Passionate Housewives Desperate for God
Sunday, November 30th, 2008I borrowed "Passionate Housewives Desparate for God" from the library and now I know I must buy it. It was so satisfying to have everything I have been teaching my 5 daughters on paper (and better articulated). While I was reading this, my 18 year old daughter asked to see it and she said,'Mom, this is just everything you've been telling us!' I wish every girl were able to receive this book on their 13th or even 10th birthday so they know how important being a wife and mother is; not just to her family, but to those around her...watching and listening! We must rise up and be blessed!
- Jennie Chancey
- Stacy McDonald
ISBN: 1934554154
Number Of Pages: 206
Unknown: English
Original Language: English
Published: English
Have you struggled to reconcile God's vision of virtuous womanhood with worldly myths that marginalize and mock the role of the homemaker? Do you wrestle with cultural messages that demean the homemaker s calling and exalt instead the emotionally androgynous power-woman---the wife whose worth is measured only by the degree of her self-ambition, the shape of her body, or her money-making skills?
Delightfully fresh and honest, Passionate Housewives Desperate for God debunks the modern 'desperate housewife' myth and provides fresh vision for the homemaker. Hear a former Christian feminist share how she went from a die-hard homemaker-in-training to a dedicated career woman, and then back again---after God gripped her heart. See the hollow counterfeit of whitewashed feminism and me-ology destroyed. And consider the beautiful picture painted in Scripture of the truly fulfilled homemaker who glories in the hopeful calling God created for her.
Pull up a chair, dust off the cookie crumbs, and join Jennie Chancey and Stacy McDonald as they they lay aside demeaning stereotypes like the 'Stepford wife,' and reveal the 1950s' 'perfect homemaker' trap. Laughter and tears will flow, and hopefully you will be infused with a renewed vision for victory as a wife and mother. Discover what it means to be a passionate housewife 'desperate' for God alone!
List Price: USD 16.00
Lowest Used Price: USD 6.38
Lowest New Price: USD 9.00
Great book!
Great book! Well worth the purchase!! I had not heard of these ladies before the purchase, but I'm glad that I bought it. Definitely helped me put being a homemaker into perspective.
The Ogre spits forth a Jewel
I was wired to be against this book from the get-go back in 2007. While I like Stacy Mcdonald, I'm loathe to cast even the most withering look on the Vision Forum, the uber-patriocentric group which touts her name around and published this book. When this apparent how-to for patriarchal wives came out from the VF's smirking anti-equality maw, I steered far away from it. Only after reading some exceptional excerpts did I buy it for myself and was surprisedly blessed.
The common sense, Scriptural application and encouragement are these book's greatest points: Stacy Mcdonald opens the first several chapters with challenging, edifying and lovely truths about the home and many women's hearts. Such topics as self-indulgement, sacrifice, work, children and God's provision are covered wonderfully; rather than brow-beats or guilt trips, Mcdonald was reasonable and realistic as well as empathetic in her approach. The first chapter, in fact, features a fictional story by her about a burdened wife (one of my favorite features by her is her great fictional writing). Jennie Chancey later picks up with writings of her own, far more succinct and smart than I'd expected. While Chancey and I disagree sharply on some matters and she's left me in the past wondering how on earth she came to her convictions, it seems the sum of what wisdom she possesses has culminated in this sharp and excellently to-the-point book; her chapters, too, were a delight to read and very accessible. Where I feared clouded and selective judgement, I usually received common sense and experience. Even the chapter on the "Stepford Husband", which I feared would resemble Doug Phillips' "Men rule or perish" diatribe, offered for the most part undeniable and observable truths about culture, men, and families.
I'm happy to say this book's good points overshadowed the few bad ones, at least for me. I've said from the beginning that Mcdonald would fare very well on her own apart from the Vision Forum. Nevertheless, both women are linked as solidly as flesh to the patriarch-reverencing VF and that link extends to this book. Usually I prefer to ignore this, but it can't be totally forgotten; the genetic code of such a glaringly faulty parent occasionally shows quite clearly in this book's bloodstream.
