The Beautiful Girlhood Doll, part 8: Out of the Dollhouse

dollhouse

And then, after all of this, I left for college. College had always been on of my parents’ expectation for me, and I’d never seen them as proud as they were at my homeschool graduation. With my parents’ approval, I chose a secular college because I wanted to witness to others and make a difference [...]

Homeschooling Rehashed

My post on the problems of homeschooling generated a good number of comments, and some of them were slightly critical of what I said. Some, too, made some good points. So I thought I’d take a minute to respond to some of these comments. I have divided the comments into seven main points, and given [...]

Dutiful Daughters

Whether one watches the Duggars’ TLC show or reads books by the Botkin sisters, one cannot escape the reality that dutiful daughters of Christian Patriarchy do exist. Heck, they even blog. I used to be one of them. For nearly twenty years, I was a dutiful daughter of patriarchy, and more than that, I was [...]

The Problem: Parents or Ideology?

After my It’s About the Daughters post was crossposted on No Longer Quivering, I received the following response: You make a lot of generalizations here. Do you really believe it is this way for all, or even the majority of, quiverful daughters? I have no doubt it’s happened to some, and I support you in [...]

Rewriting the Pro-Life Agenda

Dear Pro-Lifers: I’d like to make some suggestions. You believe that abortion is murder. Okay. You therefore understandably want to end or at least reduce the practice of abortion. I get that. What I don’t get is the way you go about it. Protesting at abortion clinics only scares women who are already in very [...]

What About Love?

At some point during my teenage years, my father gave me a list of requirements for a future suitor. This list was not more than a page long, and it included a variety of doctrinal and political views along with the stipulation that the suitor must be able to provide for me. The point was [...]

Sadness, Not Bittnerness

I don’t want anyone to get the wrong ideas about me or my childhood. My parents held the beliefs of Christian Patriarchy, yes, along with many of the beliefs of the Quiverfull movement, but I didn’t spend all of my free time cooking and cleaning, I had plenty of friends, and I received an excellent [...]

The Expendable Man

Today, I re-watched Bollywood’s retelling of Jane Austen’s classic Pride and Prejudice. Just like in the original story, Bride and Prejudice revolves around a young woman eager to leave her family and her small town and begin a life of her own. How is this to be achieved? Through marriage, of course.   Somehow this [...]

Feminism: The Problem or the Answer?

Last week the Wall Street Journal published an article called “The War Against Girls”. While it deals with the selective abortion of girls in third world countries, some of the issues involved are very pertinent to discussions of patriarchy and feminism. Here are some excerpts from the article: Mara Hvistendahl is worried about girls. Not in [...]

(Too) Great Expectations

Quiverfull teaches that Christian parents should have large numbers of children in order to raise up and army for Christ and take back America for His Glory. My parents always told me that they were filling their quiver with arrows in order to shoot them out into the world and retake this country and this [...]

The Problem With Homeschooling

This has been a hard post to write, because it is a touchy subject. But I’ve written it anyway because I feel passionate about this issue, so please hang in there and hear me out! Without homeschooling, Christian Patriarchy as we know it could not exist. Why? First, because Christian Patriarchy cannot exist without parents [...]

Cultural Disconnection

My parents thought they were doing me a favor when they chose to homeschool me and intentionally shelter me from the outside world, but what they didn’t realize is that their decision would leave me culturally disconnected from my peers. I asked someone who Brittney Spears was some years back, and was rewarded with the [...]