The Women of Moscow
This war starts at home.
Hustle culture came for me when I quit my full-time job.
Shortly before my first child was born, when I knew I would soon transition to part-time work, mostly from home, I created a Pinterest board. The title was “the new domesticity.” (Embarrassing.) There weren’t many pins—I remember linen aprons and clogs. I had visions of simmering soup and running laundry all while I knocked out a morning of ad campaign concepting with the team and the baby slept peacefully. Again, LOL. As I stood on the edge of a role I’d never had before, I didn’t have a clear job description, but I was determined to figure out the dress code.
In the hybrid space I created as a part-time stay-at-home-mom and part-time writer, I was not the target audience for Christian authors/teachers Rachel Jankovic and Rebekah Merkle. I had an employer and work obligations and a paycheck and career ambitions that were entirely my own. But I also had the responsibilities of home-making and child-raising and feeding my small family, and most importantly, the desire to do it all with excellence. So I wasn’t not the target audience either.
Rachel Jankovic and Rebekah Merkle are the daughters of Doug Wilson, a highly controversial Christian pastor, prolific author, speaker, and publishing house founder. His racist writings about slavery are disgusting; his record on covering up sexual abuse/assault within his church abysmal; his Christian theology fundamentally flawed; and his language (particularly about women) filthy and inappropriate for a Christian, much less a pastor. Wow that’s an intense sentence, but there’s….a lot…of ground to cover. He’s built an empire of influence with his family that spiders out from Moscow, Idaho, where he’s founded a church, a classical school movement, a university, church conferences, and a small publishing house.
However, back then I didn’t know any of this or even who Doug Wilson was. I came to Jankovic and Merkle’s podcast by way of someone who started out like me: a young mother and writer who worked part-time in publishing and was trying to be faithful in all her responsibilities. Over the next few years, I watched with fascination as this woman slowly radicalized—largely due to the Wilson family’s influence. As I watched this woman’s transformation with sheer curiosity—and as I listened to the podcast that was so obviously informing her journey—I didn’t realize I was absorbing their message, too.
Jankovic and Merkle hew to a strict patriarchal vision of the world, one where women stay home, submit, and work as hard as humanly possible to remain “obedient” to their God-given calling. In their world, women don’t work (except for when they do—Merkle teaches at the classical Christian school her father founded) and they don’t lead (except for when they do—Jankovic denounces women preaching while doing essentially that very thing, just not from the pulpit). They think self-care is hogwash and they instruct women to “tell their feelings to shut up and salute Jesus.” They teach their daughters to bake bread and their sons to fight dragons. They sneer at the world, but place incredible pressure on women to raise children who will change it.
So why did I listen to hours of this? (Seriously, why did I.)
Certainly, a large part of my interest in listening came from pure fascination about their worldview—an anthropological sort of curiosity. I disagreed heartily with plenty of what they said, but the real reason for my sustained attention was the novelty of their subject matter. Jankovic and Merkle could debate the best methods of mopping in one breath and the existential philosophy of Sartré the next, taking both seriously. There is a giant cultural void in the conversation about care work—but Jankovic and Merkle march directly into it. The labor of homemaking and caring for children has long been under-appreciated, misunderstood, or straight up ignored. Jankovic and Merkle elevate this work—even as they do so by prescribing strict roles that keep women home—and their rapidly growing audience of Christian women indicates a hunger for work at home to be seen and considered.
“Unpaid labor — what the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development defines as time spent doing routine housework, shopping for necessary household goods, child care, tending to the elderly and other household or non-household members, and other unpaid activities related to household maintenance — remains largely invisible to economists.
It isn’t a part of G.D.P. calculations and rarely factors into other measures of economic growth. It is notoriously difficult to value because the normal market signals of supply and demand don’t work: Traditional expectations that caring for children, the elderly and the infirm should be done gratis within the family obscure the true economic value of this work. And yet what the example of Iceland shows us is that women provide a huge unacknowledged subsidy to the smooth functioning of our economies, which would grind to a halt if women stopped doing this work.” — Gus Wezerek and Kristen R. Ghodsee
The hidden work of homemaking and caring for children is no longer so hidden. We can partly thank the pandemic for that. Perhaps as a result, even progressive/liberal writers and thinkers are starting conversations about the significance and economic value of care work. The reality is that while career opportunities and compensation slowly continue to equalize for women, there will always be people who want or need to stay home and work there instead. Care work is critical to the health and growth of a society, and that isn’t changing. What could change is how we think about or value the work that happens at home.