Let's begin with the chapter I knew from the beginning would be the most flawed: "Whitewashed Feminism". Or more clearly, the manual to knifing egalitarianism. When one of these patriarchal-ladies takes on egalitarianism, it's an almost remarkable thing to witness: their calm, earnest and lady-like tones never waver, but adopt a markedly dark and brooding tone, that of a mother gently frightening her children with horror tales of local crocodiles and how one must avoid them (or spear them, if one is clever). And indeed, Mcdonald's full of cautionary stories and predictions of what ANY desire for equality will do to a Christian woman, and how wicked and weak this desire is. She compares "whitewashed feminism" (aka Christian egalitarianism) to a filthy dog being cleaned and points out that cleaning a dog isn't baptising him because he is, after all, still a dog. In other words, defending your egalitarian beliefs and proving them valid with Biblical research and evidence won't change anything: they are still the wicked "dog"ma of hellhounds, and not even reading the Bible and proving them true will change that. It always irks complimentarians for Christian egalitarians to spread their truths, but nothing makes patriarchals more concerned for your soul than when you actually prove the source of those truths in the Bible.
Mcdonald goes all out to squash any hopes of tentative women considering egalitarianism who love God; not only can egalitarianism never be Christianized, but women simply can NOT be egalitarians and Christians at the same time. The two are mutually exclusive, according to Mcdonald; since egalitarianism is unequivocally the same as feminism (by her argument) it is therefore automatically unBiblical and something no Christian woman can touch without straying from her God and sullying herself. Not only that, but the reader is warned that just a dram of feminism can lead to a cauldron of poison. "No one can be 'sort of' feminist," she explains, "anymore than one can be 'sort of' pregnant. Once conceived, it is only a matter of time until the labor pains begin giving birth to rebellion against God's created order." It's assumed that the reader shares the extreme patriarchal beliefs of the authors as well as the stone-solid conviction that they're straight from God's lips and the only formula for Christianity. Mcdonald quotes Wayne Grudem, Elisabeth Elliot (from one of her worst works, some asinine wailing about the tragedy of women rejecting hierarchy) and some old fool Matthew Henry, who claimed Sarah was praised by God because she "obeyed" Abraham and celebrated his superiority over her, and that Dinah was raped because she wondered out from under male authority (yeah, THAT type of theologian). This sort of theology and the veiled, gently spoken threat that comes with it often makes me all the more grateful to God that I've come across the greatly superior, accurately researched Biblical blogs and books of the egalitarian nature that complimentarians warn women away from. Because of the wise men and women who taught me the truth, I never have to absorb the poisoned thorns of fleshly hierarchy, male-rule, and blatant self-contradictions within the "equal but lower" teachings which push women to a lower rung and ask us to celebrate it. It's just a shame such doctrine had to come packaged alongside the wisdom of this book.
Mrs. Chancey also generously contributes to the he-man philosophy, going a few steps further with the direct indication that women were created primarily to serve their males. Women have unique gifts, to be sure, Chancey says, but these gifts are tailor-made to help in whatever their future husband's work is; because of this fine arrangement by God, careers and jobs outside the home are unnecessary for women. While Chancey confirms that women have individual purposes, this is mentioned only briefly and over-shadowed by the idea that, rather than a husband and wife complimenting each other in their gifts in equal teamwork, marriage is about the wife completing the husband: the husband is the one with the vision, the leading goal, the true individual purpose, and the wife is meant to follow HIM and HIS goals. His goals are her goals, his work is her work, Chancey and Mcdonald say, but not in the team-sense; rather, in the "the husband has God's vision and the wife has to follow it" sense. This is the core reason why both these authors tell women to work only at home, "for your best friend": if you're not working to further hubby's every dream, you're working to further some other man's dream (assuming you'd have a boss and a male one at that) and this is unnatural!
I honestly didn't expect either author to fit so many patriarchal beliefs into this slim book, but they did their own Vision Forum male publishers proud; little tidbits of stuff like this are sprinkled throughout certain chapters, far more obvious after repeated readings. Chancey introduces it with a bang, telling the story of a young woman at her Bible study who said she'd like to get married one day, but only if her husband supported her in her calling; God gave her gifts she had to use and she couldn't let anyone stand in the way of that. Now, I don't see anything in those words of a dominating or emmasculating spirit; Chancey even said that her own husband encourages her in her writing gifts. Yet when this woman presented such common sense, Chancey and the other women were utterly dumbfounded. Chancey asked the other girls what they thought and now reports her relief that they immediately referred to Genesis for proof that a man's not made to be a woman's helper. Actually Mrs. Chancey, my idea of marriage always involved BOTH spouses helping each other in their dreams, visions and goals, not one trailing the other around the way these folks say the wife should do to the husband; everything they've announced wives should do in regards to their husbands has been far more severe than merely supporting them in their callings, as this woman wisely said she wished her husband to do for her. A wife's role as described in this book, being born to fit her husband's needs, sounds far more like a servant than the much revered "helper" anyway. One young ewe present at Chancey's Bible study declared that she couldn't respect a man who followed her around and said, "Whatever you want, dear." Who the devil said ANYTHING about wanting a man like that? The woman said she wanted a man to support her calling; how does this translate into feministic evil?? If this young smartie had fled the group, never to return, I wouldn't have blamed her.
