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Josh and Anna 55: Settling in at Seagoville


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11 hours ago, Sullie06 said:

So I can only speak to our specialized treatment,, but there is a period of intense, high impact treatment and that portion lasts about 18-24 months. During that time the offender has to participate in both group and individual counseling, they have to attend victim advocacy groups, they will incorporate re-unification if the victim would like to do so (often time with family offenses), they address other needs if they present (mental health, substance use, housing concerns, employment) and they must complete a specialized "educational" program as well. Once they "graduate" the program they then transition to after care which is less intense but still requires them to have 1-1 sessions, usually at least a couple times a month with a licensed therapist who specializes in "problematic sexual behaviors."

But is that only towards the end of the incarceration? It seems like it should be at the beginning and then have the less intense therapy for the rest of it to give them a fair amount of time to adjust to healthy behaviors before being thrust back into society. 

What is the recidivism rate? Does it very by behavior? 

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Personally I think he should have treatment from the moment he walks in the door but prisons don’t care what I think.

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I wonder whether Anna is considering or in therapy.  M7's first birthday is approaching and Anna can't make an M8 by herself.  I expect she misses Josh.  She has to try to raise healthy kids essentially alone for the next decade or so while trying to stay in the good graces of those willing to help.  Hopefully no one is openly blaming her for Josh's behavior, but it wouldn't surprise me if she has felt an undercurrent of it.

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1 hour ago, Dandruff said:

I wonder whether Anna is considering or in therapy.  M7's first birthday is approaching and Anna can't make an M8 by herself.  I expect she misses Josh.  She has to try to raise healthy kids essentially alone for the next decade or so while trying to stay in the good graces of those willing to help.  Hopefully no one is openly blaming her for Josh's behavior, but it wouldn't surprise me if she has felt an undercurrent of it.

Even if no one else is blaming her, she probably blames herself because the fucked up way her family and cult raised her. 

And no, I don't think she will get therapy, since her cult is anti-therapy and believes that prayer will solve everything. 

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20 hours ago, Melissa1977 said:

The "typical" perfect 1950's family portrait was always a well-off family with few children. Quiverful fundies are nostalgic about a life that involved birth control and fathers with accredited degrees, two things they actually hate.

I think they are more nostalgic for an idealized “frontier” life along the lines of Little House on the Prairie.  I think also the “typical” 1950s family you refer to had room for skilled labor and even factory workers.  They didn’t all have college degrees, but they all aspired to send their kids to college — which seems the opposite of these quiverful fundies.

 

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18 hours ago, Antimony said:

There's a book on this, that is unfortunately collecting dust on my shelf right now but I've been meaning to read, called "The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap" by Stephanie Coontz. I hear good things. 

I've always found this nostalgia a little strange because even the most obvious media examples disprove it, and it seems weird that our cultural memory is so short and so easily retconned. I'm relatively young, and I wasn't all that conscious for any pre-third millennia happenings, but still. My avatar gives it away that I'm a big MASH fan and while those are people in the 70's writing about the 50's, they're people who were there for the 50's writing about it as adults, with a pretty clear set of spicy opinions on it. We see a lot of blurring between the 50s and the 70s in MASH, but we get all the "sinful" greatest hits -- premarital sex, adultery, alluding to queerness, cross-dressing, alcoholism. And then just...Hitchcock's work. Sure, maybe Psycho (1960) comes out a little late for the Ultimate Fundie Nostalgia Era but Rope might be one of the most fricked up films I've ever seen and that comes out in 1948. It's weird that this whole myth is so easily destroyed by like...just a little contemporary or next-generation media. This is also just such a surface level take down, but it's weird to me that Fundies lean towards "old media must be wholesome" and I'm like, "Sweet, I can show the kids Hitchcock's work?"

In any case, I started this post because of my favorite etmology fun fact and then I got all fired up, but I can here to note that the word "husband" can be split into "hus" and "band" which makes it obvious that it comes from "house" and "bond" where "bond" refers more to a meaning of "to dwell". So, "Guy that stays in his house" or, sometimes, "a fellow who keeps a house". It's a little associated with ideas of owning land but it also alludes to how much work keeping a household was in The Oldey Times and how much of what we might consider "women's housework" would have traditionally been shared by men, housebuns. You have to add "house" to get "housewife". In some ways, "house husband" is redundant, which is...funny to me. None of this is really a huge takedown of their Nostalgia Delusion, but I think this would make some Fundies just a little irked. 

