Stephanie Gordon, Catholic wife and mother, self-proclaimed retrograde, has launched her writing career—excuse us, written a book with the express permission of her benevolent husband. “Ask Your Husband” is now in print. While Gordon’s Twitter account of yesteryear with the handle “AskYourHusband” was a fun foray into the mind of fascinating woman, the book seems less appealing. At turns the Twitter account displayed on the one hand blazing bursts of retrograde red pills thrown down by a woman who spends her days with the bro truth-dealer Timothy Gordon and on the other hand twinkle light snapshots of embroidery by an ostensibly very happy housewife. This was great. And it also had the benefit of being free of charge.
We can safely surmise that Mr. Gordon revoked his wife’s twittering privileges and the world is the poorer for it. As interesting as the defunct Twitter account was, this author does not care to pay for a 340-page book of “Ask Your Husband.” And there’s little indication that the book includes snapshots of embroidery.
What “Ask Your Husband” Misses
All that to say, the book is out and causing a subtle stir among Catholic wives who feel at times both convicted by the exhortation to be obedient to their husbands and repulsion at the strictures put forward by Gordon. Abigail Favale offers some helpful context and critique of the book. Especially helpful is Favale’s inclusion of the illuminating writings of Edith Stein.
Rich and enlightening, Stein’s essays show how fixated and narrow we have become. If womanhood is a full nature, there are many arenas in which a woman can be fully herself. Instead of trying to condemn all women who are medical doctors, we can give women the liberty to become medical doctors—or just about anything else insofar as there is not an inherent contradiction with her nature as a woman. Stein makes the point that a woman doctor will be different from a male doctor. That’s not to say that there should not be female physicians or to say that there are not serious challenges to integrating the rigors of a career in medicine with the maternal experience of most women. Based on the reviews, it seems Gordon’s book does not include such nuanced questions as this. It’s “stay within the walls of your husband’s house” or bust!
The Impulse Toward Fanaticism
All jesting aside, there is an understandable and good urge behind Gordon’s fanatical position. As Favale rightly assesses, Gordon’s book seems to be “an earnest attempt to respond to some real problems in our culture, ones that plague many marriages.” Here, Favale understates the problem. It is not merely that there are some bad ideas out there that sometimes upset some marriages. The very fabric of our civic order seems to have been contrived to make women miserable. In most educational contexts in affluent areas, girls are drilled from an early age to accept that everything will be denied them on account of their sex. Paradoxically, in classrooms in which girls excel and are headed for colleges that are predominantly female, children are taught that the patriarchy is oppressing women.
The relentless drumbeat of victimized women everywhere and always (no mention of the millennia of poor men who bore the brunt of war, famine, and the dangerous work of building civilization) launches women into the world with a distorted view. Such women are rendered all but incapable of civil relations with the men they choose to marry. Despite choosing to marry these men, they are convinced of perpetual victimhood. Every infraction, however minor, is often taken as assertion of the patriarchy. A diaper unchanged, a dish unwashed, a moment of lapsed judgement: all demonstrations of man’s inexcusable selfishness contrasted with women’s unending gift of self to the world. Women rarely feel compelled to better themselves while demanding constant displays of fealty from the men around them. Withholding affection, threatening him with “counseling,” micromanaging. These are the all-too-common hallmarks of an emerging and angry matriarchy convinced of its own righteousness. “If you can’t handle me at my worst, you don’t deserve me at my best” is the general feeling underlying many women’s utter incivility.
As an aside, in this harsh and demanding tone average women have a lot in common with Gordon’s style. As one reader noted, incredibly the guide for submissive wives is written in a tone of ridicule and scorn, in other words anything but feminine. Why does that matter? According to this reviewer, “If I were to proclaim myself a lady (which this author does) and then constantly mocked my opponents and blew over arguments by calling people illogical, I am actually not embracing my feminine strengths but adopting the ever-cringe-worthy ‘bro-girl’ blows.” Touché.
But back to the main subject at hand: women who find themselves unhappy. Many mothers seem shocked to discover the inequity of childbearing, the weight of maternal instincts, and the fact that men are not equipped to function as an extension of a woman’s being, washing the dishes just as she would, offering a consoling ear whenever the kids are acting up. In other words, our culture has set women up to fail when it comes to happiness in marriage.
