Trad wives are all the rage on social media, but Tia Levings reveals the dark underbelly to being a wife in a deeply conservative Christian marriage in “A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy (Macmillan, Aug. 6).” Levings was raised in a Southern Baptist church that railed against homosexuality and abortion while encouraging women to marry early and procreate. She met her future husband Allan at 18 and married him the following year despite numerous red flags including physical violence.
Despite Allan’s protests, Levings remained a virgin during their year of courtship. However their wedding night was certainly not the stuff of romance novels. Allan “tore into me like long-awaited mail, shocking me with dry, hard stabs and strokes,” she writes. “I gasped from searing pain as my skin broke, and then my body went numb.” Four days later, Levings went to see a doctor who told her she had a terrible infection and advised her to take a rest because “your body can’t handle that much battering.”
Things only worsened as Allan became more immersed in strict Calvinist theology. At one point he insisted that Levings call him “My Lord” and “submit” to his every want. Other traditional wives advised her to follow the tenets of the controversial Institute in Basic Life Principles, which stresses the absolute “surrender” of wives to husbands.
Levings bore five children and home-schooled her brood. She desperately tried to please her husband, but it was never enough. He constantly berated her, calling her a “s–t mother and s–t Christian.” However, Levings managed to carve out a tiny scrap of independence by frequenting public libraries, penning a blog and connecting with other women online. Eventually Levings realized that she “liked writer-Tia way more than church-Tia” and fled her marriage in 2007. The memoir ends on a happyish note. She remarried but is now divorced and has devoted herself to exposing the perils of Christian fundamentalism.
Today, the activist describes herself as a “mother, writer, artist, hiker, friend,” adding, ”I’m a human soul on a journey home and I belong to me.”