So while Jankovic and Merkle believe that a woman’s highest and only purpose is found in the home, they also take her work there seriously without pandering or patronizing—a perspective that has been astonishingly hard to find in the wider culture. Obviously, I didn’t share their belief that women’s place was in the home and nowhere else, but I thought I could set all that aside while absorbing the practical lessons. I was raised by a stay-at-home mom who gave years of her life to raising and homeschooling us. In addition to academics, she taught all of her children the basics of building a life at home, from cooking to cleaning to hosting. I entered adulthood with more practical knowledge than many, many people have and still I felt hungry to learn more. Managing a home and raising children require an enormous set of skills. Like any job, you improve and develop more capability with time. And like any job, you benefit from mentoring.
Jankovic and Merkle had lots to share about hosting, cooking, teaching toddlers, and so on. But more importantly, they offer women an intoxicating sense of control. Wrapped in the Christian language of “obedience” and “faithfulness,” they place the power to create the outcome you want (godly children, an orderly home, a happy family)—and the responsibility for doing so—firmly in the woman’s hands. They will say that a Christian’s salvation comes through grace alone, but their teaching implies the direct opposite: keeping your salvation depends on how hard you work. Identifying these undercurrents can be tricky at times because much of what they have to share can be immediately helpful, practical, even novel. In many ways, the tone of their message is a bracing corrective to the hot mess express lifestyle that’s dominated SAHM/motherhood spaces in the last decade of social media. Kathryn Jezer-Morton, a PhD candidate who studies mom influencers, notes:
“During the Confessional Age, mothers like Heather Armstrong of Dooce.com and Jill Smokler of Scary Mommy were blogging in a revolutionary confessional mode, using the new web 2.0 platform to create community and share experiences in a way that had never been possible before. Their radical honesty — about the frustrations and fears of new parenthood, postpartum depression, sustaining a marriage, dividing domestic labor, breastfeeding, boredom — was a direct response to the prevailing tone of motherhood media throughout the 20th century, which had largely been cheerful, prescriptive, and patriarchal.” — Kathryn Jezer-Morton
This “radical honesty” often manifested in a why-bother approach to motherhood that did not appeal to me. I wanted to excel. As I navigated the lonely space of balancing a freelance career with SAHM responsibilities, I was particularly vulnerable to the message that the answer was trying harder. I never gave up my career aspirations and I never quit working, but I took on more and more duties at home until my life was lopsided in every way. To be clear, I don’t blame Jankovic and Merkle for my own achievement-oriented tendencies, nor are they the only Christian leaders and teachers who espouse this worldview. They are just uniquely gifted at packaging it.
After a couple of years of listening, my curiosity wore too thin to cover my objections to Jankovic and Merkle’s content. I had begun to learn about their father, and I couldn’t listen anymore, even for research purposes. But their message had already seeped into where I am most vulnerable anyway: the belief that my acceptance—be it my salvation or my worth as a mother—was dependent on my effort. In the early part of my career, I managed to balance hard work and ambition without being poisoned by #girlboss culture, but at home, I felt directly responsible for the success or failure of everything that happened there. I fell for a formula and fell into despair when it didn’t produce the right results.
Thankfully, my own bracing corrective arrived with my third child. Although he is, was, and always has been a delight, he upended my inner world and made me remember how desperately dependent I am on Jesus and others. Letting go is a universal lesson of parenting. I am getting a double dose of it as my kids grow up and I do, too, slowly untangling myself from whatever unreasonable burden of responsibility and control I thought this role required. I’ll probably always be vulnerable to the idea that I can work my way into significance, especially when it comes to the invisible work at home. But that’s because as a society, we’re weak there too.
Culturally, we’re in a moment for all kinds of big change. How we think about caregiving is probably part of that coming change. We have to do a better job of valuing care work at home without making it the only thing of value a woman can do. Seven years in, I’m still finding my way along this path—sometimes stumbling, sometimes succeeding. I’m just not doing it in linen aprons and clogs.
current status
reading :: “A Poem (and a Painting) About the Suffering that Hides in Plain Sight” (NYT) // Truth is, the links I think are most worth clicking on never get the most clicks. This is one of those links. The interactive design of this close reading controls how you move through it and study the art, more reminiscent of a college lecture than a longform article. Poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert explores a famous Auden poem and the Bruegel painting that inspired it, explaining: “The painting is a comment on the fraught relation between attention and disaster — as is the poem: Something’s only a disaster if we notice it.” We are in a global moment of great grief, exhaustion, and anxiety—only heightened by the war in Ukraine. Auden’s poem was written shortly before WWII began, but the questions it raises feel even more relevant now, in a time where we are swamped with news of suffering nearly 24/7.
