrine to those seeking fertility, and Leah would be buried in the Tomb of the Patriarch, alongside her husband, Jacob.

  May: Fertility

  * * *

  Quivers Full of Arrows and Sippy Cups

  God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth . . .”

  —GENESIS 1:28

  TO DO THIS MONTH:

  □ Read a stack of parenting books (Genesis 1:28, Ephesians 6:4)

  □ Come clean about fear of motherhood (1 Timothy 2:15)

  □ Interview a Quiverfull daughter (Psalm 127:3–5)

  □ Babysit Addy and Aury for a day (Matthew 19:14)

  □ Care for a computerized “Baby-Think-It-Over” for three days (Titus 2:4)

  People cope with fear in different ways.

  Some prefer fight, others flight. Some get addicted to a substance; others watch a lot of TV.

  When I’m afraid of something, I intellectualize it. I buy books.

  I consult experts. I search to see if there are any TED talks on the topic. I memorize all the statistics about how you’re more likely to get killed in a hippo-related incident than in a plane crash, and research what every religion from Buddhism to Sikhism says about death. I work my way through Martha Stewart’s Cooking School with highlighters and sticky notes.

  So it should come as no surprise that at the commencement of the month in which I was to focus on cultivating my motherly instincts, I went to town on Amazon and ordered a stack of books intended to help me think my way into maternal instincts:

  • What to Expect When You’re Expecting, 4th ed., by Heidi Murkoff and Sharon Mazel

  • The Baby Book: Everything You Need to Know About Your Baby from Birth to Age Two by William Sears and Martha Sears

  • On Becoming Baby Wise by Gary Ezzo and Robert Bucknam

  • How to Talk So Kids Will Listen Listen So Kids Will Talk by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish

  • Babyproofing Your Marriage by Stacie Cockrell, Cathy O’Neill, and Julia Stone

  I arrived at this list after posting what turned out to be a controversial question on Facebook: “What books would you recommend for someone interested in learning about parenting? (And no, I’m NOT pregnant!)”

  The responses started out cordially enough, with a diversity of friends and acquaintances weighing in with their favorite titles on everything from pregnancy to discipline to “biblical parenting.” But then someone recommended On Becoming Baby Wise by Gary Ezzo, and all hell broke loose.

  “Whatever you do, DO NOT read ANYTHING from Gary Ezzo!” a young mom wrote in response. “He’s not even a real doctor, and his cry-it-out approach is CRUEL to children.”

  “I used Ezzo’s ‘Baby Wise’ and my baby was sleeping through the night long before most other babies,” another wrote back. “Why should an entire family have to revolve around a baby’s schedule? At least my son won’t turn into a spoiled brat for getting coddled AP-style.”

  Apparently in his context, AP refers not to the Associated Press but to “attachment parenting,” a parenting philosophy promoted by pediatrician William Sears that emphasizes the importance of parent-to-child bonding in developmental psychology. His approach stands in contrast to that of Gary Ezzo, who suggests that parents should exercise more control over a baby’s sleeping and feeding schedule, allowing infants to cry it out if they get hungry or fussy out of schedule.

  “Sears rules!”

  “Trust Ezzo!”

  “Rachel, you’ll have to read them both and tell us which one you like better.”

  I wasn’t even pregnant, and yet somehow I’d managed to get myself recruited into the Mommy Wars. Pretty soon I’d have to weigh in on breast or bottle, natural or epidural, cloth or disposable, canned or homemade, public or private, homeschool or circus. How I responded to these questions would automatically place me into the category of “friend” or “enemy,” depending on the company, and once I spoke out on an issue, there would be no turning back. This was one of about a hundred things that terrified me about motherhood. I’d spent enough time in the Bible Belt to want to keep my distance from fundamentalism, religious or otherwise.

  It’s no wonder books like these get referred to as “The Pregnancy Bible” or “The Baby Bible” or “The Sleep Bible,” even when most of the authors make sure to note, as Dr. Sears does on his Web site, that their methods represent “an approach, rather than a strict set of rules.”1 Like the Bible, parenting philosophies are subject to differing interpretations and applications, and as with the Bible, no one seems to want to admit that.

  The word on the street was that I had two options when it came to caring for my future baby: I could either eat, sleep, drink, bathe, walk, and work with my baby permanently affixed to my body until the two of us meld into one, or I could leave my baby out naked on a cold millstone to cry, refusing to hold or feed her until the schedule allowed. Apparently, there was no in between.

  But upon reading both of the authors in question, I saw no instructions of the sort, but rather general guidelines for the loving care of a child, some of which made sense to me, others of which did not. When eager Facebook friends asked for a verdict, I told them, “I think I’ll have to wait until when I have a baby before I decide what’s best for our family,” thereby successfully disappointing everyone except for my mother, who was just happy to see the phrase “when I have a baby” on my Facebook wall.

