Three Things You Probably Forgot Were in Elisabeth Elliot's "Let Me Be a Woman"

The Dangers of Trying to Take Anti-Feminism as a North Star

This post was originally published at daughtersofsarahbook.net. I am taking a one-week break from my series on the Basic Seminar to re-publish it now because of the release of Lucy Austen’s new biography of Elliot, which I highly recommend and hope to write a review of sometime this summer.

As a homeschool kid who grew up pretty close to Christian patriarchy, I was exposed to what a lot of people would consider extreme teaching about gender roles. Even as a child, I knew that our family was outside of the Christian mainstream because of our association with organizations like ATIA/IBLP, and because my parents liked controversial teachers like Michael and Debi Pearl (No Greater Joy MInistries), and Rick and Jan Hess (authors of “A Full Quiver”). When I began to see the serious flaws - and bad fruit - of Christian patriarchy, I rejected a lot of the teachers I’d grown up on. I thought I’d washed my hands of the whole thing by jettisoning the “extremists,” but when I began revisiting some of the more mainstream books on biblical womanhood for research, I realized that some of the books I had considered moderate, were anything but.

One of these texts was Elisabeth Elliot’s “Let Me Be a Woman.”

I read “Let Me Be a Woman,” along with “Passion and Purity” when I was in my teens. I’m guessing that, if you’re a woman who’s clicked on this post, there’s a good chance you did too. Maybe it was given to you as a graduation present, or a wedding gift. Maybe it was recommended to you by another Christian woman. Maybe you reached for it when you were struggling with what it means to be a woman in a world that didn’t seem to have a good answer. Elliot’s writing is always engaging, and maybe you remember it as being pretty good … I did. But when I read it again, with a more critical eye, I was shocked by what I found.

While I don’t intend to write a thorough review of Let Me Be a Woman that really deals with its core ideas and themes, in this article I’d like to point out three very troubling things that I forgot were in the book - and maybe you did, too.

1. Elliot presents women being treated as second-class citizens as simply a matter of cultural gender distinctions.

Elliot’s thesis - which she hammers home throughout the book - is that men and women are “complementary opposites” (p18), and that the distinctiveness between men and women must be honored, cherished and protected. She has much to say in criticism of feminism, which she sees as undermining male/female distinctives, but she seems to be totally undiscriminating about cultural customs surrounding the treatment of men and women. It seems that as long as there is a nice, bold line between men and women, all is fair and good.

Elliot, who spent many years as a foreign missionary, has a lot of experience with how different cultures draw that line. Without censure, she lists a few:

Women wore long hair, men wore short. Men ate first, women waited to eat whatever might be left over when the men had finished. Women were the bearers of heavy burdens. Men were not considered physically capable of this work. Both men and women were willing to work for white people, swinging machetes to clear grass and underbrush, and while the women were usually more efficient at this, their wages were lower than the men’s even though the hours were the same. (p18-19)

Speaking to her now-adult daughter (to whom the book is addressed), she reminds her,

You as a little foreign girl took your own place among them, learning to catch fish with your hands as women did, cooking, mashing, chewing and spitting your manioc in order to make chica, and then, before you drank yours, serving the little boys who were your friends. (p19)

Now, keep in mind, this is not a chapter on the wisdom of “when in Rome, do as the Romans do” - it’s a chapter which points out the naturalness, and rightness, and necessity for cultural gender distinctions. Elliot’s point is that all cultures do make distinctions between the sexes (true), but she seems to assume that sin never plays any part in the ways that these distinctions manifest (false). To present women being made to wait until after the men have eaten to (maybe!) take part in a meal themselves, as being equivalent with men and women having different hairstyles, is dangerous and wrong. Psalm 10:2 points to the fact that human pride leads very naturally to oppression of those weaker than ourselves, but instead of normalizing this, the Psalmist mourns and condemns it:

The wicked in his pride persecutes the poor;

let them be caught in the plots which they have devised.

Sin is a very real force in the world, and a powerful influence on all human cultures. It should make us sad to see the crushing-down of women pass into custom, and be justified by tradition.

