From Talk to Action...
Victory Through Daughters: An Excerpt from Quiverfull
By Kathryn Joyce
Today my first book, Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement, which I've written about at Talk to Action before, was published by Beacon Press. In it, I've investigated the growing ranks of the explicitly pronatalist, and self-named, "patriarchy" movement, which advocates strict interpretations of wifely submission to male headship, women forgoing all forms of contraception to bear as many children as God gives them, and homeschooling their daughters to do the same. So far, the book is being received as a fair and accurate depiction of a growing movement within conservative evangelicaldom (including kind words from Christianity Today) that deserves more attention than it has received to date. An excerpt of the book has been published at religion journalism site Killing the Buddha:
There were complications when Geoffrey Botkin's first daughter, Anna Sofia, was born. The problems were physical--Anna Sofia's mother, Victoria, could have died--and more esoteric, too. Geoffrey Botkin is one of the leading voices of a ministry called Vision Forum, the intellectual avant-garde of fundamentalism. One of Vision Forum's chief concerns is child-rearing, which the movement considers both a process of theological conditioning and an art lost sometime in the 19th century. So as Botkin held his newborn daughter perfectly still in his cupped hands, he prayed to God for guidance: after having raised two older sons, how should he raise a daughter? He felt God move him to a specific prayer for the infant sleeping in his hands, a prayer for her body. He remembered baby girls are born with two ovaries and a finite number of eggs that will last them a lifetime. He placed his hand over his new daughter's abdomen and prayed for Anna Sofia to be the "future mother of tens of millions." He prayed that the Lord would order everything in his daughter's life: "What You will do with every single egg here. How many children will this young lady have? Who will be her husband? With what other legacy will these little eggs be joined to produce the next generation for the glory of God?" He explained to a room full of about six hundred fathers and daughters gathered for the annual Vision Forum Father and Daughter Retreat that he had prayed that his new daughter might marry young.
Today, Anna Sofia and her sister, Elizabeth, strikingly poised young women in their early twenties, are the preeminent Vision Forum brand for promoting biblical womanhood to the unmarried daughters of homeschooling families, girls largely raised in the patriarchal faith but susceptible to temptations from the outside world. In all their testimony to fellow young "maidens," the Botkin daughters, raised in both the American South and the Botkins' Seven Arrows Ranch in New Zealand, stress the dire importance of one of their father's favorite talking points: "multigenerational faithfulness." That is, the necessity of the sons and daughters of the movement--especially the daughters--cleaving to the ways of their parents and not abandoning the dominion project the older generation has begun.
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http://www.talk2action.org/story/2009/3/11/12717/9382/Dominionism_in_the_military/Victory_Through_Daughters_An_Excerpt_from_Quiverfull
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