With all the media fuss over the collapse of the marriage at the center of Jon & Kate + Eight, I feel that people are overlooking a similar show that isn't full of juicy scandal. And it won't ever be so. Even though the family situation depicted therein is one that frightens me to my very core.
I'm talking about 18 Kids and Counting, now in its second season. In the first season, it was 17 Kids and Counting. Which should give you a glimmer of the situation.
When I dug below that glimmer, my uneasy feeling only grew stronger.
I explain on the flip:
In just the past couple of weeks, I've been immersing myself in the shadowy world of women in fundamentalism, sparked by a book by Elissa Wall, who sued Warren Jeffs of the FLDS extreme polygamy sect for forcing her to marry at fourteen to a man she did not love.
In Stolen Innocence: My Story of Growing Up in a Polygamous Sect, Becoming a Teenage Bride, and Breaking Free of Warren Jeffs, Ms. Wall, now married to a fellow cult refugee and the mother of two, describes how:
--Women are admonished to "keep sweet" while they take over all domestic work, labor in FLDS owned businesses, and, despite all claims to the contrary, are told who they are going to marry while still under the age of consent.
--If a man has a wife or daughters who visibly struggle with the impossible demands of their culture, the whole family is taken away and given to another man.
--How multiple wives vent their frustration on each other, creating power struggles and committing child abuse with each other's children.
--How the hermetically sealed organization controls all family relations and work opportunities, forcing any rebellion either underground or into exile with only the clothes on their backs.
While not Mormon, a similar dynamic was played out in the horrible case of Andrea Yates. This young couple fell under the spell of Michael Woroniecki, a traveling minister who preached that everyone should let "God take care of their birth control," and that the mother should stay home with the children and homeschool. Five children and a few psychiatric hospitalizations later, Andrea Yates, despairing over the impossible task that had been set before her, drowned all her children to "save them from hell."
Suzy Spencer, who is writing a book about Andrea Yates, made some additional points on a Sally Jessy Raphael Show aired before the verdict was announced. She said the preacher believed "All women are witches" and that men are wimps, beliefs that he put in a brochure entitled "The Witch and the Wimp." She also pointed out that, following her suicide attempts, Andrea Yates was put on the anti-psychotic drug Haldol, and the couple was told that, as long as she took her medication and had no more children, she would be all right. What Weren't We Discussing about Andrea Yates?
Yes, Woroniecki is not in touch with reality. Yes, Andrea Yates had mental problems. I feel she wouldn't have had mental problems if she hadn't been coerced by misguided religious fervor into having more children than she could handle; and was given the full responsibility for all those children.
Her husband and family were shocked and horrified. As various family members explained over and over in television interviews, no one ever suspected that she was capable of harming her children, especially not Russell Yates. He just thought she might kill herself.
And that, apparently, was okay.
For a comprehensive look at this movement, a marvelous book is Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement by Kathryn Joyce. As described by Vyckie Bennett in a review online at Amazon:
When I talked to Kathryn Joyce over the phone as she was interviewing me for an article on Salon.com, I told her I found it very affirming that for most of the book, she simply sticks to quoting the movement leaders ~ often with no commentary at all. "What that said to me," I explained, "is that to those who aren't steeped in this particular worldview, the craziness of it all is self-evident. There's no need to say, 'This is total crap!' because anyone who isn't already convinced can clearly see that it's truly insane to try and live this way."
People are in real danger from this religious movement.
Yes, it creates women who are no more than domestic serfs; judged by the cleanliness of their kitchen counters and the number of children who smear jam on them. But it also ruins the men involved.
In the polygamous Mormon sects, young men are told that if they keep forcing themselves on their unwilling new wives, that the "wives will come to love them," and it might take a baby or three for them to "see God's plan," and settle in. In ostensibly more "Christian" approaches, men with only one wife are similarly told that any unhappiness or rebellion on the part of their family are the consequence of them "not being a strong enough Head of the Family," and "there's nothing wrong about loving corporal punishment."
