Book Review: A Well-Trained Wife

Reading Time: 3 minutes

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Leroy Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

In the memoir A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy, Tia Levings recounts her time in an abusive marriage. While there is no “typical” abusive marriage, the patriarchal teachings of the church her family attended enabled her husband’s abuse and kept it hidden. Levings’s story is compelling and upsetting to read. It may be especially hard going for people who come from abusive pasts. But it’s an important book, and worth paying attention to.

Levings and I are contemporaries. We are about the same age and we started our families at the same time. I visited many of the same homeschool online forums she mentions, and I occasionally read her blog.

But despite that, our paths were quite different. Early on, she and her husband were heavily influenced by the quiverfull movement. While this was never a monolithic group, the people they encountered followed the teachings of authors like the Ezzos, the Pearls, Doug Phillips, and Bill Gothard.¹ These teachers promised that if you followed their “system” of living, good results would follow. If you are godly enough, submit enough, and discipline your children correctly, you will have a happier life.

As her husband’s mental illness and abuse increased, Levings kept leaning in to these teachings. She worked harder, thrifted harder, and scheduled her time more strictly. She hoped that if she could do everything perfectly, her marriage would improve. The times she did seek advice, she was told to repent and be more submissive. She kept trying to bend herself to her husband’s will, but stability continued to elude her.

One of the strange conundrums of this strict form of biblical patriarchy is its teaching that all the leadership falls on the husband, while all the weight of the marriage is placed on the wife. Levings was told not to bother her husband with problems or concerns, to keep the house spotless and the children content. It is as if the man is in charge of everything—as long as he doesn’t have to deal with the reality of life in a large family.

Because I know how the Internet works, I knew what the criticisms of the book would be before I looked at the online reviews. Some critics say the issue wasn’t the teaching, it was her husband’s mental illness. And there are of course the critics who say she should have seen it coming and never married him (which once again shifts the blame back to the victim).

I wish she had been more precise in some of her categorizations, rather than labeling her former church’s theology as simply Calvinism. However, since I am having trouble coming up with a label that encompasses all the beliefs of her former church—quiverfull, federal husbands, mandated homeschooling, family-integrated worship, paedocommunion, and domestic discipline (which is just a whitewashed name for physical abuse)—I can see the difficulty. Some teachers and authors she mentions, especially the Ezzos, were associated with broader evangelicalism in the nineties and early aughts. There is also a glaring error where she states that John MacArthur was the head of the Southern Baptist Convention, when John MacArthur isn’t even Southern Baptist.²

That, however, is not the point. It saddened me how easy it was for Levings’s family to hide in plain sight. I wish someone had bothered to ask “Do you feel safe at home?” or “What do you mean when you say you’re fighting a lot?” rather than telling her to repent of her sins and submit to her husband.

And like the slip of a hand beneath the ocean’s waves, nobody saw me vanish as they focused on what I did instead of who I was. Tia Levings, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy

It’s easy for people who grew up in happy homes with happy marriages to naively think everyone’s life looks like theirs. We have the luxury to forget that some families have secrets, with a carefully cultivated persona they show to the world. Which is why I think anyone who disciples women should consider reading this book. Like many women in abusive marriages, Levings was reluctant to admit how bad things were. She repeatedly offered pieces of her story, but nobody tried to delve deeper. Instead, they offered trite answers that caused her to retreat back into silence.

I stayed home and homeschooled for many years and enjoyed it. Many couples choose to have large families. And of course reformed theology is not the issue. Each of these categories include women who are safe and thriving. One could also debate whether their church’s teaching worsened her husband’s abuse or if that was what drew him in the first place. But Levings lays out the dangers of when preferences become mandates, and when women are seen as problems to control rather than fellow image-bearers to be loved and valued.

1. It is worth noting that Gary Ezzo, Doug Phillips, and Bill Gothard have since been removed from their ministries. ↩︎
2. MacArthur was mentioned due to his then-association with the Ezzos. Gary Ezzo and Grace Community Church parted ways after the elders of the church raised concerns about Ezzo’s teaching.
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