Will Biblical Womanhood Box You In or Set You Free?
Cleveland, Tennessee, is deep in evangelical country. It’s the home of the Church of God, a major Pentecostal denomination, and not too far from the town where prosecutors went after a schoolteacher on charges of teaching evolution during the Scopes “monkey trial” a hundred years ago. Still, even there, in the reddest part of red America, the girlboss has infiltrated.
Emma Waters was a senior at Lee University, a Christian school in Cleveland, when the girlboss struck. Waters was close to achieving her dreams. She had piled up academic honors, and she was planning a move to Washington, D.C. But there was an obstacle: her boyfriend, Jack, had started talking about marriage. “The idea of beginning life as a wife and mother felt like a major letdown after years of working hard in college to prepare for a career in politics,” she writes in a new book, “Lead Like Jael” (Regnery). “Somehow, I had gotten this idea that prioritizing marriage and children earlier in life is what you do if you lack ambition.” There it was, creeping in: the girlboss world view, in which the best kind of life is one you define for yourself. She broke up with Jack.
Not to spoil the story, but: she regretted it. She turned to the Bible. She realized that her thinking on marriage and motherhood had been “self-centered,” focussed only on what she wanted and would have to sacrifice. He took her back, and they got married. Today, he’s in seminary, and, at twenty-eight, she’s got two daughters and another baby on the way—along with a job as a policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, which she does in the early mornings and at night while her kids are asleep.
Discover notable new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
The premise of “Lead Like Jael” is that young women have been offered a shallow vision of the good life, one in which academic achievement and professional success are the only markers of worth. What’s perhaps more unusual for someone coming out of Waters’s conservative milieu is that she also warns women against adopting a competing life script: that of the trad wives, a highly online ecosystem of women who revel in domesticity, wearing prairie dresses while baking sourdough with babies on their hips. “It is a mistake to treat the tradwife as the antidote to the girl boss,” Waters writes. “The temptation to curate a life rather than live it is strong.”
Her proposal is something of a middle path: women should recognize that there are seasons of life with different demands, and see their roles as wives and mothers not as a retreat from work but as a chance to build a foundation. She tells young women to stop scrolling, to date seriously, to treat sex as sacred, and to resist elevating career over everything else. She argues that mothers should stay home with children under three, suggesting that these kids need to be around their moms full time to form secure attachments. She envisions husbands and wives as “battle-mates,” and encourages women to commit to hosting regular meals to build community.
Her model for all this, incredibly, is the Biblical heroine Jael, famous for luring the Canaanite commander Sisera to her tent, plying him with milk curds, and driving a tent peg through his temple. Jael was able to take such decisive action, Waters argues, precisely because she owned the sphere of her home. Jael wasn’t a “social justice warrior” who was trying to “break a tent-canvas ceiling”; instead, she was able to use her “distinctly feminine means” to take her place in history.
Waters’s book is aimed at Christian women who are looking for guidance on how to navigate their seasons faithfully. But she’s writing into a moment of wider exhaustion and uncertainty about the models of a good life on offer. Theology aside, the concept in her book that might be most foreign to someone outside of her world is that of authority: the notion that getting married and having kids is a matter not just of personal preference but of finding the conviction to live a life that is ordained by God. “Motherhood is a path of surrender and trust rather than a project of control,” Waters writes. Fighting the obligations of motherhood leads to misery. Waters describes the unpleasant hustle of the working mom, who “juggled deadlines and daycare pickups,” who “ate a rushed lunch at her desk while drafting presentations no one would remember,” who Zoomed while folding laundry, who lay in bed at night scrolling “through pictures of the kids she barely saw that week.” It’s no wonder that the kind of life Waters is proposing—strong marriage, more time with children, tight-knit community—would take on a subversive allure.
Bible-based advice for women is an old and popular genre, and many books follow a format similar to Waters’s: Old Testament heroines—Esther, Sarah, Deborah—offering lessons in wisdom and discernment to modern women, particularly in their roles as wives and mothers. The genre has produced huge celebrities in evangelical circles—Beth Moore, Priscilla Shirer—along with a few who have broken containment, like Jen Hatmaker.