listening :: “School’s Out Forever” (This American Life) // The destruction Covid has wrought on American school systems and students in the last two years is hard to comprehend. We will be wrestling with the impact for years and years to come. What happens to all the kids who fell through the cracks? Whose education and development were forever changed? Is school as we know it broken? That’s the question this episode of This American Life explores, through the lens of two compelling individual stories.
drinking :: Poppi Orange prebiotic soda // My pitch for this is short: I gave up alcohol for Lent, which means that I got bored by drinking plain water and black coffee. Cracking open the orange flavor of this “prebiotic soda” has been a nice change for deck sitting on breezy spring days.
cooking :: red chile chicken tacos // Sometimes you need to treat yourself to a stupid easy weeknight meal and usually those meals are just fine, in terms of taste. I count this as a necessary part of the rhythm of a sustainable cooking life. However — these red chile chicken tacos are a treat in their ease and their flavor. We ate them gleefully, with sauce dripping down our fingers, and I immediately put them back on the meal plan for the following week.
reading :: Housekeeping (Marilynne Robinson) // Ever finish a book and feel like you need to start it over again immediately? That’s my feeling upon closing this book, Robinson’s first novel and a Pulitzer Prize finalist. It is not a book for distracted reading. Her prose is absolutely beautiful, luminous and rhythmic, but you have to commit to it: immersing yourself in the stream of it and letting the words slide over you. Do I like this book? I’m not sure yet. It has made me think, made me vaguely sad, and made me feel I’m not quite smart enough for it. Time for a reread.
listening :: Go Easy, Kid — Monica Martin with James Blake / The Four Seasons, Recomposed — Max Richter reimagines Vivaldi’s famous violin concertos and it is gorgeous. I loved reading about the creative chutzpah he had to take on a classic like this…ballsy! / The Thaw — I’m married to great playlist maker. The Thaw is just right for spring days when the light is pink and blue, your to-do list is long, and you desperately need to find your flow. / Some Kind of Love — The Killers. Do other people in their 30s still drive around listening to music and feeeeeeling things? This is good for that. / Loom — Ólafur Arnalds & Reykjavík Recording Orchestra. Orchestral, wistful, hopeful. So, so beautiful.
reading :: “Rootin’ Tootin’ Charcutin’: Charcuterie boards as fantasies or nightmares of abundance” // Kathryn Jezer-Morton is writing her PhD dissertation on the momfluencer industry, but she also produces a more casual newsletter where she investigates this territory. I’m always fascinated by her observations, but I thought this exploration of the charcuterie/ “graze board” trend so prevalent in the “mamasphere” was really insightful.
loving :: Perfume Genie // Perhaps my most ~ niche ~ recommendation ever, but writer Rachel Syme occasionally runs “Perfume Genie” Twitter threads where she matches fragrance recs to a prompt. Her most recent call for submissions asked people to describe a day when they were truly, totally happy and she would match a perfume to it. I love everything about this—reading the sensory and specific details of people’s happy days (so many were ordinary!), feeling awed by Syme’s vast knowledge of perfumes, and of course, trying to decide what constitutes my truly, totally happy day.
the real feel
Help me. Help me understand the male fascination with the blower. There must be a moment in male maturation when their affinity for this power tool kicks on or something. I remember the specific moment it happened for the men in my life. We were vacationing with friends at a beach house that stored an electric blower in the shed right next to the cornhole boards. Every morning, it was an absolute race to see which of the men could get down there and blow the four tiny pieces of misplaced peagravel back into their spot. All day long they’d be doing this, walking around in swim trunks with a solo cup margarita in one hand and the blower in the other.
Now, of course, we have our own blower, and it never gets neglected. My husband and I will come home from somewhere, a veritable mountain of tasks before us—BUT FIRST, the blowing. I’ll be inside scrambling to make dinner, entertain a cranky baby, unload the dishwasher, switch over clean laundry, propel a few dirty boys upward to the bathtub, and in the distance, I’ll hear… the muted whine of the blower. What is this??? Is it the instant gratification of watching yard debris vanish before their eyes? Is it the thrill of a (battery-operated) power tool? Is it a tangible symbol of adulthood? Honestly, I don’t have a clue why men are so enchanted with their blowers, but what I do have is a very clean driveway.
last words from someone else
Until May — Get dirt under your fingernails, paint something, read aloud to someone you love, and eat as many perfect spring strawberries as you can.
Thanks for reading! And for your patience with this long-delayed edition.