Personal Testimonies
My Journey to Biblical Womanhood
By Mrs. Rocky Stewart
Aug 30, 2004 - 10:30:00 PM

I’ve hesitated to write this, because I know how far I have to go. I am also hesitant to share out of a sense of well-deserved shame. However, since there is a common view out there that no woman would embrace traditional values unless she was uneducated or raised that way, I want to share my story.

I was an only child, raised by a working mother and a stay-at-home father. In part, this was because my mother, a die-hard feminist at the time, felt that she wasn’t patient or loving enough to stay home with me full-time, although she did stay home with me for the first two years. In part, this was because my father’s extreme agoraphobia and anxiety disorders—not to mention that his drinking probably would have made him incapable of working. Despite these problems, he was a very loving father and took a very active role in my life. He played Barbies with me, taught me how to read by the time I was three, and got up nights with me when I was ill.

I was taught women should do whatever they want to do, and although staying at home was fine for some women, I was too intelligent to do that with my life. Even after I became a Christian at the age of 10, my feminist views lived on unaltered and, except for abortion, unchallenged. I became tentatively pro-life, but had no idea why. I knew I didn’t want children. I asked my mom several times after I began menstruating if I could be “fixed.” I wanted to go to college, go to graduate school and have a big career where I both helped people and made lots of money.

Even after I fell in love and got married to my high school sweetheart—also a Christian—at the age of 17, these views didn’t change. Why should they? He also embraced much of feminism. His mom was a stay-at-home mom but never commented on our vow of not having children or my common statement that I would not be a “wifey,” decorate my house in florals, and bake cookies. Neither was our stated intention of never having children or our choice to go on the abortifiacent Depo-Provera questioned at all in our premarital counseling.

Shortly after our wedding, we left Christianity. The reasons why would be another story by itself. I went to a year of college in our hometown, then I transferred to a big state university, one of the most liberal in the country. My husband, who had not done as well in high school as I did, attended the local community college. Not too long after our decision to leave behind Christ, we had embraced the religion of Wicca, also known as the practice of witchcraft.

On campus, I immediately got involved in pro-abortion work. I also took many political studies and women’s studies classes, which were nothing more then an indoctrination in feminist socialism. I “escorted” at an abortion clinic, which consisted of standing out in front of the clinic on the days they did abortions and protecting these “poor, defenseless” women from the men and women who prayed the Rosary on the sidewalk and offered help and literature to the women coming in. The escorts got a great deal of appreciation from the staff. We also got the opportunity to make many blasphemous statements about Christianity (Lord forgive me!). We would sing songs about sexual acts in churches and would discuss how glad we were that we were not chained to such a rigid, horrible system.

But all was not perfect. I began to have an uneasy feeling that once you took away Christianity, you had no ground for morality and that I had no right to argue that my view of what the world should be was any better then anyone else’s, or should be listened to. My women’s studies classes had an anti-male, anti-marriage bias that I couldn’t deny. I felt sorry for my husband, who had to go hear every day that he was the cause of all the problems in the world (he was taking very similar classes at the community college). I began to see the problems in the political philosophies I was learning. I admired their concern for the less fortunate, something I did not see in conservative politics. But I did not see how many of their ideas were workable in practice, especially once I started getting involved with political groups that tried to make them work. Like it or not, in these “egalitarian” groups there was leadership, there was power, and selections were made. Private property was also respected—contrary to the communistic teachings of the group. And I saw a more troubling tendency to tie into local anarchist groups and radical groups (like the Black Panthers) for protests and causes that were supposedly about fairly neutral issues, like concern for the treatment of overseas workers.

At the end of my second year of college, two things happened. One is that I was asked to take over the pro-abortion group on campus and was sent to NARAL training in Washington, D.C., all expenses paid. The second thing was that my husband and I were struck with the irrational, illogical desire to have a baby, which we decided to act on. This was a major act of God’s grace that would lead us back to H im. I went to a conference on abortion with prenatal supplements in my suitcase, hoping to be pregnant soon.

A few things happened at that conference that built the foundation for later conviction. First of all, two women got up and shared their stories about being spies at right-to-life activities, particularly a National Right to Life convention. This disturbed me; first of all because it was unethical, and second of all because I thought it was fairly obvious what pro-life people believed.

