Kathryn Joyce - Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement

I bought Quiverfull a month ago after having read Infidel and wanting to know more about the situation of women in religions other than Islam. It was a very good book, but I don't have a lot to say about it.

As I read Quiverfull I consistently felt a combination of horror and disgust at the idea that not only is there a growing movement that insists that women be subservient to (and essentially property of) men but that it is enthusiastically embraced by many women. Equally horrifying to me is the sheltered subculture that has been created as part of this movement in which children are being raised with limited exposure to ideas that contradict their own. These children are part of enormous families that their parents hope will become a new army of the lord that triumphs through sheer numbers. The girls, meanwhile, are raised as the property of their fathers until such time as he gives them to a "suitable" husband. As terrible as this way of raising children is, however, even worse is the idea of the submission of wives to their husbands to the point of condoning spousal abuse. Joyce's numerous illustrations of women being told that the emotional and physical abuse that their husbands were inflicting was their fault for not properly submitting to them left me cold.

The one criticism I had of the book was the people that Joyce focused on as examples of former members of the movement. She focuses on two families in particular, but both of those families came to the Quiverfull movement later in life, embraced it for a time, and then left. I would have liked to see Joyce examine the situations of people (particularly women) who left the movement after having been raised in it. It is possible that it was impossible to find such examples, but even if this was so that fact alone would have been interesting enough to merit a mention of the way in which the movement takes over one's life and makes escape (or even the desire to escape) impossible.

Overall I would highly recommend Quiverfull as an incredibly interesting and somewhat frightening read.