My life as a daughter of Christian Patriarchy

By Libby Anne

Deep within America, beyond your typical evangelicals and run of the mill fundamentalists, nurtured within the homeschool movement and growing by the day, are the Christian Patriarchy and Quiverfull movements. This is where I grew up.

I learned that women are to be homemakers while men are to be protectors and providers. I was taught that a woman should not have a career, but should rather keep the home and raise the children and submit to her husband, who was her god-given head and authority. I learned that homeschooling is the only godly way to raise children, because to send them to public school is to turn a child over to the government and the secular humanists. I was taught that children must be trained up in the way they should go every minute of every day. I learned that a woman is always under male authority, first her father, then her husband, and perhaps, someday, her son. I was told that children are always a blessing, and that it was imperative to raise up quivers full of warriors for Christ, equipped to take back the culture and restore it to its Christian foundations.

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While my upbringing was fairly happy, it was anything but normal. For one thing, I was homeschooled. For another thing, I grew up with a dozen younger siblings. Other families commonly have seven, eight, or nine children. A few have as many as eighteen or nineteen. While there are some very fun things about growing up with so many siblings, the sheer size of the family means that daughters of Christian Patriarchy have little privacy and many chores. And since they don’t go to school, their time with friends is limited and their time working by their mothers’ sides is maximized. By the time I was twelve, I could fix meals for the entire family, keep the laundry going, and essentially run the house single handedly. When I was fifteen my parents went out of town for a week, leaving me in charge of the younger siblings. Later when I was in high school, my mother had a hard pregnancy and was completely incapacitated for a month. I ran the house and homeschooled the younger children without a problem. I practically raised some of my younger siblings. And yet, this endless list of chores and expectations and responsibilities is seen as the natural order of things, rather than as a problem.

Daughters of Christian Patriarchy are essentially servants in their own homes, but this does not mean they are necessarily miserable and unhappy. While some daughters of Christian Patriarchy rebel and inwardly resent how they are being raised, most don’t. Most accept what their parents teach them as true, and look forward to their wedding day as the beginning of their lives. This was me. I was perfectly happy to help with my younger siblings and cook for a dozen and do load after load of laundry. At age ten, twelve, or fourteen, I was being trained to be a “helpmeet” to my future husband, preparing for my life’s role by working alongside my mother and serving as junior “helpmeet” to my father. I dreamed of my wedding constantly, and thought of what a wonderful wife, mother, and homemaker I would be. A wife and mother was all I wanted to be, because any dream of anything else was nipped in the bud before it ever took root. I truly believed that this was what God wanted of me, and that serving my family and raising my siblings was serving God. And I gloried in it.

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You have to understand just how deeply these beliefs are implanted. Even though I began questioning my parents’ beliefs halfway through college, I was so inculcated into their mindset that I did not even think of having a career or being other than a stay at home homeschool mom until four years later. Even though I have been out for years and am now in my mid twenties, I still feel like I am a failure because I only have one child. I feel that if I don’t have five or six kids, I am somehow a flop and a dud. In my brain, my worth as a woman is still tied to the number of children I have. I know these brain patterns are bullshit and I’m working on eradicating them, but they are still there. And in my conversations with other daughters who have left, I have found that I am not alone in this.

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