A Well Trained Wife - Tia Levings

 

I thought I would finally use Hoopla and downloaded an audio book from the library.  This was a hard book to listen to.  It's the memoir of Tia, a young woman raised in the fundamental Christian movement that practices the Quiverfull movement (the belief in no birth control and large families as a biblical requirement) and the Institute in Basic Life Principles, an organization founded by Bill Gothard and practiced by the Jacksonville Baptist church.  It promotes strict patriarchal authority and female subservience. It is the extreme version of belief that follows legalism and top down authority in the Southern Baptist branch of Christianity.

Tia became a member of the Jacksonville Baptist church as a child in Florida, married young and had 5 children in about 8 years while married to an abusive, disturbed husband.  For years she felt and was taught it was her fault their marriage was struggling.  She read her own book for the audio book. 

I was struck again at how a person can stay in a manipulative, self-destructive environment although I understand how its different living inside a situation instead of looking on from the outside. A depressing read on top of not liking the audio book experience.

Published:    Read: October 2026  Genre: Memoir

The Group - Mary McCarthy

 

A great read for travelling this summer.  I found it at Half-Priced books in the discount section.  It's a fantastic send up of the intellectual class of women (Vassar graduates '33) who went on to fall into domesticity, marriage, divorce, and children.  The women are frank and outspoken about sex, relationships, marriage and careers.  I enjoyed the voices of 1930s-1940s women (my grandmother's adult years) struggling with the same challenges and disappointments of women today.  So little has changed, it seems.  There's a sense of acceptance of their lot in their lives and the wit and satirical stabs taken by McCarthy makes them all the more sad in their intellectual spoutings versus their traditional lives.  

Seven women who formed a group of friends at Vassar College are introduced in the story attending the wedding of Kay, their most outspoken member. She's doing a non-traditional wedding, marrying a theatre director wannabe.  He's obviously a loser from the start yet Kay champions him throughout the story.  I enjoyed how the lives of each member are introduced as chatty, vignettes of a time in their lives where they are changed and shaped by their experiences.  A good find and recommended read. 

Published: 1963  Read: May 2025 Genre: Fiction/Auto-biographical

Quote:

"My generation is a little different from Mother's.   I feel--all of us feel--that love and sex can be two separate things.  They don't have to be, but they can be.  You mustn't force sex to do the work of love or love to do the work of sex-- that's quite a thought, isn't it?"

"You have to live without love, learn not to need it, in order to live with it."