Let Me Be a Woman
Preparing to interview Elisabeth Elliot's biographer, Lucy Austen
Your response to my last two posts on Christian publishing have continued to strangely encourage me, perhaps if only to remind me that while Christian book publishing remains a tricky business, there is much essay-writing I am ambitious to do. In fact, last week I had my first essay published with Mockingbird. It was a reminder to me of why I do this work. Writing helps me to name my reality and to enter into it more fully with hope and steadfast faith. I hope you’ll read “The Long Lent of Alzheimer’s” and share it with those you know who are walking this journey with a loved one.
If you’re a paid subscriber, I hope you’ll join me for this Wednesday’s hour-long conversation with Lucy Austen, author of Elisabeth Elliot: A Life. This live Zoom event will take place on 3/20 at 12 pm EST/9 am PST. (Login details will be shared in a separate post on Wednesday morning.) If you can’t make the live conversation, we will share the recording afterwards, so you can certainly listen to it later!
It was several years ago that my oldest daughter, home for Christmas after her first semester at college, asked me what it meant to be a “godly woman.” The hour was late, and we were lying on her bed together, staring up at the ceiling. I was short on answers then, despite having been on the “womanhood” job for more than a couple of decades and trying my darndest to add “godly” to the effort. All those years of marriage and raising little humans, all those years of navigating the tensions of domestic responsibility and creative, intellectual ambition and still I had nothing to say about my life as a woman?
I was wary to offer an understanding that made womanhood a fixed point in a turning world—to make it seem that there was one and only one way to live the creative life of godly womanhood. If there is anything I have grown more sure of over the years, it’s that creative is a word we should be using more to speak of the enterprise of living. We are made in the image of a Creator. Why should we believe anything less than this, that life, if it is to be beautifully poetic (see Ephesians 2:10), will also be necessarily inventive at times? Even applying the form of the sonnet to creative work, with its prescribed meter and lines, isn’t to diminish creativity but to enhance it. No two sonnets are alike, even for all their commonalities.
I imagined my daughter’s question emerging from the kinds of conversations I had with my own roommate at Wheaton College so many years ago, when we’d lain awake as freshmen mulling over the actual human beings our parents had become in the few short months we’d spent away from them. They—and their stories—took on flesh in the absence. As human beings, our parents became suddenly real and startlingly complicated. We analyzed their choices and vowed—for example—that we would not stoop to the kinds of pragmatic financial decisions our fathers had made, each of them taking up work to pay bills, not to satisfy the soul. Both of our mothers had worked, and this too had been financially necessary for each of our families. Did we have opinions about our mothers and their choices? If we did, I don’t remember them. Looking back, I can only see our grand and grossly naïve views of the world—as if money wasn’t the very thing paying our tuition bills. We imagined we would forge our way into adult life more imaginatively than our parents, and we had no worldly experience to suggest that bills might be a part of that enterprise.
My mother never talked about womanhood, godly or otherwise. I suspect she espoused, at least in principle, the traditional gender roles and responsibilities as defined by our church. She worked, which certainly seemed out of the norm compared to many other mothers in my church, but this wasn’t an expression of professional ambition or feminist conviction. This was to pay for soccer cleats and occasional vacations, to fund curtains and school fees and the tract home my parents proudly purchased on the outskirts of my Columbus suburb when I was fourteen. (For at least a year, we couldn’t afford grass in the backyard, only the poured concrete stoop and wooden steps that opened onto mud when it rained.) My mother was no idealogue, and on the rare occasion she spoke about womanhood as it related to work, she reminded me that when she graduated from high school in 1963, there were few options available to her. She could be a nurse, a teacher, or a secretary. She could also be a wife and mother. That, of course, was the “godly” in womanhood.
I’m thinking of “godly womanhood” in large part because I’ve been rereading Lucy Austen’s biography, Elisabeth Elliot: A Life, in preparation for my conversation with the author this Wednesday. After my daughter’s question, several years ago, about being a “godly woman,” I must admit it was the thin purple spine of Elliot’s Let Me Be a Woman that I pulled down from my bookshelf. I was pretty sure I didn’t share many of Elliot’s convictions, but I was certainly curious how she had shaped an understanding of womanhood for her own daughter on the eve of her wedding. “Notes,” Elliot called those reflections compiled for a book. I found that a disingenuous description for the theological work the book attempts, in laying out these “great eternal principles that distinguish men from women.”
A compelling aspect of Elliot’s work—and one reason she had such influence over me as a young woman—was her obvious desire to ground her thinking biblically and theologically, beyond her own intuitions and easy judgments. Elliot was, especially in her early years, a rigorous thinker. She was a woman in conversation with other texts and writers, religious and irreligious. This isn’t to say that many of her ideas weren’t historically conditioned and oftentimes problematic. They were—and this seems only to underscore the point that we can’t think beyond our historical moment. There are assumptions we take for granted, and because we can’t see them, we don’t know how to interrogate them.
This was certainly true for Elliot, especially as a woman who came of age before second-wave feminism. (She and Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique, were effectively contemporaries. Friedan was born in 1921—Elliot, in 1926. Friedan graduated from Smith in 1942—Elliot, from Wheaton, in 1946. Both women pre-dated the phenomenon that Friedan was documenting in her book when, post WWII, college graduation rates for women fell drastically along with the average marriageable age for women.) Elliot seems now to have gotten a lot wrong about godly womanhood and marriage and family (Friedan did, too)—most obviously because those ideas bore rotten fruit in her troubled third marriage to Lars Gren. I’m deeply grieved for the ways her contorted theology led her into an unwise third marriage and sustained her commitment to that marriage, despite an apparent intervention staged by her family. There is much more that I might write now about the way I’m wrestling with her legacy, but this letter is already overdue. Suffice it to say that I hope you’ll join me as I talk more about Elliot’s life and legacy with her biographer, Lucy Austen, this Wednesday at 12pm EST/ 9am PST. Login details will be sent to paid subscribers on Wednesday morning!
P.S.
If you were interested to join me and Abby Murrish on April 10th for a Rule of Life Workshop for Writers in Grand Rapids, registration is unfortunately now closed. If you’d like to be put on the waitlist in case of a cancellation, feel free to email me: jen@jenpollockmichel.com.
I can’t attend at noon this Wednesday, so I appreciate your making a video available later. Please let your readers know. I have read both Ellen Vaughn’s and Lucy Austin’s and am glad to have both, as each author brought something different to EE’s story.
I’m curious as to why you chose to interview or use Lucy’s biography as opposed to the authorized version just published by Ellen Vaughn, which at least had much more access to Elisabeth’s journals and letters and still presents a nuanced view of the end of her life.