  Sometimes our actions shape our beliefs, rather than the other way around, and I think this is especially true when it comes to raising families. We tend to take whatever’s worked in our particular set of circumstances (big family, small family, AP, Ezzo, home school, public school) and project that upon everyone else in the world as the ideal. We do this, I think, to protect ourselves, to quiet those pesky insecurities that follow us through life, nipping at our heels. To declare that your way is the only way effectively eliminates any fear that you might be wrong, or at least pushes it below the surface for a time.

  Things get even hairier when parenting philosophies and religion mix, and the folks dishing out the parenting advice are convinced that God is on their side. From contraception, to spanking, to family size, to the decision of a mother to work or stay at home, there is perhaps no arena in which women of faith are more subjected to the expectations of “biblical womanhood” than in their capacity to bear and raise children.

  “Women should remain at home, sit still, keep house and bear and bring us children,” Martin Luther wrote. “If a woman grows weary and at last dies from childbearing, it matters not. Let her die from bearing, she is there to do it.”

  “Contraception makes a prostitute out of the wife and an adulterer out of the husband,” St. Augustine said.

  “We need mothers who are not only family-oriented but also family-obsessed,” wrote Dorothy Patterson in Recovering Biblical Manhood & Womanhood.2

  “Woman’s hope, the church’s hope, the world’s hope is joined to childbearing,” says Walter Chantry. “Women, here is a life-long calling! It is the highest any woman can enter.”3

  Growing up in the Church, I must have heard a thousand times that my highest calling as a woman was to bear and bring up children. While men could honor God in varying capacities through work, family, and ministry, a woman’s spiritual aptitude was measured primarily by her ability to procreate. Even as a child I noticed that the church deaconesses hosted dozens of wedding and baby showers each year, but never a housewarming party for a single woman or a celebration dinner for a woman who passed the bar or graduated from medical school. Subtly, the belief that I was incomplete without a husband and children crept into my subconscious. Without procreating, I believed, my contribution to the Church did
n’t really count.

  It hasn’t always been this way.

  Both Jesus and Paul spoke highly of celibacy and singleness, and for centuries the Church honored the contributions of virgins and widows to the extent that their stories occupied the majority of Christian literature. The gory accounts of early Christian martyrdom included the celebrated heroics of unmarried virgins like Agatha (scourged, burnt, torn with meat hooks for refusing to marry the pagan governor of Sicily), Agnes (beheaded for refusing suitors and consecrating herself to Christ alone), Lucy (executed for distributing her wealth among the poor rather than marrying), and Blandina (a young slave thrown to wild beasts in the arena for professing Christianity), as well as women who chose martyrdom over motherhood, including Felicitas (executed along with her seven sons for withholding sacrifices to the Emperor) and Perpetua (thrown to wild beasts for refusing to renounce Christianity, despite her father’s pleas for her to recant in the interest of her infant son).

  The pendulum would swing back during the Reformation, when, as a reaction to the cloistered life, Luther and the Reformers elevated the virtues of homemaking and domesticity above those of rigid asceticism. “The word and works of God is quite clear,” Luther wrote, “that women were made either to be wives or prostitutes.”

  Perhaps someday, all women, no matter their marital status or procreative prowess, will be equally honored by the Church.

  I understand that many pastors elevate motherhood in order to counter the ways contemporary culture often dismisses the value of moms. This is a noble goal indeed, and the Church should be a place where moms are affirmed, celebrated, honored, and revered. But the teaching that motherhood is a woman’s highest calling can be painful and isolating for women who remain unmarried or childless.

  Carolyn Custis James said it well in her book, Half the Church:

  To define women solely in terms of marriage and motherhood simply does not fit the reality of most of our lives. Even for those women who enthusiastically embrace marriage and motherhood . . . a substantial part of their lives is without a husband and/ or children . . . Furthermore, the traditional message to women is tenuous at best—all it takes is a single tragic phone call for her to be dropped from that demographic. It happens every day.

  A message that points to the marriage altar as the starting gate of God’s calling for women leaves us with nothing to tell [unmarried women] except that God’s purpose for them is not here and now, but somewhere down the road.4

  As a Christian, my highest calling is not motherhood; my highest calling is to follow Christ. And following Christ is something a woman can do whether she is married, or single, rich or poor, sick or healthy, childless or Michelle Duggar.

  Still, the religious accouterments of the past are not shed all at once, and so, for the past eight years, I’d been greeting the arrival of my period each month with a mixture of relief and guilt. I knew in my head that I didn’t have to bear children to matter to God, and yet a sense of moral failure pervaded my growing collection of fears regarding motherhood. It could only be selfishness that kept me from happily ditching the laptop for a diaper bag, I reasoned. If only I had more faith, I could welcome my 30th birthday—now less than a month away—with no thought of biological clocks or bank accounts or “loosing myself” in a succession of birthday parties and play dates and Calliou reruns. Somehow, I’d known from the age of ten, with a cool and uncanny certainty, that I wanted to be a writer when I grew up, and yet I’ve never known with the same intensity that I wanted to be a mother. What was wrong with me? Where were my motherly instincts? Should a person like me even consider having children when it doesn’t feel natural?

