Creating arrows for God

Babble has a really interesting article on the Quiverfull movement.

That's a broad enough standard to allow for various interpretations, including mainstream beliefs that children should help out in the family and not expect to always have their way. In the Quiverfull movement, which graduates new believers from accepting many children to a deeper study of movement literature about women's submission to the headship of the fathers and husbands, it often becomes a lifestyle of rigid hierarchy and duty. Many women who have left the movement say that the experience of Quiverfull daughters is to learn early that their role is limited to the domestic and that their highest calling is in becoming mothers and wives. It can be a life of crushing toil, as former Quiverfull believer Cheryl Lindsey Seelhoff explains. "The Quiverfull movement holds up as examples men like the Duggars . . . all men of means. But for every family like this, there are ten or fifty or one hundred Quiverfull families living in what most would consider to be poverty.... Mothers are in a constant cycle, often, of pregnancy, breastfeeding, and the care of toddlers."

I didn't like the idea of this before. This article leaves me aching for little girls raised this way. My own great-grandparents had 14, though they had only 3 girls. All three, Mabel (who was fourth oldest), Bernice (#6) and Grace (#14), were expected to help. My great-grandparents kept all three girls out of school as much as possible, and all three girls ran off and got married at 16 to escape, and each had at least five kids of her own.