Second of all there was a strange reluctance to discuss abortion. They discussed why women get abortions, how women’s lives are ruined by babies, how to get more effective contraception in your colleges, and how to do pro-abortion advocacy, but there was very little about abortion itself. We heard denials of the breast cancer/abortion connection, post-abortion syndrome, and any risks involving abortion. We were told that it was comparable, risk wise, to wisdom tooth surgery (I guess that is why in my own state, for example, in the year 2000 there were 172 reported complications out of 14,022 abortions, or roughly 1 out of every 82 abortions). But we never discussed fetal development in order to prove why it wasn’t a life, or discussed how the abortion is done, or anything.

We did visit an abortion “clinic,” a Planned Parenthood facility. They showed us ultrasounds and dopplers, which made me question, “If it wasn’t a life, why did they need this equipment?” It wasn’t a doubt I acknowledged openly, but it chewed at the back of my brain. I also saw the room with 20 reclining chairs and heating pads where the women went to recover after the abortion. They reassured us that the women “comforted each other really well.” This did not strike me as high quality medical care, considering the woman had just had an emotionally traumatic minor surgical procedure.

The trip ended with prearranged visits to our congressmen and senators for our individual states, and our being gifted with an autographed book by Gloria Steinem.

Shortly after I returned home, I found out I was pregnant. Shortly after that I was struck with hyperemesis (for those who don’t know, severe morning sickness that has to be controlled with medication). This curtailed pretty much everything, including my schooling. I barely finished my classes that term. I was not able to get the pro-choice group going, and it passed to someone else. The help I was promised to get it going never came through, and I was too sick to care all that much. The medicine controlled the vomiting most of the time, but I was nauseated and exhausted all the time.

Pregnancy brought two things into really clear perspective for me. The first one was that “pro-choice” did not mean you could choose to have a child, especially if you were poor, young, or not in that perfect time in your life. No one greeted my pregnancy with joy, except the student health nurse practioner who verified my pregnancy and one friend. My mother-in-law cried because we were sending the child to hell by not being Christians, my father told me it would ruin college and asked me if I knew that “they had that pill now (meaning RU486).” Telling everyone it was a planned pregnancy only earned me a look of puzzled astonishment—the same kind of look I would get if I told someone that I did in fact plan to chop off my own arm and I was looking forward to the idea. I realized that it was only okay to have a baby if you were a certain kind of person, and this was a very troubling thought for me. No one thought we would be unfit parents. No one questioned that we would be able to provide our baby the essentials. But we were young! In school! Didn’t we want our freedom? Didn’t we want to wait until we were financially settled?

The other, more disturbing realization was that unborn children were, in fact, alive. Like most pregnant women I devoured everything I could find on pregnancy, the more so because about the only activity I could tolerate was reading. I learned when the baby has a heartbeat. I learned how much happens at the moment of conception. I learned how quickly the baby develops. I learned that by the time the overwhelming amount of abortions happen, the heartbeat can be seen and often heard. After I went in for my 16-week ultrasound and saw my baby was a boy, I came home to order pizza and opened the phone book only to see the ad “Abortions up to 24 weeks.” I ceased to call myself pro-choice.

My husband and I were a little unsettled to hear we were having a boy. We both had a strong anti-male prejudice, and not just from college. I had an alcoholic father, he had an alcoholic step-father. My husband’s real father was uninvolved, illiterate, and had not done anything at all in his marriage except to bring home the paycheck. All our male friends hated their fathers. The men we saw at college did not fill us with confidence. Most were self-absorbed, spent their weekends drinking and smoking pot, and were very sexually active. We did not want our son to grow up like this and wondered how we could teach him to be anything within a morally relativistic framework such as Wicca. We loved our religion. We were not unhappy as Wiccans, although we had some questions, but we had to admit there was nothing in our faith that would bind our son to any sort of morality, other than a vague “be a good person” type of philosophy.

Then one day, literally out of nowhere, God’s mercy reached me. I was given a brief vision of my sins; not my major ones, but my everyday ones. I realized these were enough to offend a holy God, and if God was worthy of being worshiped at all, He must be holy. I realized I was heading to hell without Christ.

That began my (and my husband’s) turnaround. We recommitted our lives to Christ. Slowly we got rid of all our witchcraft stuff. Slowly we relearned our faith and learned for the first time why it was intellectually logical to be a Christian. We struggled—struggled with emotional issues from the past, struggled with the idea of being part of a church again, and fought through some pretty weird spiritual attacks, but through God’s mercy and grace, we gradually grew in our faith.

