Of course, I was homeschooled. My mother provided the lessons and they were almost exclusively on the Bible. I learned to write well (or so I have been told), but my math never progressed much beyond arithmetic. Science was rarely discussed. For what it is worth, my brother got largely the same education that I did. So, despite the various weird things the church did to keep women down, education wasn’t one of them.
But there were very unpleasant aspects about being a woman. The only time women leave their homes was on Sunday, for Church. For church, my father would put my mother and I in a car with the windows blacked out and we would go into the Women’s Entrance to the church. There we would worship with the other women, the only man in the room being the Women’s Preacher, John Davis. All my life he was an old man with a prodigious gut. There would be about 100 women in the church and the four or five hours we spent there would be the extent of my socializing for the week. After church, one by one mothers and daughters would leave the Church and get back into their black-windowed cars. It was set up in such a way that when we got outside, my father was already there.
The long and the short of all of this was that women never saw a man that was not their father or their brother (Except the preacher). According to the teachings of the church it was sinful for non-family members to see an unmarried woman. Even married women had very little contact with men other than their fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons. By the time I left the community I had only ever met three men in my life. My father, my brother, and the Women’s Preacher.
Obviously, in a repressed society like this, sex was not discussed. I must’ve been curious about it at one point in my life, I mean where did I come from? But my parents only had two children so I didn’t see babies much. Even in Church, there were only occasionally pregnant women. It just did not come up. I knew that according to tradition, at some point after my 20th Birthday but before my 21st, my father would take me by myself to church. A man would be there, probably ten to fifteen years older than me, and he would be my husband. I would know his mother and his sisters, but it would be the first time I’d ever see him. And then we’d make a family. I really didn’t know how, but that was what would happen (The only animals we kept on our farm were birds, mostly chickens, and so I’d never even seen animals have sex). It was always a nagging fear that I would marry someone who was awful, although I could not really make strong opinions about what that would mean. But it was a distant fear.
Life for my younger brother was largely the same. He only left the farm for church, he only saw men, and the only women he knew were my mother and me. He was my only companion growing up and while in other circumstances we might fight, it was not an option for us. We had to be friends because otherwise we’d be totally alone. I still have fond memories of playing the barn growing up and making silly faces at one another. Despite all of these oddities of my childhood, I was pretty happy.
wpDiscuz