Sleeping Beauty
We were told daughters need protection, daughters need help, daughters need supervision.
Daughters need fathers.
We were told a daughter is a princess, and her father is the king. It doesn’t matter if this daughter is 5 or 35 years old. She is bound to her father’s kingdom, waiting for an approved prince to marry her and become her new protector.
I was one of those stay-at-home daughters. Being under “protection” as I became an adult meant I wasn’t allowed to have a job outside the home because I wasn’t allowed to be under the authority of a man who wasn’t my father. It meant I couldn’t go to college because I didn’t need higher education to be a good wife and mother. It meant I had strict boundaries on what I wore, where I could go, the movies I watched and the music I listened to, the friends I could have—for my entire life, into my twenties. Emails or text messages from guy friends were read by my father to ensure they were appropriate. Dating was forbidden, and father-supervised courtship was the only option.
Protection really meant being controlled. This was the lifestyle of Christian patriarchy.
In Vision Forum families like mine, the daughter became a symbol of all that was beautiful and pure. Being raised in this environment, unlike our parents, we daughters were clean from the taint of the world, unstained by public-school sex education. We were the virtuous untouched. And we were going to be kept that way until marriage.
The environment we lived in was full of resources, from conferences to audio lectures to books. One of the CDs we would listen to was called “Sleeping Beauty and the Five Questions: A Parable about the Hearts of Fathers and Daughters” by Doug Phillips (now expelled from leadership for sexual abuse), published by Vision Forum. Phillips tells a story about a princess who is led astray by the world (youth group is given as an example) and walks around like a zombie in a kind of sleeping state. But she eventually understands God’s purpose for her, which is to stay under the protection of her father the king.
A woman learns submission to her husband by submitting to her father. As Phillips says, “You’re not gonna learn how to be a godly wife unless you learn how to serve your father first, because God has put your daddy in your life as a model, as a picture of the man that someday your heart will be entrusted to.”
Phillips even gave us a script and a call to action in his story: “I want you to know that you are so special that I have decided to commit my life to raising you up for the glory of God, and to walking beside you in noble womanhood until the day that I pass you on to another king, who you will walk beside at some future day, and I want you to know that your mission between now and then is clear. You will be serving God, helping me to rule over this kingdom, and there’s so much work for us to be done in this kingdom, my darling, and I need you. I need you to help me rule this kingdom. I need you to help me to execute my duties as a king. Will you stand beside me?”
You might think this almost sounds good. Like a fairy tale with a guaranteed happy ending. But the truth is that this kind of story was told to justify little girls being trained to serve their fathers as practice for being wives. And adult women were being kept from living independently and making decisions for themselves.
I’m still struck by the clever twisting of such stories into propaganda. In this “Sleeping Beauty,” the story is far from the original fairy tale, with the father as the hero instead of the prince. And if we look at the image for the CD cover, we see even more manipulation.
The image is of a young princess who appears to be bowing in deference to a knight or king. Her eyes are down, and she appears meek and silent. We only see the back of the man’s head, but he is standing, looking down on her. You can imagine him as a patron, a caregiver, a protector, perhaps a suitor.
But if you are familiar with early 20th-century art, you might recognize that the imagery has been taken from a painting called The Accolade by Edmund Leighton.
In the original painting, the woman is more likely a queen, performing a knighting ceremony. The man is kneeling at her feet, receiving the honor. She is looking down toward him, while his eyes are bowed in deference. She is clearly the one exhibiting power and authority.
The entire story has been flipped. Vision Forum wanted to tell their own story of female submission, so they altered a painting depicting a woman in power to make her look like she was bowing down to a man.
I can’t help but see this photoshopped CD cover as an example of how patriarchy strips women of all power and tells them stories to keep them in submission, wearing the mask of “protection” to hide all the harm that disempowerment and total dependence inflicts on a woman. The truth is patriarchy lies. Patriarchy steals. Patriarchy abuses. Patriarchy oppresses.
I have learned to deconstruct the fairy tale and retell this story, resetting my own narrative. I’m not a princess on a pedestal of purity, but a woman, a human being, with a free spirit and a body that is my own and no one else’s. I have learned to take care of myself, to stand up for myself, to learn ways to protect myself from harm and to grow into a stronger, healthier woman. And I know many women who have also left the stay-at-home daughter movement successfully, who have found their own ways in the world.
We’re not sleeping anymore. We’re wide awake.