Can he trust that you will take care of your duties?
I’m reading Kathryn Joyce’s book Quiverfull, and finding interesting things in the process. Like A Virtuous Woman (for her price, as you no doubt recall, is far above rubies – no not Ruby’s, stop that at once, 40 lashes).
A Virtuous Woman tells women how to be virtuous.
Can your husband know that if he needs to bring a co-worker home that the house will be reasonably neat? We will be looking at this in depth in a few days, but for now simply think about it. If your husband goes to work each day, can he trust that you will take care of your duties to the best of your ability?
If your husband asks you to make a phone call, do you forget? Do you think ahead and make plans to iron his shirts before they are needed?
Can he trust that your moods will remain relatively even most of the time and that he knows what to expect when he comes home? Or must he wonder what is in store for his arrival?
And so on and so on and so on, for a lot of words. What every servant shud kno.
If I promise to have my husband’s shirts ironed, his house clean, and his phone calls made, can I then have sex with other men?
I decided to give the virtuous website a shot, give it the benefit of the doubt. I saw that trust was considered important, and I totally agree that trust can make or break a relationship. Then I read…
Are you freaking kidding me? I suppose my future wife shouldn’t be friends with her ex’s or ever talk to a male doctor alone? Is it ok to be alone with a gay man? I think if I read any more of that site I’d just end up banging my head on my desk.
I’m saddened to see that you two are among the lost.
(Addressing the Virtuous Woman) Virtue. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
In before MRAs start showing up to harp on BUT THE WOMAN ALWAYS GETS THE CHILDRENS THS IZ SEXEST OPPRESSHUN.
It also really bugs me how these quotes are never turned around. If the woman is “untrustworthy” and “moody” (read: has perfectly human reactions), and develops a taste for luxury like occasionally eating indulgent food bought without coupons (Oh my! I may just faint!), obviously she is just asking for her husband to start banging his secretary. And to lose her children. Obviously.
Gah!
Self denial is not a virtue. Suffering does not make you holy. Never complaining about the pain others cause you is not the mark of a stout spirit. And a relationship held together by one partner’s complete subservience to the other is not ever going to be a good marriage no matter how broadly you smile on Christmas cards.
Jeez, I thought marriage was a partnership,so if a woman chooses, or circumstances force her, to stay at home, shouldn’t she make some contributions to that partnership? The master-servant relationship is irrelevant. I was a house husband for a while and assumed it was my obligation to do housework.
My wife also pointed out to me that an implicit term in our marriage contract was that I didn’t make negative remarks about religion in the presence of her bible-bashing friends, relations and co-workers.
As my father used to say, ‘suffering doesn’t improve people’. It really doesn’t. This obsession with suffering and making a martyr of oneself strikes me as psychologically very odd.
Did you read ‘The Heart of Her Husband’ over at A Virtuous Woman?
RJW – seriously – you’ve totally missed the point. Did you read anything on the linked page? If not, don’t bother commenting, because you will just miss the point. (Hint: the marriage is not a partnership.)
I truly wonder about just how abusive an upbringing of a woman had to have been to actually espouse something as egregiously demeaning as this. It’s like watching a beaten puppy lick the hand of its owner. That’s not ‘love’ — it’s fear.
Scratch the surface of these “authors” and I think you’ll find some deeply hurt, incredibly scarred and scared people. Frankly, I’d feel sorry for them if it weren’t for the fact that they appear to have options (like counseling) to break through.
Well it’s a movement, so that partly explains it. The movement is what the book is about.
define “reasonably”…
well, he’s the one who owns a phone, so I’d be forced to start questioning his sanity if he asked me such a thing…
hellz no. For starters, I don’t believe in ironing. And secondly, if he doesn’t want to run out of clean clothes, it’s his responsibility to either do it himself, or ask me to take care of laundry several days before it’s actually necessary. I’m certainly not going to keep inventory of his dirty socks
well, it will be pretty consistently “caffeine withdrawal”, does that count as “relatively even”?
this is fun.
Ophelia,
Yes, I did read the text, however I didn’t realize that all the sentiments expressed by the author were necessarily invalidated by the sinister context, I should have known better, toed the party line, and condemned the entire article.
I was thinking of the Curate’s Egg,silly me!
Even several years after first hearing it, the word “quiverfull” still makes me recoil in revulsion.
It’s an aggressive image, children as arrows to be wielded against the likes of us.
RJW, that makes no sense, because you said “if a woman chooses, or circumstances force her, to stay at home” and that’s exactly what the article does not assume. The whole point of the article is that a woman’s domestic “duty” (which goes way beyond just “staying at home”) is not a matter of choice or circumstances. It is what God commands.
Also, you said “I thought marriage was a partnership” – but of course the whole point of the article and the way of thinking it represents is that marriage is not a partnership. Also you said “The master-servant relationship is irrelevant” but of course it is not irrelevant; it is exactly what the whole thing is about.
So don’t give me that party line bullshit. You either missed the point of the article, or ignored it for the sake of provocation. If you want to defend the way of thinking behind the article go ahead, but don’t pretend it doesn’t say what it says – don’t pretend it’s just advice on how to do housework better within an egalitarian marriage. Don’t be silly.
What is this “ex” you speak of? A virtuous woman is directly handed over by her father to her husband on their wedding day.
This is a serious problem, since, of course it’s completely inappropriate for a woman to be a doctor in that universe. But perhaps if you find an older Christian man to be your wife’s doctor, you can trust in God that there would not be anything to worry about.
Of course it’s not OK. You must flee from such an immoral person. What if your children found out that there was such a thing as homosexuality? They might catch teh gay from him.