2. Elliot legitimizes polygamy and child marriage.

In a chapter entitled “What Makes a Marriage Work,” Elliot gives a few examples of marriages that Westerners would consider unconventional, but she found to be “apparently very workable.” (p107) Two of these examples involve child marriage. The first involved the “marriage” of a teenage girl to an eleven-year-old boy:

Eugenia, a Quichua Indian girl in her midteens, came to work as our housegirl in Shandia. To our surprise, she brought along a boy of about eleven whom she introduced as her husband … Eugenia did the housework, Guayaquil went to school. He was hoping to make it through sixth grade, which was as far as the mission school took boys in those days. When he came home from school he did whatever Eugenia told him to do - chopped wood or built a fire in the stove or hauled water, and sometimes chopped onions or stirred things or washed dishes, and it was a very convenient arrangement for all of us. (p107-108)

The second involved the marriage of Eugenia’s “older brother Gervacio” to Guayaquil’s “younger sister Carmela." (p108) Now, we aren’t given the exact ages of Gervacio and Carmela, but we can assume the “husband” in this case would have been at least in his late teens, and the “wife” must have been younger than eleven. She is described as “a sweet little girl with huge dark eyes and a shy giggle.” (p108) Apparently, after Carmela’s mother had died, her father had decided to marry both her and her brother off to their already-intended spouses even though it was earlier than originally planned, “to see that they were properly taken care of.” (p108) Naturally, Elliot wondered if these marriages - with their wide age gaps and with one spouse not yet having reached sexual maturity - were actually consummated.

I asked one of the Indian women if these couples actually slept together. She whooped with laughter and said (her colloquialism loses a lot in the translation), ‘No wife sleeps closer to her husband than Carmela!’

Missionaries often confront cultural norms that are merely different than ours, not wrong, but it is troubling (to say the least) to hear a Christian woman speak of child marriage in such a nonchalant - even approving - way. Elliot even says that “both marriages seemed completely successful,” (p108) and she apparently has no judgment for the choice of the father to place his children in such a position. Guarding our children during their sexual immaturity is part of the responsibility of parenthood. Marriage and sex are not light matters. It requires the maturity and life experience of an adult to choose a lifelong, intimate partner, and to operate within a relationship that is, by its very nature, sexual.

In the next section, Elliot goes on to praise the marriage of a Auca polygamist:

We watched how well polygamy worked in the Auca tribe. Our house adjoined that of Dabu, who had three wives. During the day we watched them together while their husband was out hunting. Their house, like ours, had no walls. Never once did we hear an argument, or see the slightest sign of friction between those women. Dabu was faithful to them as far as anyone knew (and everyone knew practically everything about everybody) and very generous in having taken them on, for all were widows with children of their own who would have had no one to hunt meat for them if Dabu had not been so bighearted.

Not only is polygamy presented here without censure, it is described as “working well.” The husband in this family is described as “faithful” (even though he is sexually intimate with three women), “generous,” and “bighearted.”

Polygamy is something that we see practiced in the Bible, but it is not something that is ever praised or justified. Marriage was established as a one-flesh bond between one man and one woman in Eden, and anything which widens the circle of intimacy between a husband and “the wife of his youth” should be considered infidelity. (Prov 5:18) The new testament churches were instructed to choose as leaders men of upright conduct, and one consistent requirement was that church officers be “the husband of one wife.” (Tit 1:6, 1 Tim 3:2, 12) Similarly, Israelite kings were forbidden from using their wealth and power to accumulate wives. (Deut 17:17) King Lemuel’s mother cautions him against polygamy in Proverbs 31:3,

Do not give your strength to women,

nor your ways to that which destroys kings.

The Bible simply does not agree with Elliot that polygamy “works well.”

