Lead Like Jael, by Emma Waters. Regnery Faith, 240 pages.
Emma Waters begins her debut book Lead Like Jael with a familiar confession: “Five years ago, I was having an absolute meltdown over the thought of becoming a mother. I was convinced it would derail my career ambitions and leave me sad, alone, and irrelevant.” Yet, unlike the average New Yorker column, the plot twist in this book on Biblical womanhood is that Waters’s feelings about motherhood turned out to be false. Happiness was found not in career ambition nor a feminist cliche, but in submitting to wisdom. Lady Wisdom, that is: King Solomon’s psalms become Waters’s distinctly feminine muse as she parses what it means to be a Christian maiden, mother, and matriarch in our time.
Waters directs her young female audience away from internet influencers toward the real women Scripture praises, and the traits for which Scripture praises them. From such women, with supporting examples from historic and modern conservatism, Waters draws seven principles for Christian women: discernment, shrewdness, resourcefulness, hospitality, marriage on mission, motherhood as warfare, and wise counsel and negotiation. For most young women today, these are not lessons older women around them are teaching, much less their internet mentors: “The data suggest men are rethinking success around family, while many women still measure it by career,” Waters writes.
As a research associate at the Heritage Foundation studying bioethics and fertility, Waters is well versed in the arguments against what we might call the historically normal way of doing things: young marriage, early parenthood, mothers as home-makers and fathers as home-rulers. She’s also more aware than the average American female just how little success is found outside of this time-tested framework, in the world of egg-freezing, IVF, and other assisted reproductive technologies. That is one reason why her argument, though centered in the “tradwife versus girlboss” debate, does not land in the middle, but firmly on the side of traditional marriage and Biblical sexed piety.
Even Jael, Waters’s cover example of the Israelite wife who killed the Lord’s enemy with a tent peg, does not ride out to war, stage a protest, or murder her enemies out of feminine rage. Nor does Jael sit on her hands in fear, like a flattened vision of housewifery on offer by some who use the tradwife label online. Jael’s measured attack, using her ordinary household tool, against an enemy within her gate, becomes Waters’s rallying cry for young women today: defending the home from home requires great strength and virtue, and sometimes even a tent peg. Hers is a glorious calling: “Indeed, as Zechariah prophesies in 10:4, ‘From him [God] shall come the cornerstone, from him the tent peg, from him the battle bow, from him every ruler—all of them together.’ … Jael’s victory was not hers by might, but a foreshadowing of the greater triumph secured in Christ,” Waters writes.
Discernment, the first principle, is the most important: “The serpent did not begin by denying God outright. He started by twisting what God had said, taking what was clear and making it seem uncertain,” Waters writes. Women, as daughters of Eve, are particularly prone to deception: “It’s important to note that [Eve’s] decision was based on an external assessment that was pragmatic, aesthetic, and self-serving.”
This is relevant to the question of career, the cornerstone of the tradwife versus girlboss split. For Waters, career ambitions are not inherently bad, “But when career consumes us, such that we build our marriage, children, Sabbath rest, and spiritual growth around our jobs, we believe the old lie that fulfillment can be built apart from faithfulness to God’s good design for the family.”
Next up is shrewdness, the virtue of wise household management. (Waters notes that personal debt rose sharply in the United States after women gained independent access to credit cards in the 1970s.) Here, Waters enters a provocative dissection of anger, as the inverse of the virtue of shrewdness. Feminine rage, celebrated by leftists as “a revolutionary force with political legitimacy” and “a woman’s most effective tool,” in longitudinal studies correlated with “sharper declines in episodic memory and executive function, especially in women,” Waters writes. “Wisdom requires the ability to remember clearly, weigh evidence, and learn from experience. Rage erodes all three.”
The principle of hospitality is particularly interesting. While the word typically evokes images of private dinner parties, Waters uses the story of Esther as a reminder that setting a table can be “a political, and therefore public, act of leadership and social resistance.” Food, as Robert F. Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” tribe knows well, is the future. And the future is highly political. That is one reason why fast food brands like KFC went all in on feminism in the 1950s: If women weren’t cooking, someone else would have to, and a whole new market would be created in the process. “In a world that feasts on fear and isolation, a woman who feeds with love is a holy terror to the dark. So, take up your ladle like a sword. Stand behind your stove like a sentinel. Set your table like an altar,” Waters writes.
The clear centerpiece of Lead Like Jael is found in the chapters dealing with marriage and children. Motherhood, after all, defines the majority of women for the majority of their lives. More than simply one of many possible occupations, the job of nurturing life is the defining characteristic of the female sex, even for those women who do not have their own children: “What can women do that men cannot? The answer was obvious and profound. Women can bear children…childbearing stood out as one of the few irreducible differences that helped me make sense of what it means to be a woman,” she writes.
Scripture is not vague about how this should work: “The husband bears the primary responsibility to lead and to set the direction, while the wife is invited to join and submit to that calling,” Waters writes of marriage. Of children: “The relationship between mothers and children, and the call to be open to life, does not rest on arguments about national strength, sentimental appeal, or personal fulfillment. Children are an inherent good.”
Here again, Waters engages the question of career. Her most poignant interview is with a woman named Heather, who quit her accounting job to stay home with her sons. Once a stay at home mom, Heather started a cake business on the side with her husband. Eventually, even this proved too demanding; though Heather was physically present, she was emotionally and mentally absent, working on weekends and always answering messages, and her children noticed. Waters concludes: “This holy work of discipleship cannot be outsourced. No one else is tasked with this sacred work.” While Waters holds that the needs of young children do not prevent a woman from ever earning an income, or engaging in meaningful work outside the home, “to neglect the home to pursue work is to invert God’s design.”
As a positive example of work-life balance, Waters holds up Rachel Campos-Duffy, who had nine children before becoming a conservative TV personality: “By investing in her family first, she built the foundation for a longer career that did not come at the cost of her home.” Waters calls women to put their homes first, yet Campos-Duffy, and the other modern women featured throughout the book, almost all boast highly public, political careers, including Tiffany Justice, Erika Kirk, Rep. Mary Miller, and Phylis Schlafly. Some, like Kirk, are even leading such careers at the same time that they are mothering very young children. The reader may be tempted to conclude from this that marriage and children are a strategy for greater career success, rather than something worth pursuing for their own sake.
Waters’s own words contradict such examples, as do the data she presents on the needs of children, particularly those under the age of three, for the full presence and attention of their mothers: “The so-called conservative girl-boss—but she has kids! Unlike those leftists—will ultimately fail.”
The last principle, on wise counsel and negotiation, is for becoming a matriarch. Here, Waters is especially interested in the way women act in the absence of wise leadership: by doing nothing, by attempting to become leaders themselves, or by restoring righteous leadership. “The women the Bible commends most often take the third path,” she writes. “They neither abandon the house nor take it over. They work within the order God has established to preserve life, confirm His Word, and build again what sin has broken.”
For a target audience of young women, matriarchy might seem a long way off. Yet, while more young men attend church and more young women head the opposite direction, it is clear that wise counsel is precisely what today’s young women lack, to the shame of those who ought to have been sound matriarchs. Ultimately, there is no restoring Christian virtue for one sex without the other: “When men embrace their God-given calling, it can change the trajectory of families, churches, and even nations, yet it won’t be complete without wise women serving alongside them.” For Waters, this is the issue facing young women today, and it has the capacity to shape generations.
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