Stay-at-home daughterhood is one practice among a set of beliefs often referred to as “Christian patriarchy” (and in its less rigid forms, “complementarianism”), which places men’s authority over women and fathers’ authority over children. As the name suggests, stay-at-home daughters aren’t supposed to go to college or have a career proponents describe independent women and egalitarian men as “destructive of civilization.”įor the uninitiated, it can be hard to believe such faith-based oppression still exists in 21st-century America. Her wifely training includes helping to raise siblings and mastering what such families call “advanced homemaking skills,” ranging from menu planning and budgeting to interior design and disaster preparation. She’s homeschooled to protect her from worldly ideas and made to mimic her mother’s “helpmeet” role (a Scripture-inspired term defining women as their husbands’ helpers) until her mid- to late teens or early 20s, when her father approves a husband. “Stay-at-home daughter” is a term used in some evangelical fundamentalist Christian homes to describe a woman who lives at home until marriage and is raised to submit to male authority. They were a result of following the lead of others at the family’s church, her mother says. “I had dreams and ideas outside of this box I was put in, and I just wanted so very much to be normal.” If you ask Skelton’s mother, many of her daughter’s strict rules were self-imposed.
“As a stay-at-home daughter, there are so many expectations that your subculture has of you,” Skelton says.
Homeschooling was the way to train her “up in the way of the Lord,” she remembers being told, so Skelton memorized Bible verses and read books like those from the 19th-century Elsie Dinsmore children’s series-tales of a pious girl who struggled to remain submissive to a spiritually dubious father-in a windowless storage room in the back of her dad’s orthodontics office.