NEWS & LETTERS, October - November 2009
Ideological babies
Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement, by Kathryn Joyce (Beacon Press, 2009).
Kathryn Joyce has written a book about how the religious right is largely based upon a movement to restore patriarchy and how this is harmful to women and society. Meaning "rule of the fathers," patriarchy is a society where women are submissive to men, and fathers are in complete control of their families.
Joyce investigates the patriarchy movement's extreme manifestation, "Quiverfull," where women postpone sex until marriage, after which they have as many children as possible. Quiverfull children are meant to be an "army of God" (a Biblical reference comparing a father's children to his quiver full of arrows) that will "reclaim" the culture of the U.S. and the world for the religious right. The children are homeschooled, taught creationism and taught that the founders of the U.S. intended it to be a fundamentalist Christian country.
SEPARATE AND UNEQUAL EDUCATION
Boys are sent to religious right colleges to be trained as leaders--the "heroes" who will change society. Girls, who are not allowed to attend college, are trained in housekeeping and childcare and taught they are the property of their fathers until they become the property of their husbands. It is drilled into girls that submission to men is for their own good because they are more easily deceived, more deceitful, and more sinful than men. Wives are trained to police their negative thoughts towards their husbands, and taught that if husbands abuse them it is the wife's fault.
Some matches are arranged to join prominent families. But even a man who is not successful in the outside world can have a position of respect as the "lord" and "patriarch" of his home in a Quiverfull community, even though these large families end up in poverty. Although Quiverfull is extreme, all of its positions have filtered into mainstream conservative Christianity.
The main goal of the patriarchy movement is destroying feminism. The movement is especially critical of liberal churches that have accepted an "egalitarian" feminism that allows women to have careers, contraception, and equal relationships with men. It says that these will lead to a "radical" feminism that approves of abortion and gay rights and that will lead to "social anarchy" caused by "individual rights."
Joyce describes how the movement has established gynecologists and pharmacists who refuse to write or fill prescriptions for contraceptives. She describes movement activists who want to outlaw women's suffrage, no-fault divorce, day care centers, Head Start, stem-cell research and in-vitro fertilization, and end laws that punish child abuse. They want to replace pensions for individuals with those for male heads of households and return to sex-segregated job listings. She describes how such activists have already been appointed to positions in the U.S. government. For example, Dr. David Hagar was appointed by the Bush administration to the FDA to oppose contraception and abortion.
INTERNATIONALIZATION OF OPPRESSION
The patriarchy movement arose within mainstream churches and spread to other denominations and congregations, sometimes taking them over as it did with the Southern Baptist Convention. This movement has infiltrated the UN and established a bloc of antiabortion nations. Religious right groups have joined with Mormon leaders and the Vatican to establish the World Congress of Families (WCF) to fight women's and gay rights internationally. The WCF also works with Muslim groups, although they use the fear of an Islamic takeover of Europe to influence Europeans to have large families. They promote the racist notion of a "demographic winter" which claims white Europeans are dying out to be replaced by "foreigners" if they don't start reproducing more quickly.
Patriarchal oppression of women occurs internationally in fundamentalist Jewish and Muslim societies without the influence of the Christian religious right. Joyce interviews a doctor at an Israeli women's clinic whose clients are Jewish ultra-Orthodox. They are under the same pressure as Quiverfull women and suffer medical problems and even death from the constant pregnancies as well as constant labor in the home. The doctor describes these women as becoming "de-selfed" to the point where they can't say that they want to stop having babies.
Joyce doesn't propose answers about how to stop the patriarchy movement. However, this is a very important book that needs a wider distribution because it exposes the extremes to which the religious right will go to take over society and explains the harmfulness of patriarchy to women and society.
--Adele
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