Such eruptions of uber-patriarchal thinking crop up in different parts of this book. While most of the advice is geared towards encouraging wives as the book promises and offering them strong Biblical foundations and discipline, these interruptions in succinct logic and clear Biblical truth disturb me: if this book was meant mainly as a Biblical guide and encouragement for all wives, why the eruptions of uncommonly conservative (sometimes several pages long), solely patriarchal teaching? The chapter on the evils of all egalitarianism (namely the Biblical kind) came TOTALLY out of left field. Sharing the authors' convictions is one thing, but turning the book on its head, going from saying, "It's a great thing to be a wife" to saying "It's EVERY woman's role to be a NON-WORKING wife, and here's why" are two totally separate and by no means equally Biblically-supported things. I wish heavily that the authors had stuck to the former route; while I personally can ignore the twists on wife-hood and egalitarian convictions, I don't wish for other women to be poisoned with fear by them. Christ, not a list of rules for femininity, is our key to salvation and being secure in the faith as His followers.
In the chapter "The Way Out", Chancey shares her experience of going through a delusional anti-family time, convinced by her fellow college students to follow a career path and, for some mysterious reason, cut off family while she was at it. While I'd call this the idiocy of ignorant youth more than feminism, Chancey calls it the latter and shudders at the memory. This section of the book was more enjoyable than I expected and Chancey, if indeed the victim of some rotten branch of feminism, is more than justified in her horror at the behavior showed therein. The chapter discusses Chancey's experience and the coldly liberal college company she kept more than egalitarianism or any criticisms of it; only once is the egal-belief system mentioned. Before chronicling the spiritual dissoluteness of her classmates, Chancey briefly mentions her concern about a professor's "liberal" mindview: he thought women could teach and have authority over men. "I was flabbergasted," poor Chancey shares, "the Bible is crystal clear on this point. According to this professor's interpretation, Paul wasn't issuing a command at all in 1 Corinthians 14:34-35. Instead, he was quoting something the Corinthian men had said in order to refute it (i.e that women couldn't teach in church). I wondered why it had taken nearly two-thousand years for someone to figure that Paul meant the opposite of what he wrote, but I held my tongue...My professor had a doctorate. Maybe he knew something I didn't." Well, you're half-right Chancey: your professor did know something you didn't. What he said was exactly right and if anyone wishes a more lengthy explanation than Chancey's, I recommend you look into Dawn Wilson's painstaking translation of this Biblical passage in "Women, get in the Army of God." Oh and it didn't take two thousand years for scholars to figure this out; many of the early churches already knew the truth, but it takes longer than that for spiritual tyrants to relinquish control. I'd also suggest people look into Sarah Sumner's book "Men and Women in the Church", which mentions another problem occuring in colleges, the exact reverse of the one Chancey faced: women who go to college just to meet a man and make babies, babies, babies (not that I have a problem with babies, but isn't it your mind that college is supposed to make more fruitful?)
In one of the best chapters here, Chancey describes herself as a flawed ruby (referring to the Proverbs wife), and that's what I think this book is. Do I recommend it? Yes, with caution; it's blessed me, a starch egalitarian and single woman, and I believe it has something to offer every woman. This book is like a river, with nourishment to offer, so long as you don't step in one of the deep holes in the riverbed and injure a limb or drink the poison from the group who published it. Enjoy this jewel, just beware of the belligerent belly from which it sprang.
Encouraging Read!
I've always enjoyed being a stay at home mom but this book put it all in perspective and gave me a passion for my family and all the ways I can serve them for God's Glory! A must read for any Christian mother.