Elliot is probably right that the women may have gone hungry (and their children with them) if Dabu hadn’t married them. And of course, the Aucas were a people who had never been exposed to scripture, and their custom probably seemed good to them. But the Bible has a different solution for women who are bereaved of husbands, and children who are bereaved of fathers:

1 Timothy 5 outlines how we should respond to widows, and it does not say that we should ask them to accept the shame of becoming someone’s second, third, or fourth wife to avoid starvation. It says rather that every family ought to take care of their own widowed relatives, and if a widow has no relatives, that she should be provided for by the church. James 1:27 says,

Pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.

Nowhere does the Bible ever legitimize polygamy as an answer to female poverty. This is the way the world has historically “taken care of” widows and orphans, but we are called, as James says, to keep ourselves unstained from the ways of the world. This means rejecting social solutions that involve sexual impurity.

3. Elliot Does Not Believe That Equality Is a Christian Ideal

In almost every self-described complementarian text I have read, its authors have been very adamant that complementarianism holds men and women to be equals. Some use the phrase “equal in worth, unequal in role,” or talk of women as being “equal but functionally subordinate,” but it is almost universally affirmed by complementarians that gender equality, even if misunderstood by feminists, is a vitally important concept. Since Elliot was invited to write on “The Essence of Femininity” in Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, I fully expected to hear male-female equality affirmed by her. I was wrong.

In her chapter entitled “Equality Is Not a Christian Ideal,” Elliot writes,

Many women readily accept the notion of created order but consider men and women to have been created ‘equal.’ Equality is not really a Christian ideal … Men and women are equal, as we may say, in having been created by God. Both male and female are in His image … They are equally called to obedience and responsibility, but there are differences in their responsibilities … The statement ‘All men are created equal’ is a political one, referring to a single quality for a single purpose. C.S. Lewis called this a ‘legal fiction,’ useful, necessary but not by any means always desirable. Marriage is one place where it doesn’t belong at all. Marriage is not a political arena. It is a union of two opposites. It is a confusion to speak of ‘separate but equal,’ or ‘opposite but equal’ in referring to this unique union of two people who have become, because they were made different in order that they might thus become, one flesh.

Elliot argues that there is no place for the notion of equality in marriage, because it is a “political fiction” which is only useful for the legal sphere. But why is this ‘fiction,’ as she and Lewis call it, necessary in the legal sphere? Elliot dismissively quotes half of a line from the declaration of independence - “All men are created equal” - but she forgets why that premise was established by Jefferson in the first place. It was in order to assert the truth that all men “are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.” If rights are endowed by our Creator (which they are), then they do not disappear when we walk through our own front door, or when we stand up in church and say “I do” to our spouse. And the reason for reminding people of these rights - sin - doesn’t disappear when we get married either. In a relationship where intimacy makes it so very easy to take advantage of the other person, the last thing we should do is to say that equality evaporates on contact with the marriage sphere.

Proverbs takes a much better view of equality than Elliot does. The introduction of the book declares its purpose:

To know wisdom and instruction,

to perceive the words of understanding,

the receive the instruction of wisdom,

justice judgment and equity. (Proverbs 1:2-3)

Equity is nothing more than equality enforced. It means to perceive inequalities, and work to right them. It means to use just measures: judging all by the same law, and granting all their due as image-bearers of God. To preach equity is not to preach that all are the same in size, shape, ability or office- that is nothing more than a straw man. To preach equity is to recognize that in this less-than-ideal world, not all have the same resources, strengths, or positions of power in the world, but that all are due equal treatment under the law of God. Marriage is not a vacuum where we are free from such principles. God’s law extends into marriage, and His eye is on us all the time, judging whether our treatment of others is equitable, or oppressive.

Reader Beware …

In Let Me Be a Woman, Elisabeth Elliot allowed herself to lose her way by ricocheting off of feminism, instead of being guided by scripture. In making the different-ness of men and women her north star, she has forgotten that those differences must be seen as subordinate to the things we have in common - our common source in God, our common identity as His image-bearers, and our common hope in Jesus.

While Elliot has written many wise and encouraging things on other topics, I cannot recommend Let Me Be a Woman as a trustworthy text on godly womanhood. It is much more a diatribe against American feminism than a Biblically-informed worldview of women or marriage.