The “Unsupervised Woman” and the Limits of Reactionary Traditionalism

What the latest evangelical gender war misses about Christian women’s vocations

The gender war rears its ugly head yet again, this time over a character dubbed the “unsupervised woman.” So what exactly is an unsupervised woman, and why are we arguing about her?

Every now and then, conservative Christians online find themselves plunged into niche yet heated debates over the precise nature of women’s roles in marriage, the church, and society. These typically begin with someone making an extreme, totalizing statement and then letting X do its thing. 

Earlier this year, a clip of Rebecca VanDoodewaard discussing singleness on Ligonier’s X account attracted hundreds of thousands of views. VanDoodewaard, a Reformed author who has written extensively on marriage and Christian womanhood, was offering encouragement to young single women who desire marriage. She encouraged unmarried women to use their present circumstances profitably, whether through education, employment, service to their churches, or care for their families.

However, her advice was interpreted by the internet through the lens of declining marriage and fertility. After all, wasn’t she simply encouraging Christian women to pursue the same advanced degrees and professional success that secular culture already celebrates? 

The Category of Christian Vocation

The modern debate over women’s roles is frequently conducted according to a set of remarkably narrow categories, separating women into autonomous feminists or submissive wives and mothers. Most would not say that they see things in these harsh binaries, but when you think about it, the perception falls along these lines: a woman is either a “based tradwife” or a rebellious “girlboss.” But these categories fit the lives of our Puritan predecessors rather poorly.

Consider the Christian household before the modern separation of home and workplace. A woman might supervise servants, manage livestock, oversee household finances, and educate her children, all while remaining firmly committed to the primacy of her role as a Christian wife and mother. Our search for a remedy to modern social ills should make us return to one of the Reformation’s great contributions to ordinary Christian life: its recovery of the doctrine of vocation.

In medieval Catholic theology, celibacy was generally given a higher spiritual status than marriage. Thomas Aquinas, for example, explicitly defended the superiority of virginity to marriage in his Summa Theologiae. This is not to say that medieval Catholics regarded marriage as merely a necessary evil. But they did believe that there was a spiritual hierarchy separating religious life from ordinary ‘secular’ stations. 

The Reformers, however, challenged that hierarchy. A Christian did not need to leave ordinary life and enter a monastery to pursue holiness, and each person’s life circumstances were all legitimate arenas of Christian service. This recovery was particularly significant for women. Ordinary wives and mothers were not engaged in some spiritually inferior enterprise while their celibate counterparts pursued the truly religious life. Each woman served God in her particular providential calling. 

Contemporary Christians would do well to remember that everyone in their various stages of life has responsibilities God has given them, and all of them stem from a personal, emotional, and intellectual pursuit of Christ and his word. A woman, therefore, does not need to become a wife before she possesses a legitimate vocation.

The Model of the Puritan Woman

John E. Marshall, in his lecture, The Puritan Woman, explains that our theological forefathers thought extremely highly of Christian women, their responsibilities, and their competencies, all within a framework of biblical gender roles. Perhaps nowhere is the combination of traditional household order and considerable female competence more apparent than in the Puritan ideal of womanhood.

In this address, Marshall explored the lives of seventeenth-century Christian women through the lens of Proverbs 31. The picture that he draws is not one of female independence from marriage or domestic responsibility, but neither is it one of intellectual and practical helplessness. The woman of Proverbs 31 is, after all, an impressively busy person. She manages the household, buys and sells, and oversees her children’s education. And her husband trusts her, seeing that she is diligent and discerning. This is not an illustration of the husband monitoring her every move, but wisely delegating tasks that the wife will handle with care. 

Puritan theologian William Gouge is particularly helpful. In his 1622 tome Of Domestical Duties, he articulates a robust conception of the husband’s authority, including restrictions on a wife’s independent control of household property that would make many modern Christians squirm a bit.

Yet Gouge also insists that a wise husband should entrust substantial responsibility to his wife. He describes her as a joint governor of the household and argues that husbands should not continually demand everything that their authority might theoretically entitle them to require. A prudent husband should grant his capable wife considerable liberty in managing the household and exercising her judgment.

The Puritan ideal also presupposed a considerable degree of theological literacy. Women were expected to know Scripture, practice personal devotion, understand doctrine, participate intelligently in the worship of the church, and instruct their children in the Christian faith. 

Some Puritan women pursued their theological education considerably further. Lucy Hutchinson, for example, produced substantial theological writings, translated portions of Calvin and John Owen, and wrote a theological treatise addressed to her daughter. Her literary accomplishments included Order and Disorder, a lengthy biblical poem exploring creation and providence.

Hutchinson’s writings demonstrate that serious theological engagement was not regarded as exclusively masculine simply because ordained ministry was reserved for men. A mother cannot meaningfully catechize her children in doctrines she has never taken the trouble to understand. An older woman (à la Titus 2) cannot offer sound biblical counsel to younger women if her own understanding of Scripture is shallow and superficial. Male headship in the home and the church does not imply male ownership of theology or a deep personal piety.

The ordinary Puritan woman could exercise industry, intellectual ability, economic judgment, hospitality, and charitable initiative without rejecting her responsibilities as a wife and mother. The lesson is not that Puritan women were secretly modern feminists. It is that our modern mindset frequently fails to understand the virtues Christians historically expected women to cultivate, and that those virtues were not in conflict with their stations.

