Stay at Home Daughters: When Patriarchy is longed for

*A very long post on a very vexing topic.*
Everything that mainstream and even right-wing America believes is good is, to the Daughters, poison.
To the Visionary Daughters/ Issacharian Daughters/ stay-at-home daughters movements, the words “independence” and “self-achievement” are anathema.
Who are these daughters?
They are young, predominantly European-ancestry women living in the West, practicing Christianity and Judaism, who not only believe, as many evangelical Christians do, that a woman’s role in life is to support her girls alone, but who encourage unmarried young women to live with their parents and to forego outside jobs in favor of “training” in housework. They do this so that they might help their *father* fulfill his life-vision, until such time as the daughter is given in marriage to help her husband fulfill HIS life-vision.
As then-Stay At Home Daughter Genevieve in New Zealand writes,
“It was not so long ago that my ambition was to be the first woman prime minister of New Zealand. And it was even less time ago that I was working a highly paid legal executive job for a prominent solicitor [lawyer]. The Lord has done quite a work in my life since this time. He has turned my heart to my FATHER, my family and my home. (all caps Okra’s)
Genevieve learned to help her father with his vision, his business (as opposed to pursuing her own self-focused interests and jobs). Presumably, her mother did not have a vision of her own that required support. When Genevieve married Pete, she saw it as an explicit transfer of authority and vision from her father to her new husband. Now her job was to support Pete in HIS business of his own choice:
“[my husband] Pete would set the vision; he would follow the calling God had for him and seek to be fruitful in the areas God wanted him to take dominion. And I would help him to be successful in being fruitful. I would help him to see his vision to completion.”
And this is only the tip of a deep iceberg.
The post on the main Feministing site last week about Old Spice’s “Manliness” contest led me to a treasure trove of loudly-and-proudly anti-feminist, anti-humanist, anti-HUMAN philosophy. See, for only a few examples:

  • A young Jewish woman in Israel advances her theory of “Domestic Felicity,” in which girls/women must do everything they can to avoid university education. Seriously. Read the site.
  • Maidens of the Home by American Maiden, a young Christian woman living at home with her parents who describes her occupation as “Keeper at Home -in-training.” She writes: “Why is going through a secular college an assumed event in every high school graduate’s life, but simply learning at home and continuing education in many mediums highly disregarded? The answer is clear. Karl Marx saw it plain and simple. Feminism.”

What interests me is that some of the most visible leaders of this movement are people like the Botkin sisters, Anna Sofia and Elizabeth (aged 20 and 22), who are unmarried young women living in “their father’s” home, yes, BUT who are also published authors, professional bloggers, and motivational speakers as well. A far cry from learning how best to scrub a toilet for one’s future husband and children. Apparent disconnect? Here is what this duo has to say about their own domestic training:
Those who know us only by our public appearances see only a tiny part of our life, and can’t know how much we enjoy doing the “unglamorous” work that makes a family thrive. We have laundry to wash, hungry people to feed, floors to mop, families to reach out to through hospitality, and men in the family who can always use an organizer, stenographer, editor, or someone to iron their shirts. This is our real life, and we prefer it. A few times a year we have opportunity to, in a sense, reap the harvest we have sown by writing, and it often involves going public, but to us it’s just another privilege of service, like taking a meal to a needy family. We and our parents believe this is the kind of life that will best prepare us for marriage to any kind of man.
Their site is filled with such attempts to reconcile the sisters’ very impressive (by “the world’s” standards) accomplishments with their stated ideological goals of limiting their pre-marriage training to that of the domestic and “visionary helpmeet” variety.
Believe it or not, despite my religious pedigree (see below), I was unaware that this ideology had in the U.S. been crystallized into a formal movement that actively discourages young women from attending university to begin with or even from working at BURGER KING or THE GAP or BEST BUY after finishing high school. Because attending college or working any type of job on the “outside” breeds in women a “selfish” focus on herself and causes her to “value her own achievements” so much that entering a life of godly wifehood apparently loses its luster somewhat. In other words, keep ‘em ignorant so they don’t know what they’re missing. (Explore the sites I link to; they actually use this exact language).
One self-professed anti-feminist writes:
“I was very depressed for a long time when I first came home after graduating from college. It took me between one and two years to wean myself away from dependence on the constant feedback of school grades to confirm my worth.”
(Okra asks: as opposed to those other facets of life that DO confirm your worth, like washing the bathtub, unearthing a new bread recipe, and learning to sew so that if you meet a like-thinking man and marry him one day, you can run his household as an efficient chatelaine?)


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I have spent many years in Protestant Evangelical churches, and this Visionary Daughter/Stay-at-Home-Daughter movement is far on the outer fringe of what was preached and practiced within even the most “conservative,” “Bible-believing” communities.
Even these churches did not openly and vigorously dissuade teenage girls from even considering going to a university of any type *including Christian and Bible colleges.* Even these congregations did not ADVOCATE for young women to stay at home with their parents upon completing high school, minus a job, so that they could “train” for “homemaking, marriage and motherhood.” (e.g. one pastor’s own daughter went to Vanderbilt on a scholarship and his niece went to a Bob Jones-type Christian university.)
Stay at home DAUGHTERS? Truly?
I read these personal testimonies and blogs and feel like weeping.
I want to weep over these young women who have been reared up since birth to believe that they were created on earth for the sole purpose of supporting “the vision” of a male protector and provider, whether father or husband.
I want to cry out “But your ideas and contributions are meaningful and stand alone, without reference to a father or husband, just as men’s thoughts are valuable in of themselves and not measured in terms of the woman who bore them, the father who sired them, or the person with whom they have sexual relations.”
I experience a stab of regret when reading the personal testimony of an honors high school student in Australia who delighted in her coursework, who now, as a Stay at Home Daughter, has turned down a scholarship to university and all it offers in order to “train” on behalf of a husband she has not yet met, children she has not yet conceived.
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For all those who misinterpret my abject dismay over this social movement to mean a denunciation of Stay at Home Mothers, *you are quite in the wrong.*
Most American SAHMs do what they have to do for their particular families and lives. Many are women who have a college education or higher, or, alternately, have developed artistic or technical skills in a field. Almost all developed friends, interests, experiences independent of male relatives or guardians. They’ve seen as much of the world as their finances and circumstances allow. They’ve learned who they are as HUMAN BEINGS IN THER OWN RIGHT and advisedly go forward with this new stage in their life (which may indeed be temporary, anyway).
Most SAHMs do not advocate an entire system of separatism and segregation and gender essentialism that views women as so irreducibly tethered to their sole PURPOSE for existence–“helpmeet” to a husband and “Keeper of the Home”–that young girls are encouraged to drop out of society after high school, become full-time Stay At Home Daughters under the “covering” of their fathers, and train in domestic arts until they pass from their father’s supervision to that of their husband’s.
Chastity balls and the Southern Baptist Convention are looking almost SANE at the moment.

Disclaimer: This post was written by a Feministing Community user and does not necessarily reflect the views of any Feministing columnist, editor, or executive director.

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