Twenty years ago, Hatmaker was much like Waters: a young pastor’s wife raising three little kids while writing her first books on Biblical wisdom for Christian women. She practiced the same schedule sorcery as Waters, writing from 8:15 A.M. to 12:15 P.M., three days a week, plus occasionally during nap time. In “Make Over,” from 2007, she seeks to help overwhelmed women find their balance: “If the Lord created a woman to be a servant of God, a wife, a mother, a professional, and a friend—not forgetting that she is still a daughter—then there is a way to be that woman.” In “Ms. Understood,” published a year later, she distances herself from feminism—“this is no battle cry for independence, because men are our beloved allies”—and carefully circumscribes her mission. “On behalf of my generation, I believe we’re pursuing center,” she writes. “We recognize the oppression of being subservient male accessories as well as the danger of turning into contentious, genderless semi-females.” Same polemic, just with Bush-era archetypes.
Not long after these books appeared, however, Hatmaker’s career took an unexpected turn. She had begun straining against the boundaries of the Southern Baptist subculture she came up in, in which women teachers were relegated to small groups and sidebars. She and her husband left their church to co-found “one centered around the marginalized.” She started tossing around words like “patriarchy” and “white supremacy.” In 2016, she gave an interview in which she said she would gladly officiate a gay marriage. The backlash was swift: books pulled off shelves, speaking engagements cancelled. For four years, she slowly built back her brand—still the advice-giving Christian sister, just a little libbed out. But, in 2020, the final, irredeemable break came: she filed for divorce.
In a memoir from this fall, “Awake” (Avid Reader), Hatmaker writes of how she discovered that her husband, whom she had met and married while they were both students at the same Southern Baptist college, had been drinking, lying, and cheating. “Out of a dead sleep, I hear five whispered words not meant for me: ‘I just can’t quit you.’ My husband of twenty-six years is voice-texting his girlfriend next to me in our bed.” Hatmaker, who is now fifty-one, had spent years coaching women on marriage: “Sweet Friend, if your marriage has suffered a catastrophic blow, I beg you, seek Christian counseling,” she wrote in her early thirties. “I know it would cost your pride, your controlled image, to seek help, but is that worse than a destroyed marriage? A family in crisis? A lifetime of loneliness?” And yet, when the catastrophic blow finally came for her, she knew to call it. Within thirty-six hours of her middle-of-the-night discovery, she was talking to a lawyer.
Whatever evolution Hatmaker went through in the heady years around Donald Trump’s first Presidency, it was nothing compared with the wreckage at home. She sees her failed marriage not just as a specific relationship gone bad but as a casualty of rigid Christian purity culture that taught her to keep herself small and to idolize early marriage as the ultimate achievement. “The community that raised me placed little premium on healthy young evolution,” she writes in “Awake.” Her husband entered ministry soon after graduation, a choice she seems to look back on with both regret and tenderness. “What if that boy splinters inside hierarchical leadership, and that girl is actually powerful?” she writes. “The patriarchy failed him too.” She is scathing about “biblical rules” that “felt terrible”; for example, that women should “spiritually and socially submit to men” and that queer people should be shamed. “Some combination of patriarchy plus religion, gender roles plus groupthink, power plus the threat of exclusion became the soil in which my marriage ultimately died,” she writes. She stopped going to church, convinced that “the fruit of these trees was rotten. Not one bad apple, not one questionable limb; rotten to the roots.” Her career has been huge—five Times best-sellers, an HGTV show, more than half a million Instagram followers—but she concluded it wasn’t possible to continue within the constraints of traditional Christian womanhood.
Many evangelicals of Hatmaker’s generation have travelled the same path of pointed questioning—not just about specific verses or churches but about their whole cultural milieu. The phenomenon is so common that defectors have repurposed the term “deconstruction” for it, as in “I’m deconstructing the deeply patriarchal views that evangelicalism taught me.” Of the five prominent Christian female writers whom Hatmaker counts as among her closest online friends, two got divorced around the same time that she did, each from a pastor she had married young. The scripts Hatmaker seems most interested in these days don’t come from the Bible. They come from within. In “Awake,” she lightly auditions new paradigms for sisterly guidance: learn to self-mother; listen to your body; trust your intuition as the greatest source of truth. Your authority is yourself. Her early books are no longer on her website.