Leaving Eden did recently do a very good re-read of Proverbs 31 through a feminist Christian lens as a means of reclaiming it and pointing out the weird way fundies read it, which was very good, as well. 

The Stephanie Coontz book is great, so dust it off.  I think I recommended it recently in one of these forums, I am such a big fan.  It really clarifies (for the 1990s) that the past that people idealize was not really true for most people.

 I am also a huge MASH fan. The tension between the tragedy of war and the comic impulse to survive is what I like best—plus I had a bit of a crush on Alan Alda in my 20s. You are right that it also does a good job of addressing many of the social issues of the 70s by showing how they were relevant in the 50s also.

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20 hours ago, Melissa1977 said:

The "typical" perfect 1950's family portrait was always a well-off family with few children. Quiverful fundies are nostalgic about a life that involved birth control and fathers with accredited degrees, two things they actually hate.

Also a life that involved vaccines, scientism, rationalism, optimism about modern social advances, high-school for everyone, an ideal of steady employment in corporate jobs, educating women, being part of a community, the importance of socialising as opposed to isolating your family... they really, really don't promote these things. Their mentality is completely alien to the 1950s.

I have tried to find a cultural model for the kind of housewife "modern" fundies promote. I couldn't find one.

Homeschooling/homechurching as well as the "let's show our ideal family to the public as a role model"-behaviour some fundies practice has historically been an aristocratic thing, yet the old nobility had actual jobs in politics and the military instead of isolating themselves from the rest of the country. Some of these families seem to fantasize about those careers (pseudo-Medicorps, pseudo-boot camp, obsession with aviation, didn't Duggar senior run for some kind of office ?), yet they are objectively powerless and uninvolved with wider society.

 

20 minutes ago, EmCatlyn said:

I think they are more nostalgic for an idealized “frontier” life along the lines of Little House on the Prairie.  

"Frontier life" also calls for the women to work for a living ; on the farm, in the family business, as a schoolteacher... having a grown woman be completely idle was a luxury for most people for most time periods. Isolated religious groups are the best fit, yet those require people to actually be part of a community as opposed to submitting exclusively to the father.

Refusing to leave home to work didn't even make sense in an economy where consumer goods were produced inside the home : if you own a chicken coop, you will collect excess eggs that need to be sold ; if you spin flax, you will occasionally get a good harvest and end up with too much thread --> women had to sell things on the market all the time.

Having a stay-at-home wife was a status symbol for the post-Industrial Revolution middle class, however, those people were educated, hired other women to work for them (meaning they weren't ideologically opposed to women working) and also drastically limited their family sizes by whatever means necessary (there was something like a moral panic in Western Europe in the 1890s about birth control because the middle class just refused to have a lot of children). The 1950s "ideal family" was built on this 19th-century idea.

Modern fundie families tend to generate income through remote work : Etsy shops, "influencer"-gigs, blogs etc. All of these occupations are tied to the internet era. I marvel at the cognitive dissonance.

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And part of the reason the Duggars had a good, financial base was because they delayed reproduction for a time and  JB and M both worked. Also, it’s likely Mary gifted them some cash for their starter home. Parents can do that when they have fewer kids. Rolling out kid after kid is unhealthy and irresponsible. 

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6 hours ago, EmCatlyn said:

The Stephanie Coontz book is great, so dust it off.  I think I recommended it recently in one of these forums, I am such a big fan.  It really clarifies (for the 1990s) that the past that people idealize was not really true for most people.

 I am also a huge MASH fan. The tension between the tragedy of war and the comic impulse to survive is what I like best—plus I had a bit of a crush on Alan Alda in my 20s. You are right that it also does a good job of addressing many of the social issues of the 70s by showing how they were relevant in the 50s also.

Early seasons of MASH are a little rough, but it always impresses me in the attention to detail and how accurate the set is. There are photos from the Korean War that are indistinguishable from any given still of MASH, and I feel like the consultant team that was eventually procured (based on all visible evidence) was doing an incredible job. At some point, they ditch the plates in the Mess Hall because I assume somebody told them to, and the medical episodes in later seasons are absolutely accurate. (Hawk does move between patients in an episode in Season 1 without changing gloves, but that gets better over time, and I think this and the Plate Thing tell me they were bringing more and more consultants on board.) The episode featuring Korean hemorrhagic fever is on point, made all the more impressive by how specific that is. So, I tend to trust what MASH is commenting on, just because the attention to detail on other aspects is so impressive. 

