Janice

Hi Cheryl.  Thanks for all your hard work.
I read Stimson’s linked article and then got to wondering what femininity is according to the CBMW.  So I skimmed a few articles over there, including Elisabeth Elliot’s chapter in RBMW, and the impression I get is that they’ve confused Christianity with cultural conservatism.  So it is not OK for men to have facial scrubs but it is OK for women to get their nails done. Well, I don’t like men to be effete either but this business about women and make-up reminds me of a story I read years ago.  There was a Christian women’s conference on in Europe somewhere.  The Danish women were scandalised by the American women (because they were all wearing make-up).  The American women were scandalised by the Danish women (because they were all smoking cigars). 
Elisabeth Elliot doesn’t seem to realise that feminists aren’t a homogeneous bunch.  She credits them all with believing that the only differences between men and women are “a matter of mere biology” and being interested only in “questions of authority or power or competition or money”.  Oddly, after describing the differences between male and female roles among the South American Indians among whom she worked – differences that she must, at some level, have realised are culturally conditioned because most of them are so foreign to Westerners – she then urges us not to, “swallow the feminist doctrine that femininity is a mere matter of cultural conditioning, of stereotypes perpetuated by tradition”.  Here the word “mere” is the only thing that makes her statement passably true.
So yes, I agree with you that fear is probably what is underlying a lot of CBMW rhetoric; that and nostalgia for the good old days when women knew their place, divorce was relatively uncommon and most men (and, no doubt, plenty of women) agreed that a battered wife had probably been “asking” to be beaten.
Lately I’ve been wondering about people like David Koresh, Jim Jones and Wayne Bent. Does anyone know what these fellows’ position on women (and/or male authority) is or was?  Did they preach the subordination of women?  Is that part of how they managed to get so many of their female followers to have sex with them?  I ask because my understanding is that sexual abuse seems to be much more common in  families where the father is traditionally authoritarian and Scripture is used to justify a “me first—you submit” attitude toward women