My Journey into and out of Biblical Womanhood
A Woman in a Man's World Part Two
My story is not my mother’s story. I thought I wanted a different story.
The Cultural River of Biblical Wife
When I left home for college in 1978, I had big plans. I wanted to follow in my mom’s footsteps and be a success in business. But a part of me also wanted to find a husband and have my own family. I majored in business and was the first person in my family to graduate college. In my senior year I fell in love, and I married my college sweetheart. We were both raised Southern Baptist and when we moved and found our first church home, I soon began to learn the idea of Biblical Womanhood. It was not something I remember being taught in my own SBC church. I found myself drawn to this idea of learning to please my husband. So, I dove into becoming the Biblical wife that my new church family was teaching. I gravitated toward women of faith who were teaching me about being a Godly wife. I still have a deep appreciation for my mentors and their love for me. But I also realize that they too were just part of the cultural river we were all navigating. Biblical Womanhood did not start with them, it started many years before.
As I slowly began to be swept along in the cultural river of Biblical Womanhood I began to resent the way I had been raised. The household I grew up in seemed to me in this moment to not be the model household. I was going to do better.
If you have not, you should discover my extraordinary mother in Part One of this essay A Woman in a Man's World. My mother was the “bread winner” of our home, and my father worked from home and was our daily caretaker, very non-typical of the 60’s and 70’s. My parents had a rocky marriage. They loved each other dearly and there was no physical abuse, but my dad was an angry person.
Dad lost his father when he was only two years old, and his mother remarried at least two different times. My dad drove an ambulance in World War 2 and because he could speak a little French, he also was assigned to be an interpreter. He witnessed the mangled bodies of war. He had a stroke in 1994, and he was in and out of the hospital for the next couple of years. In April of 1995 as he lay recovering from a leg amputation, we saw the Oklahoma City bombing on the news. His eyes filled with tears. He said he was reminded of what he saw in the war. A few weeks later he died. And a few weeks after that my youngest son was born.
I know my father loved us and he showed it in the ways he cared for us. But at times he would become angry over various unpredictable things. He carried scars of childhood issues and trauma from war. When my husband and I visited my parents for a weekend, we walked on eggshells. If you didn’t agree with my father, he would get angry.
Over the years my mother had just taken the quiet way out of arguments. Dad would rant over something, and mom basically ignored it or didn’t talk to him for a few days. We all learned how to be passive aggressive. She could stand up for her financial decisions in her powerful government position with the men she encountered during the day. But she became silent at home, not standing up for herself during my dad’s various rants.
Biblical Labels
In the Southern Baptist community I grew up in, I had never heard the teachings I was hearing as a young wife in the 1980’s. I was learning new terms for modeling a Biblical home. I never heard the term Head of the Home before I started studying scripture through the eyes of the Biblical Womanhood curriculums. When we joined our new church, I was intimidated by the scriptural understanding of the other women. I wanted to learn how to study scripture like them. My husband’s parents were not very involved in church when he was young, he credits his desire to follow Christ to youth leaders in his church. When we began our marriage, we wanted to honor God and raise our children to follow God as best we could.
At our wedding, I had a scripture read that described my hopes for our marriage.
“There is no fear in love, perfect love drives out fear, because fear involves punishment. So, the one who fears is not complete in love. We love because he first loved us. (1 John 4:18)
I wanted a marriage without fear because that was not the marriage I witnessed growing up in my parents’ home. I wanted more. I wanted better.
I wanted my husband to be the head of the home. I wanted to be a stay-at-home wife, caring for our children and volunteering in church and school activities. I did not want the house I grew up in.
I began reading books on biblical marriage, titles like Love and Respect; His Needs, Her Needs; and then I discovered the book -Between the Sheets. This last one, written by a man, teaches women what they should know about men. Their natural sexual desires and how women need to please them in the bedroom. I recommended it to all my women friends at church. My church library even ordered it but put it in the back so children would not see it. We would go to couples retreats to learn how to be better spouses for each other. We had new couple friendships and we were all seeking to be faithful to God through our marriages. I attended women’s retreats to focus on growing closer to God and how to Love my husband better. These goals are admirable, but the view of marriage was distorted. At women-only retreats they talked about Sex and Submission and what the Bible said about women honoring their husbands, how we as wives were to “please” our husbands. I remember attending a breakout session with Dorothy Patterson on how to be “Biblically Hospitable.” Her husband Paige Patterson was instrumental in leading a conservative resurgence of Southern Baptists in the 70s and 80s. Paige Patterson would later be charged with covering up sexual abuse by a fellow Southern Baptist minister. (Check out Beth Allison Barrs podcast titled “All the buried Women”. Where she and Savannah Locke “trace the history of the increasingly monolithic Southern Baptist Convention”)
Church Leadership
My husband was nominated to be a Deacon in our church. We were a young married couple, and I was so proud. We had arrived. We were entering that model biblical married life I had envisioned. He was asked to serve as the church treasurer and did that for several years. He began to learn things about church people that frustrated him. The attitudes displayed by lay leadership were unexpected, and he did not agree with the church’s governance structure. When we moved states, he would be asked to serve as deacon and he continuously refused. He had seen enough of that side of church and wanted no part of it. In writing this piece, I asked him his thoughts. He told me that he just wasn’t motivated by the biblical manhood “Kool-Aid.” He attended one Promise Keepers event and never went back. Neither was he motivated by these large stage type events.
