A thread earlier in the day linked to a site called Ladies Against Feminism. I was glad I was going out into the sunshine for most of the day with my daughters, as the reminder of that site, and the ideology wrapped up around it, really upset me and distraction was necessary for a time.
I became involved with the ideology a little bit before I got married, around 20 years ago, and it coloured almost everything in my life for a decade of it. I was involved in email groups, blogging, churches that subscribed to the teachings. It affected everything - my marriage, my pregnancies, my parenting, my clothes, our lifestyle.
I actually broke free when the quiverful teachings impacted our lives to a degree that was beyond all reason. I was pregnant almost constantly for around seven years and the strain on my body was ridiculous. I had severe SPD and spent my days on morphine. My mental health was being crushed, and the drudgery was unending. I was homeschooling the kids, too.
My DP is not a bad guy at all, and he was really questioning the idea of no contraception and continued pursuance of pregnancy as an idea. He thought it was really unhealthy, to say the least, and wanted to get a vasectomy. I was horrendously conflicted - I believed that to deliberately frustrate my fertility was a grave sin, and to end all childbearing would be spiritually dangerous - after all, the Bible says 'a woman shall be saved through childbearing'.
Thankfully for me, the pincer movement of obeying your husband actually worked in my benefit, and he did have the op. I started to recover physically, and slowly began to address the whole movement and what it taught.
It had seemed so attractive to a woman from an abusive secular background, with a history of mental illness and a certain amount of chaos. Pretty, happy women, successfully running stable homes and families with many children. I thought it would be a way to protect any children I had from the kind of life I had experienced. There are books, tapes, a whole network.
You may well believe that coming out of it wasn't easy. My mental health dipped considerably as my support network, which had been entirely wrapped up in this movement, just fell away. It's taken me years to recover, and I'm getting there.
It was a real shock to see the website again today after so many years, and follow a couple of links to see familiar faces. I'm so grateful to be free, and profoundly aware of how easy it is to fall into these ideas without realising the consequences.