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Quiverfull
Quiverfull - Growing in Size and Influence
Quiverfull - Research Resources

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Articles

'Arrows for the War' Kathryn Joyce, The Nation, posted November 9, 2006 (November 27, 2006 issue)

The Case Against Birth Control [Pro] by Nate Wilson

Extreme Motherhood "Understanding Quiverfull, the antifeminist, conservative Christian movement that motivates popular reality-TV families like the Duggars." Kathryn Joyce, Newsweek, May 17, 2009
At the heart of this reality-show depiction of "extreme motherhood" is a growing conservative Christian emphasis on the importance of women submitting to their husbands and fathers, an antifeminist backlash that holds that gender equality is contrary to God's law and that women's highest calling is as wives and "prolific" mothers.
Mary Pride, an early homeschooling leader whose 1985 book "The Way Home: Beyond Feminism, Back to Reality" is a founding text of Quiverfull, convinced many readers that regulating one's fertility is a slippery slope. "Family planning is the mother of abortion," she writes. "A generation had to be indoctrinated in the ideal of planning children around personal convenience before abortion could be popular." Instead, Pride and her peers argue, Christians should leave family planning in God's hands, and become "maternal missionaries": birthing as many children as He gives them as both a demonstration of radical faith and obedience, as well as a plan to effect Christian revival in the culture through demographic means—that is, by having more children than their political opponents.
[...]
It's this ideological grounding, tying the Quiverfull conviction to growing anticontraception efforts among abortion opponents worldwide, that makes Quiverfull arguments relevant far beyond the movement's small but growing numbers. (As a movement, it likely numbers in the tens of thousands, though hard numbers are not available.)
[...]
Quiverfull doesn't follow from any particular church's teachings but rather is a conviction shared by evangelical and fundamentalist Christians across denominational lines, often spread through the burgeoning conservative homeschooling community, which the U.S. Department of Education estimates has more than 1 million school-age children, and which homeschooling groups say easily has twice that number.

Books

A Full Quiver [Pro] by Rick and Jan Hess

Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement [Contra] by Kathryn Joyce

Journalist Joyce has conducted a groundbreaking investigation of a little-known movement among Christian evangelicals that rejects birth control and encourages couples to have as many children as possible.
The movement, which takes its name from a verse in Psalm 127, advocates a retreat from society and a rejection of government policies that encourage equal rights for women, pregnancy prevention and an individualistic ethic. Quiverfull families share with more mainline Protestant groups, such as the Southern Baptist Convention, a belief that wives should submit to their husbands. But the group goes further by insisting that children be homeschooled and daughters forgo a college education in favor of early marriage and childbearing.
The book probes a San Antonio–based ministry called Vision Forum, which began as a Christian homeschooling resource and now promotes "biblical patriarchy" through seminars and retreats. Members of the movement use militaristic metaphors and see themselves waging a war to win back the culture and rescue American society. The book lacks an in-depth historical account of the movement's connections to 19th- and 20th-century American fundamentalism or its accommodation with modernity, especially its heavy use of Internet blogs. Yet future historians and journalists will owe Joyce a debt of gratitude for her foray into this still nascent religious group. (Mar.)
- Source: Publishers Weekly as cited by Amazon.com

The Way Home: Beyond Feminism, Back to Reality [Pro] by Mary Pride. Seen as a founding text of Quiverfull.

Web Sites

QuiverFull.com
BlesssedArrows.org

Quiverfull - Growing in Size and Influence

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