But, I became frustrated that my husband wasn’t being more “biblical.” Very early in our marriage, my Sunday school teacher invited me to join a study she led called “Biblical Womanhood.” I would talk to my husband about the things I was learning about biblical marriage. At times, he seemed disinterested. He never demanded that I follow that biblical model I was learning about and felt was so important. I was grateful my husband was a follower of Christ, and that we were choosing to raise our children together in a church, but I just felt he was not really “getting it”
My husband had a demanding and stressful job and over the years as he progressed in the corporate world, the stress increased more and more. Remember the Passive Aggressive behavior I learned from my mom? It began to play out at home too. I wanted him to lead our boys in devotionals and prayer times and talk with them about scripture. He did, but not in the formal and structured way I was hearing about from these biblical womanhood teachers. We did not have family devotionals. But even as I was being taught this, my observation was that most of the men I knew were not doing this either. This idea put stress on our marriage and was not fair of me to demand. He was available for our children in all their activities. And he did use scripture in life lessons with our boys. He talked with them and made it a point to always be at their sporting events. He counseled them on various decsions and even today they often call him for advice. During a career move to another state, I stayed behind so one of our sons could finish his senior year. My husband would make a six-hour drive back and forth every weekend so he could see him play soccer. In a conversation with my son’s wife, she told me that that is the thing he remembers and talks about. His dad was dedicated to being a part of their life and sacrificed his time to make sure he was there for them. He still does that.
But still I was frustrated. My mother attended church, but my father did not. I just wanted my marriage to be better than that of my parents.
At some point in my married life, the Southern Baptist church I grew up in – that my mother still attended – began allowing women to serve as Deacons. I was appalled. I even mentioned it in one of my prayer groups at my church, which now makes me laugh, and cringe. The Baptist church of my childhood was also teaching that we had for years misinterpreted Paul’s teachings on submission. When I would go visit my mom, I really dreaded going to church with her because I thought she and her community had veered from the “correct” teaching of scripture. Her church eventually left the Southern Baptist Convention and joined with the less conservative Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.
Lessons in Womanhood
On weeknights in the 60s and 70s, back home in Louisiana, my father would prepare supper for us, so my mother did not have to. She cooked on weekends. My dad also did laundry, and he taught us how to make the bed. Being an army man, we had to make sure the top sheet was tight and tucked in. And he had a certain way that his shirts needed to be folded, nice and neat to be placed in the drawers.
What I saw in my parents’ marital relationship was not healthy. But what I saw in my mother was a woman of strength and resilience in a difficult marriage. A woman with a successful career in the sixties and seventies. A woman proud of her accomplishments (my dad was proud of her as well). A wife and mother proud to provide for her family in a way that her parents – and my father’s parents – were never able to.
But when I got married, I wanted to throw all that out the window. Because we were going to be different than the “unbiblical” way I was raised. My husband never required or even suggested this “biblical” standard of marriage. It was me. I was the driver.
My Cultural Rivers
A journey presents many choices. I began my own adventurous river journey many years ago.
Rivers flow through a wide variety of places. Rivers are filled with opportunities for adventures. White water rapids, slow moving water, navigating around other boats. But sometimes those rivers swell and rage with the seasons and with the storms. Sometimes the banks of the river become more visible as the water recedes during the droughts. In navigating rivers, you need to be ready when the current begins to shift or the water changes depth.
I have written about my compassion for the vulnerable [speaking out for the vulnerable] and about my journey into learning how to heal racial divisions [Building Bridges across Racial Divides] . I have written about being a woman who grew up in the sixties and now is in her sixties [When I'm 64]. Now I am writing about the white water I hit when I began changing my understanding of marriage. The “untruths” I taught myself and learned from others. I say “untruths” instead of “lies” because these models and norms and structures were taught to me as biblical truths. But biblical truths can always be distorted and justified to fit what we want them to mean.
It was, of course, in 2020 when I saw the truths I had believed, truths I had been taught, begin to change. As my cultural river began to shift, What was hidden became visible. Conspiracy theories grew, many believed even by some of my family members. Racial atrocities were displayed on the news. Lies about stolen elections persisted. And it seemed that people felt that Jesus needed defending, in the wrong kind of ways. It seems what they really meant was their version of Christianity needed defending.
The river I was on was beginning to change course and I was learning a new way to navigate it.
Stay tuned for Part Three of Woman in a Mans World where I will explore the concept of “biblical” and why I no longer agree with the usage of those terms.
Here are some recommendations of other Substack writers debunking the idea of Biblical Womanhood and Patriarchy
— read her book -The Mary We Forgot A look at Mary Magdalene as a Disciple. I loved this book! — read her books-The Making of Biblical womanhood and Becoming the Pastors Wife —I haven’t read her book yet but it is on my list (Read her story below of Pastoral Ministry as a woman)
And for a great conversation of the use of the word “Biblical” check out Voxology podcast Why ‘Biblical’ might not mean what you think— I will be talking some about this in part three of this series Woman in a Mans World
Ah Janet, thank you for sharing your process. It's so important for people to read these things.
Thanks for sharing Janet. I’m so blessed to have known you in Texas for those few short years. You never know the impact on someone’s life that you made so I’m glad I can say that you did make an impact on my life in such a positive Christian way. I can’t wait to read more!