i couldn't get through the whole article

it was far too hard for me to stomach. yes, i'm that sensitive. but if you can handle stories where it's a woman's fault she gets beaten BECAUSE SHE HASN'T SUBMITTED ENOUGH TO HER HUSBAND, well then this is for you!

if you can handle stories about people who believe women are no more than baby making, cooking, cleaning and fuck toys, well then this article is for you (there is NO such thing as saying NO to your husband!)

(the article IS written from a point of view similar to mine. i still couldn't finish it though. it really WAS making me rage)

The Purpose-Driven Wife
Teaching women to submit to their husbands, for the love of Christ.
—By Kathryn Joyce
i first encounter "teacher and exhorter" Martha Peace at a Sunday-school hall on the campus of the First Baptist Church of Jonesboro, an 8,000-person megachurch in this verdant Atlanta suburb. Spacious enough to host its own congregation, the hall is flanked by ebroidered banners bearing shields, birds, and crowns. The evening's emcee, Leanne, a peppy blonde with frosty blue eye shadow, says they represent the virtues of the nearly 120 women who came to see Peace speak as part of the church's "Women of Purpose" series. As daughters of the king of kings, Leanne explains, all Christian women wear crowns. But with that honor comes a mandate to apply their faith at home.

Peace is here to help. Over the past two decades, the 62-year-old Georgia native and former nurse has written five books on biblical womanhood, conservative Christianity's answer to the women's movement. Among them are The Excellent Wife, now a classic in this burgeoning niche, and Damsels in Distress, a set of biblical solutions to female problems ranging from pms to depression to "feminist tendencies." ............

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good spousekeeping

Martha Peace on how to be the wife God intended

• On feminism: "Instead of dwelling on what I think I deserve, I should be thinking that I am to serve the Lord graciously, however He chooses."
• On widowhood: "Younger widows are to remarry rather than have idle time to gossip."
• On extramarital friendships: "Turn from wrong thinking about the other person to right thinking about God and your responsibility to honor and worship Him."
• On pms: "Lord, forgive me for maligning You. Instead, use me for your glory however you choose. If the pms symptoms have to continue, they'll just have to continue."
• On vanity: "Beauty is one of the ways the adulteress draws her prey...[but] it is all right to have some external adornment, because stripping oneself of all makeup and wearing only plain, drab clothing does not make a woman more pleasing to God.".....................

two of my favorite subjects

and by favorite, i mean two that make me spew deadly flames from my mouth, ears, eyes and nose

evangelicals (of ANY type of religion. this story happens to be about christians but it doesn't matter to me. they're ALL alike) and women as second class citizens (i.e. submitting to their man. i.e. not being worth anything without a man. i.e. keeping your mouth shut and your brain turned off)

Women's 'Liberation' Through Submission: An Evangelical Anti-Feminism Is Born
By Kathryn Joyce, Religion Dispatches.
This October, more than 6,000 women gathered in Chicago for the True Woman Conference ’08: a stadium-style event to promote what its proponents call “biblical womanhood,” “complementarianism,” or -- most bluntly -- “the patriarchy movement.”

Women gathering to support the patriarchy movement? It’s evangelical counterculture at its most contrarian.

The Associated Baptist Press explains the relationship of biblical womanhood to feminism, highlighting an ambitious initiative that arose from the meeting: a signature drive seeking 100,000 women to endorse its “True Woman Manifesto,” which, the ABP writes, aims “at sparking a counterrevolution to the feminist movement of the 1960s.”

To outside observers of the patriarchy movement, the starkness of the calls for gender hierarchy often seem amusingly outdated (not to mention historically misleading: feminist blogs Feministing and Pandagon have deftly dismantled some of the speakers’ Leave it to Beaver idealizations of the 1950s as a time when women were universally protected).............