Christian Trad Wives: I think we can do better.
A letter to the women who hate when women say NO to tradism.
My heart is torn by your love for the beautiful image of traditional family and utter disgust at the disdain you spew against women who choose careers and freedom over serving the way you choose to serve patriarchal systems.
It’s okay to share the good of your choices without looking down on the choices of another.
God never intended for our society to be a homogeneous tribe of Stepford wives and crunchy mamas completely reliant on husbands who may be faithful or could abandon them at any moment. Nothing in the bible says to completely financially rely on a human being to never change their mind.
Even the Proverbs 31 woman had skills, wisdom, and the capacity to buy and trade independently of her husband.
I found one feminist account that NEVER looked down on women with children (in the few posts I read). She just shared that she doesn’t like kids & all the reasons she will never have them. Simple. Authentic. A voice for many women AND mothers who feel the same way.
The motherhood accounts went nuclear, dragging her through these Substack streets with all the apparent love of Christ they could muster (which was NONE). That’s the only reason I know who she is. Jameela Jamil’s “sin” was not just refusing to bow to the altar of motherhood that the church has erected before generations of women as our god.
She chose to strike the altar with unapologetic disdain for all the reasons that motherhood is the greatest cost of a woman’s life. She clarified why she operates in her right not to have children. She opened the possibility of informed choice that reflects the hearts of so many Christian women.
It was noised about that she had an abortion, and that somehow made her more evil than the hundreds of thousands of young Christian women of all races who did the same before having children later.
How dare she speak about having children? How dare a woman have an opinion on being a woman that doesn’t agree with a Conservative world view?
As A Conservative Christian who loves God and women, I think we can absolutely do better. There are billions of women all over the planet who don’t have the testimony that their husbands are all men of God who loved, honored, and cherished them until their old age.
It’s okay to acknowledge that our way of life isn’t the ONLY way of life.
No, a man-led culture is not the way to go, just like a full-on matriarchy won’t work either. We had one of those. Feminism was the necessary solution to a society that found it acceptable to:
Marry 14-year-olds off to 40-year-old men,
Throw your wife in an insane asylum for having a different faith
Ask you if your husband agreed before you opened a bank account.
Blame the dead wife for not leaving sooner when the system legally allowed her and her children to be rejected for an apartment, before daring to protect them from the abuse in the first place.
But yes, let’s keep talking about the good old days when the perfect society was simply broken by feminism, vs the broken and ugly results of a male-led culture requiring women to fight for the liberties women have now. What followed those initial first wave fights will not die until society admits that a male-led culture has never worked and leans until the balance of a society led by both women and men, that is balanced and whole.
Yes, women who choose NOT to have children are 100% sane. Those mothers who regret having children are not mentally ill: they are tired, mostly unsupported, and living the reality of our grandmothers.
You may be living your dream life. But your dream is NOT a universal reality.
Reality matters.
All this fear over young women being influenced by the reality of life should be redirected to solutions that don’t involve women praying harder and continuing to bear the weight of a male-led culture that tells them that their highest calling is that of wife and mother (not purpose, not writing, not traveling, not building, not walking with God). Just birthing children and being a wife.
While men’s highest calling is anything and everything a human being needs to be fulfilled in Christ, outside of being a husband and father.
The birth rates aren’t falling fast enough.
Signed, a Christian Conservative mother of 4 beautiful children fighting to build a society that honors my daughters’ divine right to LIVE life and live it more abundantly.