One woman escaped the “Quiverfull” nightmare. First she entered the trap –
I remarried, found a “bible-believing” church, and worked hard
within the Quiverfull counterculture to implement the best of the best biblical
family values into our home life. I had six more children. I homebirthed,
homeschooled, and home-churched. I submitted to my husband and joyfully
sacrificed my time, energy and talents to build him up and help him to succeed.
I published a “pro-life, pro-family” Christian family newspaper to inform and
encourage other Christians to defend “Traditional Family Values.”In 2003, we were honored as Family of the Year at the Nebraska Family
Council’s “Salt & Light” awards.
Then she noticed how bad it was –
…perpetual pregnancies destroyed my health, and my indiscriminate acquiescence to my husband’s every whim transformed him from a loving father into a tantrum-throwing tyrant. Burnout and disillusionment led to abuse, neglect, family disintegration and a particularly nasty divorce.
And then she got out, and stopped quivering.
I used to read No Longer Quivering on a regular basis, but became completely overwhelmed by the huge number of screwed up stories women were sharing on there.
That, and the forums can be a bit frustrating to an atheist
What Jadehawk said. Some things, even fiction films, can be a bit too overwhelmingly disturbing for me.
Good to know that one more woman is no longer quivering. She seems an insightful writer.
Yes. I look at it all and want to read…and also don’t.
I’m glad she’s telling her story. People who are in it need to be able to see how terrible and controlling the men who are soaked in the movement are when they don’t get their way and the mask is ripped off.
*note: I think many of those men would have been good people if they hadn’t been raised and steeped in that environment, but the end result of being raised that way as a man is that you think everything must be according to their own wishes.
It looks like there’s a lot of good information to read on that website about the horror of being inside the movement, but there’s a technical glitch that prevents me from doing so. The “no longer quivering” website has bad HTML that hides the last few words of each line behind other stuff so you can’t read it no matter how much you resize and stretch the window.
For example the first paragraph I read looks like this:
I fled to the farm where I grew up and spent several weeks just trying to get the fuzz o [cut]
the doctor, who diagnosed Abi with failure to thrive. I supplemented her with formul [cut]
breastfeed, because for once I had the luxury of breastfeeding by my own lights, and I in [cut]
moved six kids, 9 years old and under [ etc..... ]
Have other people had this problem, or is it just my browser? I know the text is *there* because I can look at the raw page source and sort of read it that way, but it’s very time consuming.
Anyway, I am glad she got out of that mess, and more importantly, also escaped the common tactic of a cult in which people who “lapse” are pre-programmed to blame themselves for it. It’s a good measure of her character and resliance that she busted through that indoctrination, and defiantly so. I hope her stories are spread wide as a warning about the true goals of the quiverfull cult, and I am glad to find she found a good restart to her life. It’s a hard thing to have to do later in life to reboot everything and make new friends and move in new social circles completely apart from all family contact.
Steven – I get that problem on the front page, but if I click on a particular article then it’s readable. Did you try that? (Sorry, I must not have noticed it the other day.)
Ah – Vyckie is aware of the cut off text problem, which is new, and says it is just the front page.
http://nolongerquivering.com/2011/08/29/tea-party-family-values-and-the-worlds-greatest-freak-show/comment-page-1/#comment-11658
Hooray – I got that glitch fixed. The cut off happened when I used that picture of the Bates family which was too wide to fit the page. Thankfully, a tech saavy reader at NLQ figured it out and sent me instructions on how to take care of the problem.
Thanks for reading. 🙂
Vickis blog has helped me a great deal, since coming out of the “movement” with my husband and 5 kids. I think all who felt hopeless will find encouragement reading the stories from the women there!
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