I still have a crush on Alan Alda, and I'm still (barely) in my twenties. 😛 

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8 hours ago, FiveAcres said:

And no, I don't think she will get therapy, since her cult is anti-therapy and believes that prayer will solve everything. 

I think it’s possible Anna is in therapy, but it would be church approved therapy and will ultimately be more damaging than if she had never gone in the first place. 

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33 minutes ago, viii said:

I think it’s possible Anna is in therapy, but it would be church approved therapy and will ultimately be more damaging than if she had never gone in the first place. 

IIRC, Anna (or someone) said that she and Josh saw a marriage counselor after he returned from Jesus jail.  I'd imagine it was a Christian "approved" counselor but don't remember any specifics.

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18 hours ago, ignorantobserver said:

Also a life that involved vaccines, scientism, rationalism, optimism about modern social advances, high-school for everyone, an ideal of steady employment in corporate jobs, educating women, being part of a community, the importance of socialising as opposed to isolating your family... they really, really don't promote these things. Their mentality is completely alien to the 1950s.

I have tried to find a cultural model for the kind of housewife "modern" fundies promote. I couldn't find one.

Homeschooling/homechurching as well as the "let's show our ideal family to the public as a role model"-behaviour some fundies practice has historically been an aristocratic thing, yet the old nobility had actual jobs in politics and the military instead of isolating themselves from the rest of the country. Some of these families seem to fantasize about those careers (pseudo-Medicorps, pseudo-boot camp, obsession with aviation, didn't Duggar senior run for some kind of office ?), yet they are objectively powerless and uninvolved with wider society.

 

"Frontier life" also calls for the women to work for a living ; on the farm, in the family business, as a schoolteacher... having a grown woman be completely idle was a luxury for most people for most time periods. Isolated religious groups are the best fit, yet those require people to actually be part of a community as opposed to submitting exclusively to the father.

Refusing to leave home to work didn't even make sense in an economy where consumer goods were produced inside the home : if you own a chicken coop, you will collect excess eggs that need to be sold ; if you spin flax, you will occasionally get a good harvest and end up with too much thread --> women had to sell things on the market all the time.

Having a stay-at-home wife was a status symbol for the post-Industrial Revolution middle class, however, those people were educated, hired other women to work for them (meaning they weren't ideologically opposed to women working) and also drastically limited their family sizes by whatever means necessary (there was something like a moral panic in Western Europe in the 1890s about birth control because the middle class just refused to have a lot of children). The 1950s "ideal family" was built on this 19th-century idea.

Modern fundie families tend to generate income through remote work : Etsy shops, "influencer"-gigs, blogs etc. All of these occupations are tied to the internet era. I marvel at the cognitive dissonance.

I agree that the fundies we are discussing don’t follow any real historical model, but the “stay at home wife” they idealize is precisely the “pioneer woman” who works hard at home.  That is why they are so fond of little “home businesses.”

While it is true that a lot of these fundies are far lazier and less ambitious than pioneer families, the model they seem to have in mind is the “self-sufficient farm family.”  Even the men do not like to work for anyone else if they can avoid it.  Internet businesses have given them a chance to pursue the “stay home and stay clear of bosses” goals without actually having to plant and raise crops, clean and can fruit and vegetables, etc.

They love modern conveniences, and definitely do not oppose technology.  They just don’t trust any education that might help people think for themselves. And since they are so ignorant, they don’t really understand the many ways their model is faulty.  

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13 hours ago, Antimony said:

Early seasons of MASH are a little rough, but it always impresses me in the attention to detail and how accurate the set is. There are photos from the Korean War that are indistinguishable from any given still of MASH, and I feel like the consultant team that was eventually procured (based on all visible evidence) was doing an incredible job. At some point, they ditch the plates in the Mess Hall because I assume somebody told them to, and the medical episodes in later seasons are absolutely accurate. (Hawk does move between patients in an episode in Season 1 without changing gloves, but that gets better over time, and I think this and the Plate Thing tell me they were bringing more and more consultants on board.) The episode featuring Korean hemorrhagic fever is on point, made all the more impressive by how specific that is. So, I tend to trust what MASH is commenting on, just because the attention to detail on other aspects is so impressive. 

I still have a crush on Alan Alda, and I'm still (barely) in my twenties. 😛 

Well, the real-life Alan Alda was too old for me and is way too old for you, but Hawkeye will be youngish forever. (Late 20s/early 30s though the actor was older.)  My thing was I admired him as a person also.  He was an honest-to-goodness feminist, seemingly a devoted husband… but on TV he was a sexy “available” guy  as well as a dedicated doctor.  What not to have a crush on? (Perfect package.) 