It would be tidy to situate Waters and Hatmaker as two points on an inevitable arc: when you’re young, you reach for clear answers, but once you’re older and you’ve been through some shit, you’ll realize it was all lies. However much the young Hatmaker had in common with Waters, though, their lives seem likely to trace two very different arcs—ones instructive about both American Christianity and the wider debate over what a good life looks like for women.
For one thing, Hatmaker came of age during what was arguably the peak of evangelicalism in the United States. Some of the most iconic evangelical cultural artifacts, like the apocalyptic “Left Behind” series, came out of the nineties. Evangelicals got George W. Bush elected in 2000. The Southern Baptist Convention, the largest single Protestant denomination, reached its highest membership levels around the beginning of the twenty-first century. For Hatmaker, the act of deconstructing religious life and its wholesome images of marriage and motherhood was not primarily about doubting the Bible. It was about fighting back against a powerful cultural force.
By contrast, Waters is starting her career at a time when Christianity is no longer as dominant in America. After years of marked decline, the percentage of Americans who identify as Christian has levelled off. It would seem that the faith went through something of a sloughing-off period; people who once might have identified as nominal Christians are no longer bothering. Her call to put home life first and to let career follow can feel genuinely countercultural, because she is writing from within a counterculture.
Waters’s work is also distinctly political in a way that the young Hatmaker’s wasn’t. In addition to Biblical heroines like Jael, she points to contemporary models of family wisdom, most often right-wing influencers: Tiffany Justice, who co-founded the activist group Moms for Liberty, or Charlie Kirk. Waters’s experience of getting married and having kids, especially so young, is itself polarized. Counties with higher total fertility rates were more likely to go for Trump in 2024. Conservative women between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five are much more likely to be married than their liberal counterparts, and thirty percentage points more likely to have children, according to the Institute for Family Studies; in the eighties, that gap was only five percentage points. Waters is part of an emerging cohort of Gen Z writers trying to reclaim female empowerment for young women who are both religious and conservative. Just as evangelical deconstruction became its own subculture, which Hatmaker helped define, these new, young, family-oriented religious conservatives seem to be forging a potent subculture of their own.
One notable matriarch mentioned in Waters’s book is Phyllis Schlafly. The conservative activist had six children before gaining prominence in the early nineteen-seventies as the chief opponent of the Equal Rights Amendment. Waters expresses admiration for Schlafly’s life. “She didn’t win by acting like a man. She didn’t abandon her home, her femininity, or her faith. She led through them,” Waters writes. “She understood how to use the tools God had given her.” Schlafly also had a distinctive ability to drive feminists crazy. During one debate, the feminist activist Betty Friedan called Schlafly a witch, adding, “I’d like to burn you at the stake.” The reason that Schlafly was so crazy-making is fairly straightforward: while Schlafly was railing against the dangers of feminism, feminists were busy passing laws letting women open credit cards, protecting girls’ and women’s sports, and preventing employers from firing women for getting pregnant. These achievements are so far in the rearview mirror of the feminist culture wars that they may be easy to forget, but Waters and her cohort no doubt benefit from them.
At the same time, feminists have never quite known what to do with women like Schlafly or Waters, or, for that matter, with Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erika, other than calling them hypocrites for having big careers while singing the virtues of staying home. That kind of dismissal misses something important about the project that Waters is pursuing. She’s writing about women who find freedom in the constraints of motherhood and marriage, and insisting that there’s room for them to nurture both professional ambitions and a traditional home life, if not necessarily at the same time. Hatmaker felt small in her conservative world, but Waters doesn’t feel small in hers; instead, she feels relief from the relentless pressure to lean in. She doesn’t experience motherhood and marriage as a millstone she must bear on the way to career success, or as a source of ambivalence about her identity. She appears to be at peace in the conviction that she was made for both.
Jael is a sly choice of hero for Waters, because she’s so easy to cast as a girlboss. After all, it takes real determination to drive a tent peg through a man’s skull. But nobody owns Jael, and women don’t have to fit a feminist frame to be powerful. Waters is lucky enough to be a young woman in a world where she can freely choose her remix of a traditional life. The tent peg is in her hands now. ♦