No one gets any love that way. Far from creating a situation where one has a large and loving family, there is the constant stress of stretching resources too thin and the pressure to not exert any control over one's life.
This recent post on a Quiverfull blog by a mother of five speaks of a situation that many women understand, yet I find it frightening that the very situation she is despairing over offers only solutions that drives her further into despair:
We’d lost a deal on a house I had my heart set on! and finally we just gave up trying to control things -it wasn’t really what we ever wanted to do anyway. The circumstances kinda scared us into clinging to ‘being responsible’ and taking charge of our lives. We conceived again and delivered our first girl within a year of the miscarriage! Then and only then did the Lord make the way for our move to our first home. We then conceived our second daughter 5 months after our move. And this only happened because we listened to our hearts and the Lord not our emotions and circumstances.
As I type this while holding my eighth baby -the fifth to be in my arms.
...
We also were not financially stable and found ourselves moving more than once a year in search of an affordable living situation. Then at 18 months old our eldest boy lost all his early speech and our second son proved to be on the strong willed hyper side. All that to say we had more than the terrible twos to deal with. Nothing was easy; at one point I even found myself living in the upstairs rooms of an elderly friend; pregnant with a toddler, doing dishes in the bath tub, fighting the summer heat with no air-conditioning on an upper floor all day and night, laundry was being done at the laundry mat... my husband was trying to go to school and work and was not home much.
...
Please forgive the temporary barrenness here on the blog of the last month. I will revive and post again soon.
In my personal life I have been calling out to the Lord to make me a better wife and mother! And I expect to show fruit from this deep desire and the studies I have been doing.
Birthing a Quiverfull is more than birthing the unborn but raising him in the admonition of the Lord and showing the fruit of the Spirit in my daily walk and ministry to my family.
The mistakes I have made in the past must be confessed to have new insight on the future and to raise these children for the Lord.
I am rereading To Train Up a Child and Raising Your Child for Christ.
In case you were wondering, these are the books that result in this kind of review of James Dobson's The Strong Willed Child:
I'm 22 years old and recently found out my parents raised me according to this book. Violence is not tolerated in our society except on children. To this day I have flashbacks to my childhood when my parents would hit me (probably ages 3-10). You can sugar coat the word however you want but spanking is using physical force/violence. I remember feeling so small and weak and terribly afraid when my parents would hit me.
So not only does this movement advocate as many children as biologically possible, it also claims we must "break the child's will," and use corporal punishment on infants.
If we ever wonder "how wingers got that way," I think we have a partial answer.
As I see it, Betty Crocker made me a feminist. My mother married in the late fifties. One of her wedding presents was a lavishly illustrated Betty Crocker cookbook. Unlike the corporate clipping service such cookbooks have become, this one showed how to cook from scratch, and covered a great deal of what was known as "homemaking."
Cleaning and storing kitchen equipment, making batches of cookies to send to our fighting men overseas, (including how to pack them,) and how to shop with meal planning in mind were all covered in an exhaustive and informative view of Womanhood in the Fifties.
As a small, strong willed, child, I noticed two things:
--Only one woman in the whole cookbook had her own name (and she used her initials.) Everyone else was Mrs. Warren This and Mrs. Herbert That. There wasn't a single woman's name in the entire huge book.
--Every section divider had helpful hints about lowering stress. The implication I came away with was that "homemaking" had the same PTSD potential as a combat battalion in WWII.
Oppressive patriarchy, sugar coated with lies about "what the Lord wants," is on the move. Let's be aware, and fight back.
I have a happy and loving relationship with an enlightened fellow who gets the full measure of my love and devotion, and I get the same back.
There isn't another configuration that will make both parties happy. What the charlatans of the Right are pushing is far from a solution.
It's a return to The Problem. Then blaming people for not making an impossible situation work.