  When the first set of parenting “Bibles” finally arrived in the mail, I scoured their pages for answers, but the only consensus they seemed to reach involved the importance of taking prenatal vitamins. While volumes have been written about how to care for children, little has been said about whether or not to have them to begin with. And so I found myself simultaneously resisting and revering a fundamentalist approach, squinting through the foggy gray for some sign of black-and-white. Like all who search for truth out of fear, I desperately wanted someone else to tell me exactly what to do.

  People think we are overpopulating the world. We are just following our convictions.

  —JIM BOB DUGGAR

  The Bible often describes children as a gift from God.

  “Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord,” the Psalmist wrote, “the fruit of the womb a reward. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children of one’s youth. Blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them! He shall not be put to shame when he speaks with his enemies in the gate” (Psalm 127:3–5 ESV).

  “Blessed is everyone who fears the Lord, who walks in his ways! You shall eat the fruit of the labor of your hands; you shall be blessed, and it shall be well with you. Your wife will be like a fruitful vine within your house; your children will be like olive shoots around your table” (Psalm 128:1–3 ESV).

  Passages like these have long inspired the cultivation of large families among the religiously devout and most recently have given rise to what is called the Quiverfull movement.

  Based on the aforementioned Psalm that describes children as arrows in a man’s quiver, Quiverfull is a lifestyle in which parents keep an “open womb,” discounting any form of family planning as patently immoral. The most famous “open womb” family is, of course, the Duggar family. Featured on the popular TLC reality show that began as 17 Kids and Counting, then graduated to 18 Kids and Counting and is now (at least the last time I checked my local listings) 19 Kids and Counting, Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar proudly keep an open womb and appear to be loving every minute of it. With nineteen children, ages two to twenty-four, all of them with names beginning with the letter J, the family lives on a twenty-acre farm in Tontitown, Arkansas. Their 7,000-square-foot house includes an industrial kitchen, a cafeteria, a game room, and a laundry room, complete with four washers and four dryers. The show features the Duggars organizing their own orchestra, visiting Niagara Falls, going on a book tour, and celebrating Mother’s Day. By all accounts, they seem like a happy, healthy, highly functional family.

  My friend Hillary grew up in a Quiverfull home, but she says her childhood looked nothing like that of the Duggar kids.

  “I’m the oldest arrow in a quiver of eleven,” she said. “I can’t speak for every Quiverfull household, but the strongest underlying principle of this lifestyle is trust. Adherents claim to trust God with their fertility and extend this faith to provision for all physical needs, which means that any consideration of economics often plays a secondary role, if one at all. But despite strong faith, most Quiverfull families don’t have the luxury of financial freedom, and many fathers (or older siblings) work from dawn to dusk to provide for the many mouths to feed and many bodies to clothe and educate and keep warm. Most of the Quiverfull women I speak with report living arrangements in stark contrast to the abundance that the Duggars enjoy.”5

  Hillary, now thirty-two, grew up in a small farmhouse down South. She says there were times when she went nearly two weeks without a bath so the family could conserve water, and her house never had heating or air-conditioning.

  “I can’t remember when our toilet worked,” she recalls. With just one bathroom for twelve people, the septic tank backed up again and again. “We kept a bucket in the tub to flush it when it got bad . . . The stench, the smell of un-flushed waste, permeated the house.”

  Still, there was much that Hillary loved about the Quiverfull lifestyle.

  “In a large family, there’s always someone to make you laugh, someone to cry with, someone to tell secrets to, someone to get in trouble with, someone to make memories with,” she told me. “Having these relationships brought much richness and beauty to my life. But being the oldest became an endless cycle of pouring out to meet needs while my own basic needs went largely unmet. Burnout was perpetual, because on top of this was the spirit
ual teaching that our own needs are not important and we should die to ourselves daily.”

  Part of the problem, Hillary explained, is that Quiverfull turns what the Bible describes as a blessing into an implicit command, requiring women to bear as many children as possible, regardless of whether their health or finances can support those children. According to Quiverfull advocates, the Duggar lifestyle is “biblical” and therefore desirable for Christian women everywhere.

  “Michelle Duggar is the real deal,” noted Doug Phillips, President of Vision Forum Ministries when Michelle received the Mother of the Year award at the organization’s annual Baby Conference in 2010. “She embodies the very best of a Christian role model for women.”6

  Interestingly enough, I could find no single woman in Scripture responsible for bearing more than 15 children on her own. Men like Jacob, Gideon, and Solomon had multiple wives, slaves, and concubines contributing to their large families (A possible exception is Job’s wife. If she is the same wife he had before his scourge, then she would have had a total of twenty children.)

  Even in the Bible, the degree to which parenthood is a blessing appears to be somewhat conditional. Speaking of the future tribulation of the Church, Jesus said, “But woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing babies in those days! (Matthew 24:19). War, famine, persecution, and instability bring us face-to-face with the sobering reality that the children we bring into the world are capable of being hurt by it. The blessing of parenthood carries enormous risk.