Few things give me greater pleasure than seeing friends succeed. Emma and Jackson Waters are two such friends. Emma, a colleague at The Heritage Foundation and a Claremont Institute Lincoln Fellow, and Jackson, prepping to be an Anglican priest, are in their mid-20s and married, with two beautiful girls. And another child on the way. Now, Emma has written a book of advice, Lead Like Jael: 7 Timeless Principles for Today’s Women of Faith, that aims to teach college students and young adults how to recover biblical womanhood, which is bitterly scorned in our feminist dispensation.
Waters, though homeschooled, was raised under the feminist mystique, a life script created under our present regime. Middle-class, college-bound girls are raised to be mini girl bosses, guided into a life where they prioritize their “careers” and downgrade—or forget altogether—marriage and children. Young girls make a “to-do” list and check items off one by one, hoping that by the end they have a fulfilling job, a closet full of expensive shoes, and maybe a boyfriend. What a marvelous dream!
Emma checked the boxes. Advanced education and professional achievement were keys. Mentors identified. Check. Study hard and earn high marks? Check. Standardized test prep? Check. The right school? Check. The Right internship? Check. She prepared for her dream career, ready to climb the ladder of credentials and meeting expectations. How about marriage? Normally, for the box-checkers, there is some recreational dating with contraception. Next, perhaps living with someone. Then, if the time is right (after she is set in her career), marriage. Or not. If not, she will bemoan how “there are no good men available.”
>>> Heritage’s “Save the Family” Plan Empowers Women
Emma was convinced “that motherhood would be the end of my dreams and everything I had worked so hard to achieve.” Jackson approached Emma a bit early for her taste—she was not yet established in her career. When marriage came up, she bolted. Ultimately, however, the breakup did not sit right with Emma. As she examined her priorities and her faith, she concluded that “girl-boss feminism” sat at the center of her crisis.
We all know the feminist story. In the beginning, life was patriarchy. Women had no opportunities, no voice, no education, and no respect. Our grandmas and great-grandmas—really, any woman coming of age before 1960—could not exercise or even talk in public. Their husbands regularly cheated on them, and people consciously looked the other way. Women were barefoot and pregnant, living dead-end lives as housewives.
Then feminism brought about today’s glorious vision of womanhood: birth control and cubicles! Today’s gals can post on Instagram. They can have high-powered jobs. They can choose not to marry. They can testify before Congress. They can cheat on their husbands (and divorce them!) to the supportive cries of “Go, girl!” from their sisters. They shout their abortions. They are happy and fulfilled. Or so they say.
Betty Friedan laid out how she escaped the feminine mystique in her bildungsroman autobiography Life So Far. Feminist lips parrot the same script today. Amazingly, more women (especially educated women) today find American society more hopelessly misogynistic than at any time in the past. The chief thing to fear is…male backlash.
For Waters, Lead tells a different tale, ultimately informed by an alternative vision: womanhood after feminism. First, while Betty Friedan was living like a zombie under the feminine mystique until she read Simone de Beauvoir, Waters came to her senses when confronted with the irrepressible conflict between feminism and love. Feminism glorifies the independent woman, but love is always a form of mutual dependence. Love or feminism? Waters realized she could not have both. Friedan’s aha moment came from ideological consciousness raising; Waters’s from the promptings of nature and a properly formed conscience.
Waters is not alone in finding feminist assumptions hardly relevant to today’s crises of meaninglessness and nihilism. The tired feminist narrative has run its course. It is obsolete.
The alternative is the Christian woman. Drawing on biblical sources, Waters identifies discernment, shrewdness, resourcefulness, hospitality, mission, combativeness, and wise counsel as the seven principles of biblical womanhood. While Waters gives much practical advice for young married mothers, her counsel points most toward an attitude—a new, American feminine norm that sits between careerist girlbossery and Marian submissiveness. Jael, an obscure and determined woman of the Old Testament, ends up a heroine on par with Mary. Waters makes the biblical case for what I call the side-hustle tradwife, a woman who works, as Waters writes, “either out of necessity or desire,” yet puts her “home and relationships first.” She recognizes, as Waters notes, that “family life and the well-being of…children must take precedence over the relentless demands of careerism.”
Waters teaches young women that relationships with “husbands and children refine and strengthen them for successful work in political, social, religious, and personal realms—either directly, or through their husband and children.” And she’s got the biblical stories to prove it.
Jael’s story from Judges 4-5 reveals a strong, resourceful woman. Her husband betrayed Israel, allying with Canaan’s King Sisera. Yet when Sisera fled a battlefield and collapsed in Jael’s tent, she made up for her husband’s deficit of courage and trust. She reached for a tent peg and a mallet, driving the peg through Sisera’s skull, just as she had used it to anchor tents so they would not be swept away in desert storms. Jael protected her country while protecting her home.
The same spirit informs chapters like “Marriage on a Mission” and “Motherhood as Warfare.” The chapter on marriage, for instance, hardly whitewashes marriage. Instead, husbands and wives must be “battle-mates rather than rivals” in living a life of adventure and mission in a hostile world. Husbands must partly see their market activity and careers as providing for their family. Wives must partly see their role as supporting their husband and cultivating a home worthy of his provision. Women may sometimes bristle at this arrangement, just as men may feel that the fruits of their hard work quickly vanish due to household expenses. Marrieds may have seasons of flexibility in their joint lives as battle-mates, but couples should intend to achieve a well-ordered household as soon as possible. The vision of battle-mates makes sense of these tensions.
>>> Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years
The motherhood chapter depicts a welcoming, surrendering, and trusting mother, rather than one driven by control or centered on other priorities. As husbands and wives are battle-mates, mothers are “warrior mothers.” Such a mother must wage war against the worldly temptations to prioritize something other than her children, to be envious of her husband’s glories, or to wallow in disappointments. Warfare really involves prioritizing motherhood in a world that often does not. Mothers are called to be present: “There is no substitute for a mother’s available and loving presence in the earliest years” and beyond, writes Waters. Many mothers are prompted to take political action precisely out of concern for maintaining households. Much fruit grows from putting family first, not least a healthy family.
One of the most compelling critiques of the side-hustle tradwife is that women who work part-time often lack the energy or the time to build community, or to allow husbands sufficient space to pursue fraternity. Side-hustle tradwives can make for excessively private or domestic men. Side-hustlers can also sit in great tension with the traditional homemaker. One wonders whether the two groups can coexist in a workable coalition of “family first” women. Is the side-hustle model traditional enough?
For Waters, the traditional homemaker is the center of gravity for the motherhood movement. Side-hustling tradwives should do what traditional homemakers do—but do it shrewdly, and with excellent negotiating skills. She has chapters on hospitality, for instance, and on maintaining the right attitude to support a husband in his endeavors.
It is impossible to do justice to every detail of Lead Like Jael, but such a book is an essential how-to guide to create a world after feminism. Such a world cannot come soon enough.