The Single Woman’s Life is not a Waiting Room

This brings us back to VanDoodewaard and her comment that initially inspired so much indignation. What should an unmarried Christian woman who desires marriage actually do with her life?

Certainly, she should be encouraged to pursue marriage wisely. Churches should make room for young Christian men and women to meet, develop friendships, and form families. Parents and older Christians should offer practical guidance about finding and evaluating prospective spouses. There is little pastoral wisdom in simply telling a woman who deeply desires marriage to “enjoy her season of singleness” without acknowledging the legitimate grief of an unfulfilled desire.

That said, it would be equally foolish to suggest that her present circumstances are somehow outside the scope of God’s providence. However you want to answer this question, our approach to singles in the church must have room for Paul’s treatment of unmarried Christians in 1 Corinthians 7. Paul acknowledges the goodness of marriage while also describing some distinct opportunities available to those who are unmarried. For example, the unmarried woman can devote particular attention to the things of the Lord instead of worrying about what her husband thinks. Her life is not spiritually dormant or meaningless because she has not entered the marriage covenant.

Similarly, Paul explicitly recognizes a widow’s liberty to remarry according to her judgment, provided that she marries in the Lord (1 Cor. 7:39). That does not quite describe a general transfer of her personal governance to the nearest available male relative. An unmarried woman’s Christian responsibilities therefore cannot be reduced to merely preparing herself for the possibility of marriage. 

Like all Christians, she has responsibilities toward Christ, her church, her family, her neighbors, and the ordinary work entrusted to her. For many women, these responsibilities will usually include paid employment.

A young woman may need to support herself, contribute to her family’s finances, assist aging parents, or provide for other relatives. Education can equip her to pursue her abilities, gifts, and responsibilities. Of course, this does not mean that every Christian woman should pursue a graduate degree or assume substantial debt for credentials. The desire for professional accomplishment can become every bit as idolatrous as the desire for marriage.

But there is a substantial difference between acknowledging the dangers of careerism and treating a woman’s economic productivity as evidence of feminism. A Christian calling is not identical to a career, but it is the sum of the responsibilities God has entrusted to us within our actual circumstances. 

Should a single woman eventually marry, her responsibilities will change. Her husband will have covenantal claims upon her that an employer does not. Children, should God provide them, will introduce further obligations. She may reasonably decide to reduce her paid employment, leave it entirely, or arrange her work around the demands of her household. Her previous education, industry, and intellectual cultivation are not necessarily liabilities, but may even make her more capable of fulfilling her calling as a wife and mother.

The Importance of Women’s Responsibilities

Scripture gives women substantial responsibilities for the spiritual formation of other women. 

Titus 2 explicitly directs older women to teach younger women what is good. The content of their instruction is itself deeply traditional, emphasizing marriage, children, self-control, purity, and faithful household management.

The biblical answer to bad female influences is not to regard female influence itself as inherently suspect. It is to cultivate godly women capable of exercising good influence. A congregation that wants its young women to become wise wives and mothers should therefore take their theological education seriously.

Women should be capable of reading Scripture carefully, understanding the doctrines of the Church, recognizing false teaching, and applying biblical wisdom to their ordinary circumstances. This does not require placing women into offices Scripture reserves for qualified men, but rather, takes seriously the spiritual responsibilities they have already been given.

Married and unmarried women alike need to understand that they have been tasked with some of the most important areas of Christian life: instructing younger women and, frequently, children. These are gravely important things that require excellent, theologically sound, discerning women who have the maturity to recognize sin and error. Imagining that this is a feminist invention does not serve the church or the home well.

Conclusion

Both approaches (the feminist and the reactionary) reduce a woman’s identity to her relationship with male authority rather than beginning with her Christian identity: someone with inherent dignity, made in God’s image and redeemed in Christ, who has duties and responsibilities to her fellow Christian that are laid out in Scripture.

She is a morally responsible Christian whose life should be ordered according to Scripture and the providential circumstances in which God has placed her. Christian parents should prepare their daughters for adulthood, not merely for marriage, teaching them to understand Scripture, cultivate practical skills, work diligently, and exercise sound judgment. They should learn what it means to become capable wives and mothers without assuming that marriage is a guaranteed gift, or that their unmarried years have no value.

We have to avoid two errors that are plainly shown here, both by the controversy and the highly emotional, offense-based reactions to them. Firstly, a Christian is not a feminist for recognizing and cultivating the unique gifts, intellects, and abilities women have been given by their Creator, single or not. Secondly, we must not minimize the importance of a Christian woman’s role in marriage and family, or imagine that submission is a concept that we must pay lip service to to get our ‘I-Heart-Biblical-Headship’ sticker on our Reformed Awana vest. 

The Reformed tradition gives us a more substantial vision of womanhood than either the modern feminist ideal of male-suspicious autonomy or the reactionary ideal of perpetual curation of a woman’s intellectual life. It is a vision in which women can pursue genuine competence and excellence without abandoning submission because the work they do is so crucial for the health of their homes and churches.

We ought to ask whether we are encouraging Christian women in our churches to become sufficiently mature to fulfill the responsibilities God has actually given them. The single woman’s life is not a waiting room outside her “real calling,” and the married woman’s godliness is not measured by her inability to function without her husband. One of the worst ways to convince them of the Scriptures’ unique duties for men and women, and the goodness of those roles, is to tell them that biblical godliness for women is merely a product of male supervision.