But coincidentally, the book arrives at a moment when the trappings of the hyper-patriarchal, anti-modernity lifestyle hold cultural power, too. A Well-Trained Wife offers a glimpse of the less wholesome aspects of households where wives submit to their husbands, reminding readers that while spending their days growing their own food, birthing their babies at home and serving their husbands are all perfectly valid choices for women, behind closed doors, those living the offline, religious version of the tradwife life may not be offered a choice at all.
A Well-Trained Wife effectively establishes how extreme religions so wholly indoctrinate their followers: by isolating them early. Born in the mid-’70s and brought up attending a Baptist church in Jacksonville, Florida, Levings was taught to mistrust the outside world, with its abundance of information and technology. Cancer, church leaders told her, was a punishment for the sins of humans; the 1986 Challenger space shuttle explosion was the natural consequence of “scientists playing God”; the United Nations was already plotting a future one-world government that would arrest and torture people left behind in the Rapture.
Levings was also told from an early age that her best route to salvation was through marriage and cultivating a home. “At 14, my job was to prepare to be a Christian wife and mother,” she writes. In the first few chapters, a blossoming passion for art is discarded as a distraction from the path to glorifying God, and a brief consideration of Bible college ends when her church’s pastor, known for helping young congregants get into Liberty University, informs her that the church uses its dollars only “to assist men called into the ministry”.
Instead, Levings married, at age 19. Shortly before the wedding, Allan, her devout 21-year-old groom, abruptly forbade her from seeing her best friend, an ex-Christian gay man, and soon after it, Levings recalls, Allan replaced affection with quick, random, violent sex and physical punishments when Levings failed to please or obey him.
It is Allan’s seemingly insatiable thirst for ever-stricter ideologies and schools of Christian thought that gives A Well-Trained Wife its momentum. Levings describes Allan’s escalation from one strict congregation to another, like an addict perpetually seeking a hit of stronger and stronger stuff, culminating in a hyper-conservative fundamentalist church in Tennessee. Levings recalls wearing a head covering for modesty at the urging of Allan, whom she was to refer to as “my lord”; submitting to discipline spankings; and, at the command of church elders, moving her flock of four home-schooled kids to a dangerously isolated mountain community.
Levings gets a brief respite from Allan’s controlling behaviours after she persuades him to try the more egalitarian Orthodox church. Allan’s worsening alcoholism ends it. Notably, of all the aforementioned misdeeds, only his alcoholism is condemned by the church; Levings’s only attempt to alert church elders to the abuse within her home, she writes, was met with an admonishment for not submitting enough.
At a critical juncture, Levings recalls learning about the Duggars - the Arkansas family at the centre of reality TV show 19 Kids and Counting.
Leafing through a parenting magazine, Levings writes, she stopped short when she recognised matriarch Michelle Duggar’s dress habits and her family chore chart, adapted from the teachings of Bill Gothard, which she and Allan had once followed. Already feeling faint stirrings of doubt about her community’s way of life, Levings was perturbed by the apparently glowing secular response to their quaint, small-town home life.
“If Gothard-life was going to be featured in the mainstream, what about the secrets we kept? The way [Christian parenting authors Michael and Debi] Pearl recommended spanking babies and the way women couldn’t vote?” she writes. “What would happen when the readers of Parents found out women had to obey and that we didn’t vaccinate our kids?”
Though Levings’s insights predate mainstream fascination with the tradwife, her sentiments are applicable all the same. From the outside, the homespun trappings of ultratraditional life can seem charming. But the inner workings of any given household might tell a much more frightening story. “It bothered me how fundamentalism simply flew under the radar for fans, sucking them into the pretty ideals,” Levings writes. “What happened to me was neither sweet nor wholesome.”
Eventually, it dawned on Levings: only she could stop her sons from growing up to be like their father, and only she could stop her daughters’ adulthoods from looking like her own. Over several gripping pages, she recounts her harrowingly narrow escape from the family home with her children; there’s genuine suspense in the telling.
But it’s in the denouement of A Well-Trained Wife where Levings fully, and elegantly, reckons with what trying to live life as a perfect “Proverbs 31 woman” - a diligent, dutiful, selfless wife and mother, who’s in the world but not of it - has cost her. “Purity culture hadn’t prepared me for healthy sexuality. Keeping sweet hadn’t equipped me to speak up about abuse,” she writes. “Doctors weren’t evil agents of a New World Order. … Cutting off gay friends didn’t make them straight.”
When Levings describes ultimately leaving her religion, she compares it not to leaving a bubble but to bursting a festering blister. It hurt, yes, but “it also revealed that the world wasn’t what we thought it was”, she writes, “not at all - and eventually, that blister healed. I struggled to trust a phenomenon that repeated itself over and over again: when I had a need, the universe rose to meet it. I wasn’t alone out here.”
The reader’s heart breaks along with Levings’s when she realises the deal she agreed to so early in life - secluding herself to worship God, raise a family and avoid the supposed wickedness of the secular world - was based on a lie. “The world, actually,” she writes, “was beautiful.”
- A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape From Christian Patriarchy, by Tia Levings (St. Martin’s)