We were baptized New Years’ Eve, 2001. For both of us, this was our statement that we were turning our lives completely over to God, that we were done holding on to the past, and we were ready to serve Him completely. We destroyed the rest of our occult material. And we came to the realization that, although God had forgiven us for our sins, we had a responsibility to make things right—or at least as right as we could. I was immediately and powerfully convicted the day after my baptism that I needed to repent of my pro-abortion involvement specifically. I wrote the senators whose offices I had campaigned in and asked their forgiveness and begged them to support life. I wrote the head of a local crisis pregnancy center and asked about volunteering, and I started reading about pro-life issues.

At the same time, I was reading Scripture again, and I came upon the verses on women’s roles. I realized for the first time how plain they were, and that if I was going to be a Christian, I needed to accept the Bible—all of the Bible. I couldn’t just pick and choose the parts I liked. But every part of me revolted against this. It was almost enough to lead me away from my faith again, but then I started to think.

I had been in “egalitarian” movements where there is supposedly no leader. There always is, though, or the group falls apart. There is always a leader, there is always someone in charge. They won’t admit it, but everyone knows that to get the really good opportunities, to have your ideas heard, and to be taken seriously by the group, you had to be in with “so-and-so,” who wasn’t in “leadership” but was the de facto leader. If no leader emerges, the group will dissolve. That is why Wiccan covens, which are supposedly leaderless (the role of the High Priestess is nothing like the role of a pastor, and often rotates within the group), usually have a lifespan of two years or less. If they last longer it is because someone—in conflict with their own principles—has emerged as the one “in charge.” Thinking of this really helped me to understand why there had to be a leader.

So, why the man? In my own experience with married couples (and in my own marriage) I had noticed that men tended to be, if left on their own, perfectly willing to go to work, come home, and leave the rest to their wives. Women seemed to be, if left on their own, perfectly willing to run everything, not leaving any room for the man. The man usually reacted to this by becoming domineering or by becoming totally neglectful. This had not happened in my marriage, but I could see the seeds of it in our personalities and in the errors we tended towards. But the ideal of servant leadership was opposed to either extreme. A servant leader would acknowledge his wife as the weaker vessel and get up with his baby in the middle of the night so his wife could sleep, even though he had to go to work in the morning. It would mean taking on more, not less, responsibility, and being more, not less, attentive and responsive to the needs of his wife and children. To love as Christ loved the Church—what an obligation! What a command!

Meanwhile, my son was doing his best to throw all my ideas about gender-neutral parenting out the window. I had always thought that mom and dad were interchangeable, and that mom could be the traditional “father” role if need be, and vice versa. My husband’s failure to lactate and my son’s insistence on being comforted by me when he was ill or upset was messing all this up. Why my son wanted me I had no idea. My husband is a very kind, gentle, patient man who can be functional on very little sleep. I am ready to move to Hawaii by myself when I’m woken up for the third time in the middle of the night. Since my son’s infancy, my husband has rocked, bathed, changed diapers, got up for nighttime wakings, and been as involved as any father could possibly be. And yet, even when my son had been nursed, if he was ill, upset, or in some way distraught, he wanted me.

He also had the nerve to protest to my going back to school. I had worked out my classes so that I was gone only 10-15 hours a week—an average of about two hours a day. My financial aid provided a good portion of our income, and I was convinced I would need the intellectual challenge of school. I only had two years left anyway, and since the beginning of our marriage we had planned on me being the main breadwinner. Due to some financial aid issues with my husband’s school, he was no longer attending college and was working full-time, which made my getting a degree and being able to provide even more essential. Most people thought it was the absolute ideal situation, especially since my mother or my husband was watching my son while I was in class. I knew that the care they provided was excellent. I knew my mother gave him every attention and doted on him.

Yet it still had several immediate negative effects. I had a very expensive, double electric breast pump, and my body refused to release milk for that thing. We eventually had to completely supplement while I was at school, which crushed me. I consulted three lactation consultants, Le Leche League, and a nurse. I tried all the supplements, all the advice, but still I could not get enough from the pump to provide a supply for my son while I was not there. My supply was fine when I was there, but nothing for the pump (I have since learned that this is not uncommon, and that pumped breast milk, while superior to formula, is still inferior to straight from the source breastmilk). My son became very attached to the bottle, despite only getting one or two a day, and began to prefer it and his pacifier to me at feeding time, but he also became very clingy, and bedtimes became a nightly ordeal. He refused to nurse to sleep, and became panicky when he got tired. His personality changed. I was lost and frustrated. I had been home with him exclusively the first four months. He was in very high quality care in my home for very short periods a day. And yet it wasn’t enough. He wanted me, he needed me.

