Virtuous Women

Virtuous Women was born from my desire to transform my home into a haven of peace and comfort. My career as a parish pastor had just gone down in flames, in part because the congregation and the church hierarchy had forced me to choose between my ministry and my family. I chose my family and decided to put my energy into strengthening my relationship with my husband as we raised our infant daughter and toddler son together.

But there was a problem with my plan: I’m a card-carrying GenX latchkey kid, an only child raised by a divorced single mother, and I had no idea how happy, two-parent households with multiple children and a stay-at-home-mom were supposed to function. So, I turned to the internet and searched for “how to be a good wife and mother.” That’s how I discovered the Quiverfull movement.

There was no shortage of women blogging about exactly this topic. Many didn’t use the word Quiverfull, but I began to see the pattern. All these women were religious (not a problem for me, as I’d lost my career but not my faith), and all promised that if I dedicated myself fully to the roles of wife and mother, my family life would be blissful. They emphasized that children were blessings from God, and they were to be cherished. I’d never felt that growing up, and I wanted it for my own children.

I considered talking to my husband about having more kids—a lot more, as these women advocated—and I liked the idea of devoting my life to raising them and showing them that they were loved and valued. I dismissed the parts about women being submissive to men because neither I nor my husband had any interest in that type of a family structure. My seminary training had given me a solid understanding of the socio-historical context of the bible, and the appeals to scripture as mandating such a system didn’t convince me. But I felt pulled to this simple, family-focused life filled with love and happiness. According to these blogs, it was mine for the making.

As I continued to read these blogs and look for more, I began to find testimonies of women who had left the movement. They had very different stories to tell about those simple, family-focused households with traditional gender roles and lots of children. Stories of abuse, control, neglect, and isolation. I realized that something very dark hides behind the promises of Quiverfull: men have all the power, whether they use it wisely or not, and they insist that being a wife and mother is the only option for women. Women who are unable or unwilling to accept that life are shamed and scorned, or worse.

I wondered what it would be like for a girl growing up in a Quiverfull household where female submission was expected and enforced. The character of Hope Wagner came to life in my imagination, a teenaged girl who was completely sheltered from the world and unaware of any options beyond what her father dictated. What if she was the eldest daughter of ten children, and her mother died giving birth to number eleven? Would she have to step into her mother’s shoes until her father remarried? And what if her father’s new wife was a world-wise young woman who’d chosen that life because she was drawn to the same things that had tempted me? Jennifer Levine would discover too late that Quiverfull doesn’t always deliver on the promises it makes to women.

As I was imagining this, the rights of women were being eroded in American society. The right to make choices about our own health and wellbeing has been taken away from women across the nation. Policies intended to strengthen traditional families (at the expense of non-traditional families) and promote conservative Christian values are being debated and implemented at all levels of government. Hulu’s adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale has taken off, and protesters regularly chant “Make Margaret Atwood fiction again!” Over the last decade, the specter of Christian theocracy in America has become embedded in the public’s imagination. But as I discovered, for many women this patriarchal and fundamentalist rule is not a potential dystopian future; it’s already their present reality.

My daughter was an infant when I first learned about the Quiverfull movement. She’s now a teenager. I wrote this book for her, and for all girls and women who are trying to figure out what it means to be a woman in this day and age.

Virtuous Women is an exploration of what makes a woman virtuous, and a celebration of some of the different ways women define virtue for themselves. It also explores the dark reality of contemporary patriarchal Christianity and the high price paid by women who have no choice but to be that version of virtuous.

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Ann Goltz writes fiction that deals with complicated family dynamics, questions of identity, and the intersection of faith and life. After spending five years working in government finance, she obtained a Master’s in Divinity and became an ordained pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. No longer in active ministry, she lives in New Hampshire with her husband, two teenagers, and three cats. Virtuous Women is her first published novel.

VIRTUOUS WOMEN

There’s only one way to be virtuous. Or is there?

In the two years since her mother’s death, seventeen-year-old Hope Wagner has single-handedly raised and homeschooled her ten younger siblings while keeping her father’s house. When her father marries the strange newcomer to their church, Hope is allowed to begin a courtship that will make her a helpmeet in her own right. Much to her surprise, her betrothed has a vision for their life that includes radical ideas like education, careers, and choosing how many children they want to have rather than leaving it up to God. For the first time Hope can imagine a different future than the one her father’s planned for her, and she wants that future more than she’s ever wanted anything else.

Jennifer Levine has always wanted a large, close-knit family that lives according to traditional values, just like all those families she reads about in her beloved historical novels. When Michael, a handsome, successful widower at her new church begins to court her, Jennifer believes she’s found the life of her dreams. But Jennifer’s new life is a nightmare of inadequacy and futility as she tries to embody her husband’s idea of a virtuous woman, and she discovers the dark side of their conservative Christian sect. When Jennifer finally rejects Michael’s authority over her, she launches the family into a crisis that threatens Hope’s future and will change their lives forever.

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Category: On Writing