I started watching MASH just when it was getting good.  I think BJ and Colonel Potter were new but Frank Burns was still around.  I agree that the earlier episodes are not as strong. They became more concerned about accuracy (about everything except the hairstyles) as time went on.  

They didn’t do so well about Korea and Koreans, but they got the military and US culture down pretty effectively.  (They did improve on the Koreans as the show went on.  I remember in an early episode, they had a Korean girl named “Kim.”  (That is a family name, not a woman’s name in Korea.)  By the last few seasons, the names were right, and they were showing not only ignorant peasants but courageous people of some sophistication among the Korean characters.  It was a great show.

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Yes to Alan Alda being a feminist and devoted husband of over 65 years to his wife Arlene. Hell of an actor and overall good person. He’s the real deal. I loved MASH when it was on prime time. My dad mostly controlled what we watched on tv in the evenings, but it was always me who went in the living room Sunday nights at 8 oclock and turned the channel to MASH. No one in the house including my dad had any complaints, anyone who was home at that time meandered into the room to watch. 

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On 8/5/2022 at 9:24 AM, Giraffe said:

Thanks @Sullie06. How long does the after care typically last? Is it something where he could be in actual therapy for his 20 years’ probation?

In terms of our Probationers we follow the recommendation of the treatment provider. So they have to remain in services and engage until they are successfully discharged  by the therapy team. 

On 8/5/2022 at 8:44 PM, anjulibai said:

But is that only towards the end of the incarceration? It seems like it should be at the beginning and then have the less intense therapy for the rest of it to give them a fair amount of time to adjust to healthy behaviors before being thrust back into society. 

What is the recidivism rate? Does it very by behavior? 

I’m a probation officer so our offenders are not incarcerated. Their treatment begins as soon after sentencing as we can get them into treatment. 
 

Recidivism definitely varies person to person. If they do not admit what they did was wrong, if they don’t actively engage in treatment, if they were already repeat offenders the recidivism rate is much higher. 

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22 hours ago, Dandruff said:

IIRC, Anna (or someone) said that she and Josh saw a marriage counselor after he returned from Jesus jail.  I'd imagine it was a Christian "approved" counselor but don't remember any specifics.

Yes, I remember discussing Anna’s “counseling” back then.  It was definitely religious based and probably something connected to their cult, unfortunately.  She and Joshua also had (religious) couples counseling when he got out of Jesus Jail.

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13 hours ago, EmCatlyn said:

 Even the men do not like to work for anyone else if they can avoid it.  Internet businesses have given them a chance to pursue the “stay home and stay clear of bosses” goals without actually having to plant and raise crops, clean and can fruit and vegetables, etc.

They love modern conveniences, and definitely do not oppose technology.  They just don’t trust any education that might help people think for themselves. And since they are so ignorant, they don’t really understand the many ways their model is faulty.  

Yes, I'm pretty sure this was actively taught by IBLP/ATI. Bill Gothard emphasized owning your own business and setting up your sons to be independent providers via small businesses. Once again, the privileged oblivion that ignores the fact that for every Duggar family that is able to somehow swing that there are thousands of others living in poverty b/c an uneducated man with little connections has a small chance of succeeding just out of the blue. 

I think today's fundies go down the rabbit hole of anti-government, anti-libs polarized thinking (often led by their wives on social media). It's not a huge leap to hobby farms or living off the land or some hybrid between the two. 

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On 8/6/2022 at 6:22 AM, FiveAcres said:

 

And no, I don't think she will get therapy, since her cult is anti-therapy and believes that prayer will solve everything. 

I mean, it obviously worked with Smuggar.  

You'd think at some point they'd catch on that, nope, doesn't solve everything.  

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13 hours ago, EmCatlyn said:

Well, the real-life Alan Alda was too old for me and is way too old for you.

Hey, I'm certainly not afraid to give it a shot. 😜

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14 hours ago, EmCatlyn said:

While it is true that a lot of these fundies are far lazier and less ambitious than pioneer families, the model they seem to have in mind is the “self-sufficient farm family.”  Even the men do not like to work for anyone else if they can avoid it.  Internet businesses have given them a chance to pursue the “stay home and stay clear of bosses” goals without actually having to plant and raise crops, clean and can fruit and vegetables, etc.