I was also confused by my reaction to our separation. I missed him. I wasn’t as “intellectually stimulated” at college as I thought I would be, especially once I realized how little of it was education and how much of it was anti-Christian propaganda. 10-15 hours was just enough time away to make me feel as though I could do neither job well. Despite my husband’s help and support, things were always chaotic. I was trying to be a homemaker mom and be a working mom at the same time, and it wasn’t working. I’d miss school when my son was sick, only to suffer for it later. I’d have a rough night with him and have to rely on coffee and sugar to make it through the day. My heart was at home, and when I was at home, my head was at school. I realized I could not serve two masters, and realized that to be a good student (and eventually a good employee), I would have to detach from my son to a certain extent. I would have to learn to leave him with a sitter or Dad when he was sick, or to walk out of the door when he was crying. I would have to accept I could not be there when he needed me all the time. I would have to accept I would miss things. I was unwilling to do this, but wasn’t quite ready to let go of college and a career. I was terrified of our financial future, of my parents’ disappointment, and my pride was hurt. Everyone said when we got married that it was going to be such a big mistake because “You’ll have kids and you won’t finish college” and here I was going to be proving them right. I would have failed—I would just be another poor, young college dropout—a statistic. The only mothers who supposedly did this were mothers who were too stupid to do anything else, or who had rich husbands, right?

Into my confusion came three gifts from God. One was Dr. Brenda Hunter’s excellent book Home by Choice, which gave the scientific evidence to explain what I was experiencing. Her section on the emotional vunerability of boys was especially enlightening. Another gift was Shelia Kippley (Couple to Couple League) and her article “The Crucial First Three Years,” which not only had major scientific evidence, but also had the guts to say that it was important that the woman, not the man, was home. This completely convinced my husband, who was only waiting for my decision. He did not once mention the costs to himself, only his concern that I would feel guilty having left college. The third gift was the book The Way Home by Mary Pride, which confirmed the nagging feeling I felt whenever I looked at Titus 2:5. Finally, there came the day when, as I walked out the door to go to school, I looked back at my son and my mother in the window. My son was crying, reaching for me even through the glass. I decided then and there that I would never go back again, and I didn’t. I didn’t even finish out that day.

There have been costs and struggles, and there still are. My past and the spiritual issues involved in it have not magically gone away. I am trying to learn how to be a homemaker, and trying to teach myself the feminine arts and other skills that have been lost. Financially, we have struggled severely. I am often tempted back, especially when my two-career, nominally Christian friends have it so seemingly easy. But there have been major rewards as well. My faith has grown in astounding ways. I finally have a true, consistent worldview to show my children. I am enjoying relearning how to be a feminine woman, even though it has been excruciatingly painful at times. It has been a witness to Christ in ways I could not have dreamed. My son (and now a daughter and another child on the way) are flourishing. I can see the difference between them and the children of parents who both work.. “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and yet lose his soul?” (Matthew 16:26) What would it have done to gain all this worldly success and either lose my soul or lose my children’s souls, or their hearts and minds? Titus 2:5 says that when women are not keepers at home, the word of God is blasphemed, or discredited.

This is easy to see when you have been in feminism. Feminism is a completely consistent philosophy when it comes to rejecting God and His will for our lives. When the church, or those in the church, embrace feminism but try to hold on to Christianity, they are living and acting in an inconsistent manner. They are trying to be both of the world and of God. It will not work. If barebones faith is maintained, holiness is lost, and it is only an authentic, holy, consistant Christian faith and practice that the next generation will embrace. The reason why so many leave Christianity for the world is easy enough to understand. If you can ignore or reinterpret (often with the blessing of the church) the “hard passages” on women, why not the “hard passages” such as “I am the way, the truth, and the life”?

These were not the final steps in my journey towards Biblical womanhood. I would eventually reject contraception as part of a Christian marriage, rejoining the conviction of all Christians up until the Planned Parenthood agenda entered the church. Through the LAF site, I would be introduced to the concept of homemaking (although I was home, I had no idea what necessarily to do there for a long time) and to modesty. And it is a journey I am still traveling, as I try, with the grace of God, to put my past behind me and become a new creation in Him.


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