Will Biblical Womanhood Box You In or Set You Free?

Cleveland, Tennessee, is deep in evangelical country. It’s the home of the Church of God, a major Pentecostal denomination, and not too far from the town where prosecutors went after a schoolteacher on charges of teaching evolution during the Scopes “monkey trial” a hundred years ago. Still, even there, in the reddest part of red America, the girlboss has infiltrated.

Emma Waters was a senior at Lee University, a Christian school in Cleveland, when the girlboss struck. Waters was close to achieving her dreams. She had piled up academic honors, and she was planning a move to Washington, D.C. But there was an obstacle: her boyfriend, Jack, had started talking about marriage. “The idea of beginning life as a wife and mother felt like a major letdown after years of working hard in college to prepare for a career in politics,” she writes in a new book, “Lead Like Jael” (Regnery). “Somehow, I had gotten this idea that prioritizing marriage and children earlier in life is what you do if you lack ambition.” There it was, creeping in: the girlboss world view, in which the best kind of life is one you define for yourself. She broke up with Jack.

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