But before Etsy, every single fundie woman would have had to sell her earrings or whatever on the local market by herself. "Self-sufficient" families are an intrinsically 20th/21st-century phenomenon. Before modern supply chains, convenience stores and freezers, absolutely nobody would have even tried to pretend to be in any way self-sufficient ; that would just have been ridiculous. There was no way of isolating yourself from your immediate surroundings : you were part of a community and took whatever work was available. When the Puritans were banishing people, that wasn't an alternative to life in the community but a death sentence. People planted vegetables and sold the excess on the market (canning is a 19th century invention).  People made cloth and sold the excess on the market. Whenever money was tight, women did textile work, washing or childcare for others. Whenever men were wealthy enough that their wives didn't have to work for outsiders, they immediately started hiring (female) help themselves. Working exclusively for the "family business" was a sign of social status, not a moral imperative for all women. Before modern homeschooling material became available, absolutely nobody would have deliberately chosen to have his ignorant wife "teach" his children at home ; the pretense would have been impossible to keep up.

(The reason the "Little House"-family seems to be socially isolated is that the author saw most of their historical interactions with other families as inappropriate for children and pretends they never happened ; this becomes apparent when you compare the "Little House"-books to her "adult" autobiography "Pioneer Girl". They actually lived in a community full of other people, most of whom didn't agree with them on questions of religion or morality. The females of the family took whatever work they could get, including paid contracts as employees in other people's businesses.)

What I am trying to say is that the fundie social ideal doesn't fit with their economic ideal. They call for a career that allows the father to feed his family without forcing him to hire other people. That's not the reality of small businesses: if you are successfull, you start hiring others to work for you. If you don't have enough clients, you start working for someone else instead. People who want a job that reliably feeds exactly one family but doesn't force them to hire other people need to find steady employment somewhere because that's what steady employment is. The precise "fit" between an independent business and a single family is a fantasy, especially if you also want families that vary wildly in size due to the Quiverfull stuff.

(It's a little bit out of place here, but I recently read a weird novel/sermon that sort of predates the Quiverfull mentality : Emile Zola's "Fecundity" (1899). It's a crazy read and I don't recommend it as literature, but some of the ideas he defends are very close to modern fundies - except that the guy was on the far left of the political spectrum and virulently opposed to religion. The entire thing is basically an 800 page long harangue asking middle class families to please have more children so France will have enough soldiers to beat Prussia in the next war. Zola acknowledges that a single salary can't feed a mega-family, so he has his technical drawer-protagonist move his family to the countryside after the fourth child or so. As commuting to Paris is unsustainable, the guy eventually decides to become a farmer, finds an investor and buys some land (the land is "available" because modern agricultural practices now allow the exploitation of previously useless swampland). His new career is flexible enough to adapt to his family size : he plants a new wheat field for every new baby, eventually hiring employees and older sons. It's also made clear that limited space will eventually become in issue in France, however, this is presented as rather positive : one of the sons goes on to raise a gaggle of children in the Congolese savannah. It's very close to American "settling the frontier"-narratives of the same time period, but with an unusually heavy focus on birthing as many children as possible. The reasong for having all those children is exactly the same as Gothard's : if you have a giant family, your descendants (and your country) will eventually take over the world. Hilariously, the novel also calls for what the author thinks are social changes that would help produce more babies : paid maternity leave, generous financial and practical support for pregnant teenagers, social workers, free anonymous births, free healthcare for women and children, a "sex-positive" narrative so that young women are less afraid of getting married, abandoning catholicism because catholicism values virginity and chastity too much... a lot of that stuff is "far left" even by modern standards. The novel is absolutely obsessed with babies, even by the standards of other pro-natalist authors of the time period, yet, politically, it's the polar opposite of the fundie-mentality).

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Anyone watch this guy? He seems more credible than WOACB but that isn’t saying much. 

 

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7 hours ago, ignorantobserver said:

But before Etsy, every single fundie woman would have had to sell her earrings or whatever on the local market by herself. "Self-sufficient" families are an intrinsically 20th/21st-century phenomenon. Before modern supply chains, convenience stores and freezers, absolutely nobody would have even tried to pretend to be in any way self-sufficient ; that would just have been ridiculous. There was no way of isolating yourself from your immediate surroundings : you were part of a community and took whatever work was available. When the Puritans were banishing people, that wasn't an alternative to life in the community but a death sentence. People planted vegetables and sold the excess on the market (canning is a 19th century invention).  People made cloth and sold the excess on the market. Whenever money was tight, women did textile work, washing or childcare for others. Whenever men were wealthy enough that their wives didn't have to work for outsiders, they immediately started hiring (female) help themselves. Working exclusively for the "family business" was a sign of social status, not a moral imperative for all women. Before modern homeschooling material became available, absolutely nobody would have deliberately chosen to have his ignorant wife "teach" his children at home ; the pretense would have been impossible to keep up.