In such a context of insanity, it is understandable that many women seeking to follow Christ and his Church feel an attraction to Gordon’s brand of submissiveness. As one young man observed of his colleague’s “trad” wife: she seems to think she exists to make babies and keep the home. It is a simple assignment with more than enough to keep most people busy. Clumsy and lacking nuance, to be sure, but clarifying for all parties involved as far as the division of labor and recognition of real differences between husbands and wives. It is, despite what some alarmist will tell you, a good starting place for many people.
Growing in Femininity and What Obedience Means
Watching women attempt hardline wifely obedience is a bit like watching an insecure mother trying to control a young toddler. Taking the idea of a child’s obedience seriously but lacking all cultural context and life experience for understanding what that actually looks like, a young mother may be seen insisting with growing irritation that her one-year-old refrain from chewing a simple children’s toy at a friend’s house. Never mind that the child is so young as to lack the requisite self-control for that. Never mind that the self-same toy has spent part of every day in someone’s mouth in the house and the host insists, “It’s fine, he can put that in his mouth.” The insecure and inexperienced mother demands an exacting and uncompromising obedience.
Something similar happens in many marriages. A husband and wife of average gifts and abilities attempt to form a coherent family unit. The wife has likely been trained to behave like a rabid dog in relation to other people: resist any form of restraint. This makes family harmony very difficult. Add to that the waves of maternal instincts that may flood a woman on the birth of a child and the pressure to secure adequate resources for said child, and the wife may be blindsided by an emerging realization that values instilled in her upbringing are opposed to the good of her family. In reaction to this, she may take on an exaggerated degree of subservience to her husband.
The hope for the controlling mother and the theatrically submissive wife is time and experience. The experience of more reality through lived experience may soften the rough edges and create a more human dynamic. Her husband is, after all, a mere man who needs good counsel, encouragement, and companionship; he is not merely an exacting head of state.
In John 2:5, Mary tells the servants at the wedding feast, “Do whatever He tells you.” She was not speaking of their husbands, but of Christ. It is so stunningly simple, and yet in our lived experience we find that obedience is not as simple as doing what someone else says. Obedience requires the alignment of one’s will with the will of one who has authority and desires your good. A Christian husband has legitimate authority and wills the good of his wife. She is therefore called to seek understanding, provide counsel, and submit her will to his, not as a child would but as an assistant of equal dignity, complementary abilities, and ordinary human frailty.
It is understandable that many holy women may go through a phase of being inordinately submissive to a mere man who likely has as little understanding of full-fledged masculinity as she has of femininity. The marriage relationship, a sacred bond of love and trust, should grow beyond the demand of submission into a flowering of mutual respect and continual challenge to individual excellence. But it has to start somewhere. If you had an “Ask Your Husband” phase or you know someone who has, it can be a sign of growth and movement toward health. The key is to continue growing, pressing on to the end of the race, having the humility to change our mind.
There is a path forward. If narrow-minded how-to’s are unlikely to enlighten, what is the alternative?
The Alternative to “Ask Your Husband” Legalism
There are few areas of our daily life as post-moderns in which we can say with a sense of confidence, “This is the way we have always done things.” We are now doing by conscious choice what were once patterns of behavior, tapestries of meaning beyond what most people realized even as they were living them out. In such a befuddling world with so little received directly from generations before us, getting caught up on the nitty-gritty as a starting place for the meaning of femininity seems prone to error. Beginning with prohibitions against any work outside the home for women is not only unsound but also unhelpful. Begin with joy.
Spend less time crouched over a glowing screen on Twitter (props to T. Gordon for booting his wife from that hellscape). Spend less time “arguing” through a volley of trite phrases and memes. Spend more time cooking food. Eat that food with other people: real and alive. Spend more time reading books. Having read a full-length story or argument, discuss it with people. Clearly, there is plenty to discuss in “Ask Your Husband” if you really want to! Spend more time listening to music. Once enjoyed enough, that music may overflow into our own voices united with the voices of other real people.
In this fertile ground for intimacy in all its many forms, people will discover scraps of wisdom, glowing embers among the ashes of families rent by divorce and disease. Many mothers discover through caring for children and home a full and rich understanding of femininity denied them by their truncated education. A blossoming understanding of what it means to be a woman will lead many mothers to choose a life opposed to mainstream careers, secular financial principles, and radical individualism. You don’t have to meme people into a belief that this is good for them and their families. You can invite them into full freedom and let them discern the particulars for themselves.
