Credit: The Nation.
hen Ruth was 21, she put on a wedding dress; it was high time, her parents and everyone else around her had said, for her to be married.
Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Ruth (a pseudonym to protect a victim of abuse) had been told over and over what it meant to be a woman—and marriage was at the center of it all. In Sunday school and Bible study, she had been taught that a wife’s role is to be submissive and accept her husband’s headship. Women were not allowed to address the congregation at her church. The faith she had grown up in was a “dark and bloody” one, she told me; in her Sunday school lessons, she had been taught to expect an imminent apocalypse that would annihilate the faithless and wreak vengeance on God’s foes.
In her community, dating was forbidden before the age of 16; at that point, young congregants […]
The article was so demeaning toward women that I couldn’t finish it! It is so backward and archaic and it’s astonishing that women today are following it. Sad, but that’s a choice they have made.
I watched this happening in earnest starting in the early eighties. This thinking caused problems for those hearing it and the people preaching it. I have not heard any of them outright blame the indoctination. The sad thing is that many people caught up in this are frequently victims of abuse themselves. They somehow think there is redemption for their lack of self worth. Research supports this.