Back in the late 1990s, I burned my copy of Elisabeth Elliot’s Let Me Be a Woman – a story I tell here – along with a copy of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. While I have nothing against Dracula as a novel, I burned it symbolically as a bad influence on my thinking. I’d read it too young, when I was seven.
My grievances with Elliot’s book were more personal. In Let Me Be a Woman, she grossly misapplied Holy Scripture to make idols of men – and to make of women something less than fully human, counseling us to rejoice in a glorified patriarchal prison.
These books, despite their differences, exude dark energy. Dracula feeds on Lucy multiple times, literally sucking the life out of her. As Lucy’s friend, Mina, observes: “All the time the roses in her cheeks are fading, and she gets weaker and more languid day by day.”
It is now coming to light that the abuse Elliot suffered from her third husband had a similar effect on her. A friend of Elliot’s, reflecting on this destructive marriage and its convergence with “biblical womanhood,” recently wrote that over the years, she “made herself smaller and smaller.”
“Biblical” Womanhood?
Elliot was married to her third husband, Lars Gren, for thirty-eight years. Liz Charlotte Grant, drawing from books by prominent Elliot biographers Lucy R.S. Austen and Ellen Vaughn, describes the marriage as one defined by Gren’s pervasive abuse:
“Gren decided when [Elliot] drank a cup of tea, took a bath, and when she slept. He frequently checked her car’s odometer, double-checking that she hadn’t made any unplanned stops. He controlled the house thermostat. He listened in on her phone conversations and had the final say on whether she visited her friends, often declining invitations for her at the last minute. When he grew angry with his wife, he would refuse to speak to her for days. And most painful for Elliot, Gren [would randomly deny Elliot access to her family].”
She goes on to quote Vaughn in stating that Gren “controlled [Elliot] for the rest of her long life.”
Gren’s humiliation of Elliot indeed continued until the very end of her life, when he burned her journals, robbing her of her voice as she was losing her mind to Alzheimer’s.
A Cautionary Tale
Elliot isn’t someone for women to emulate in marriage. Rather, she’s a cautionary tale.
Grant writes that Elliot “did not understand her own worth; she saw herself as a slave of men and God alike, subservient to their whims and feelings even as she suppressed her own.”
It is this precise depravity – the gut-wrenching idolatry of making men into gods – that oozes from Let Me Be a Woman.
But far worse for me than reading the book was reading the story of a woman who de-converted from Christianity based on Elliot’s false words.
What do you call evangelism in reverse?
Rethinking Elisabeth Elliot
When I threw Let Me Be a Woman into the charcoal burner with Dracula, as a young teen, I could not have imagined that Elliot, like Lucy, was getting the life sucked out of her.
As I’ve come to see that Elliot was ultimately a victim of the complementarian ideology she espoused, I pity her more and despise her less. She was a flawed human being and in her life the hero, the villain, and the victim. Her investment in “biblical womanhood” would essentially become an investment into her own dysfunctional and abusive marriage. One of the fiercest and most influential advocates of male headship, she submitted to abuse because her husband was the abuser.
Of course, Let Me Be a Woman was written just prior to Elliot’s marriage to Gren. But given the decades of emotional abuse that soon followed, it is difficult not to interpret her dogged defense of “biblical womanhood” as her way of trying to rationalize her own abuse, as her way of trying to sanctify her submission to it, as her way of justifying staying with her abuser.
This post has been dark, so I want to end with an encouraging word from Elliot’s book Through the Gates of Splendor. The book was first published in 1957, before her “biblical womanhood” days, and this passage reminds us that our own limitations can’t hinder God’s purposes for us:
“God is the God of human history, and He is at work continuously, mysteriously, accomplishing His eternal purposes in us, through us, for us, and in spite of us.”
Elliot may have passed away, but as her complicated story continues to unfold, maybe God is still at work to accomplish his purposes in her, in spite of her.
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