Daughters, part 1

Last month, out of a kind of morbid curiosity for the girl I used to be, I picked up an old book. It was in a pile of books I had cleared off my shelves but hadn’t succeeded in trading for credit at a bookstore because the staff didn’t think they would sell. Apparently nobody else wanted my old books, either, even though this one was in perfect condition. I had read it once because my parents had given it to me, and it was so disheartening and shaming, even back then, that I had never picked it up again. Until that day when the little voice in my head said, “Hey, you’re writing about your patriarchal past. Maybe you could use that as research.” So I plunked myself down on my bedroom carpet, pulled the book out of the sack of thrice-discarded Perry Mason and Janet Oke novels, and started skimming. The effect was almost immediate. Like time in rewind, I could feel myself growing smaller, less confident, and more helpless by the minute, my body reacting to the shame trigger by curling in on itself, like a frightened hedgehog. The book was So Much More, by American-born sisters Anna Sofia and Elizabeth Botkin, published by Vision Forum Ministries (yes, that Vision Forum). It’s basically a 352 page trial-by-brimstone in which Jesus himself would be condemned (but not, say, Donald Trump). And it is the ideal of girlhood I was meant to achieve.

“Feminism,” the confident teenage sisters proclaimed, “promised that women in a feminist society would live on a Utopian playground, enjoying liberation and equality. What we see instead is women being exploited by men to an extreme never before seen on such a wide scale in the West¹.” Statements like this spoke right to my fear of men and fear of my own naivety about the world. Freedom and equality sounded as good to me as to any other frustrated teenager, but I had been taught a deep mistrust of feminism, and so if those words were linked with women intent on ruining the world in a misbegotten attempt to dominate it, then freedom and equality must be bad for me. Especially if “they” couldn’t even make good on their promise. I had a persistent foreboding that the moment I stepped outside the protection of my family I would be raped and left for dead. Or worse, left unmarried and pregnant. I wasn’t really sure what I wanted in life, but it sure as hell wasn’t that. Sitting on the floor with the dense carpet pressing back against my butt, I felt the fear again. More than anything else, I just wanted to be fixed. I wanted to be normal and feel safe and happy and confident, and not at all like me. The Botkin girls seemed to have a formula for achieving that goal, and I was all ears.

In this generation, girls are facing a lot of problems…They are facing all kinds of complications, conundrums, cynicism and confusion over where they are headed in life. They struggle with a proper idea of femininity and masculinity, a healthy view of authority and submission, a sense of direction and priority, the concept of protection and security, and an elemental understanding of what it means to be daughters of God.

We’ve found that these girls all have one more thing in common: they are missing a functional, confiding, loving relationship with their fathers.

The premise of the book is that the world can be ultimately saved by “turning the hearts of daughters back to their fathers.” It is through this “functional, confiding, loving relationship” between father and daughter, the Botkin girls argue, that a girl is transformed into a dynamic, powerful and influential woman worthy of a good man and a healthy, happy life…so long as she remains properly behind and beneath the male authority placed over her by an invariably male God. In which case, I was screwed.