(The reason the "Little House"-family seems to be socially isolated is that the author saw most of their historical interactions with other families as inappropriate for children and pretends they never happened ; this becomes apparent when you compare the "Little House"-books to her "adult" autobiography "Pioneer Girl". They actually lived in a community full of other people, most of whom didn't agree with them on questions of religion or morality. The females of the family took whatever work they could get, including paid contracts as employees in other people's businesses.)

What I am trying to say is that the fundie social ideal doesn't fit with their economic ideal. They call for a career that allows the father to feed his family without forcing him to hire other people. That's not the reality of small businesses: if you are successfull, you start hiring others to work for you. If you don't have enough clients, you start working for someone else instead. People who want a job that reliably feeds exactly one family but doesn't force them to hire other people need to find steady employment somewhere because that's what steady employment is. The precise "fit" between an independent business and a single family is a fantasy, especially if you also want families that vary wildly in size due to the Quiverfull stuff.

(It's a little bit out of place here, but I recently read a weird novel/sermon that sort of predates the Quiverfull mentality : Emile Zola's "Fecundity" (1899). It's a crazy read and I don't recommend it as literature, but some of the ideas he defends are very close to modern fundies - except that the guy was on the far left of the political spectrum and virulently opposed to religion. The entire thing is basically an 800 page long harangue asking middle class families to please have more children so France will have enough soldiers to beat Prussia in the next war. Zola acknowledges that a single salary can't feed a mega-family, so he has his technical drawer-protagonist move his family to the countryside after the fourth child or so. As commuting to Paris is unsustainable, the guy eventually decides to become a farmer, finds an investor and buys some land (the land is "available" because modern agricultural practices now allow the exploitation of previously useless swampland). His new career is flexible enough to adapt to his family size : he plants a new wheat field for every new baby, eventually hiring employees and older sons. It's also made clear that limited space will eventually become in issue in France, however, this is presented as rather positive : one of the sons goes on to raise a gaggle of children in the Congolese savannah. It's very close to American "settling the frontier"-narratives of the same time period, but with an unusually heavy focus on birthing as many children as possible. The reasong for having all those children is exactly the same as Gothard's : if you have a giant family, your descendants (and your country) will eventually take over the world. Hilariously, the novel also calls for what the author thinks are social changes that would help produce more babies : paid maternity leave, generous financial and practical support for pregnant teenagers, social workers, free anonymous births, free healthcare for women and children, a "sex-positive" narrative so that young women are less afraid of getting married, abandoning catholicism because catholicism values virginity and chastity too much... a lot of that stuff is "far left" even by modern standards. The novel is absolutely obsessed with babies, even by the standards of other pro-natalist authors of the time period, yet, politically, it's the polar opposite of the fundie-mentality).

I never said that the fundies had a realistic historical model.  I was trying to say that their ideal was not a 1950s that never was but a “pioneer times that never was.”  😉

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8 hours ago, ignorantobserver said:

(The reason the "Little House"-family seems to be socially isolated is that the author saw most of their historical interactions with other families as inappropriate for children and pretends they never happened ; this becomes apparent when you compare the "Little House"-books to her "adult" autobiography "Pioneer Girl". They actually lived in a community full of other people, most of whom didn't agree with them on questions of religion or morality. The females of the family took whatever work they could get, including paid contracts as employees in other people's businesses.)

The Ingalls family is also presented as socially isolated due to Rose Wilder’s libertarian leanings. Rose helped her mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder, edit the Little House books. Because of this the family is presented as much more self sufficient and independent than they actually were. 

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nevermind

Edited by Bluebirdbluebell
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I'm looking forward to reading the Coontz book - thanks for the recommendation. I wonder how much of the fundie pretend 1950s comes from a steady diet of the few permitted "family" 1950s TV shows for entertainment and other Americana vibes like the images/motifs orgs like Above Rubies use to frame their posts. Scroll through their facebook and instagram and you see it - there's probably a term for it, but I think it's lurking behind the old school fundie influences. I think the newer fundie influencers carry some vague idea of this alongside minimalism, homesteading, and the conservative pioneer/self-sufficiency subculture.

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