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Hooray ~ NLQ is a year old today! 

What started out as a small blog with two Quiverfull refugees telling our stories has in just one year’s time become the foremost online resource of information regarding the deceptions and dangers of the Quiverfull philosophy and lifestyle as well as a thriving virtual community of a diverse group of women (and a few men) to support and encourage one another as we process our experiences and recover from spiritual abuse.

Highlights from NLQ’s first year:

In the initial days following the publication of Kathryn Joyce’s “All God’s Children” on Salon.com, No Longer Quivering received a tremendous response of supportive feedback and posts around the blogosphere heralding “two brave women” ~ within the first month NLQ was nominated for the Canadian “F-word” Blog Awards: Best Feminist Blog International.  At the time of the nomination, our escape from QF was still so fresh and our comprehension of what we were doing so naïve, I asked Laura, “Are we feminists?”  To which Laura hesitantly responded, “I guess so.” LOL

Enthusiasm for this project has not slowed ~ currently, the blog and forum are getting 80,000+ hits / “visitors” per month ~ “page views” is nearly 500,000 per month.  The blog alone gets an average of 6,500 page views per day ~ the forum gets more than twice that amount.  Average time on site per visit is 12 mins. and 5.8 page views per reader. 

There have been a number of media opportunities ~ including my appearance on the Joy Behar Show to promote the “Born to Breed” episode of WEtv’s Secret Lives of Women.  I got to go to New York City ~ and the highlight of that trip was meeting Kathryn Joyce in person ~ after all the hours she spent interviewing me on the phone, we’ve developed a friendship, so it was a real treat to visit with Kathryn in the lounge of the Millinium Broadway hotel near Times Square.

[Read more →]

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by Laura

So much can happen in a year!  Just a year ago Vyckie and I birthed this blog which has morphed into such a wonderful resource of encouragement and help for folks.  It has also been a great place of healing for myself and I am so grateful for all the love and encouragement I have experienced through the birth and growth of NLQ!

I have been pretty quiet the last 9 months or so and it has been necessary for me to be so.  Yet, in honor of the NLQ Anniversary, I want to come out of my silence, so to speak, and give you all an update on what has been happening in my life.  If you are feeling a bit blue or discouraged or have just been thinking that life will NEVER get better…read on for a lift in your spirit.  Dreams really DO come true!

[Read more →]

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by Vyckie

Back in January of last year, I was checking out articles on Alternet ~ the progressive news site which my uncle Ron had introduced to me during that momentous year of our correspondence which I’ve come to think of as my “rehab” days ~ it was a year of waking up to the fact that my strict fundamentalism was not only unhealthy for me, but was also destroying my family, going through the withdrawal-like process of freeing my thought life from its narrow, black/white thinking patterns, getting clean of the “virus of the mind” which, in my own life, had been the “hard stuff” which numbed my brain and created illusions of happiness when reality was just too painful to deal with when completely sober.

I’d been on the wagon with regard to religion for about a year when I happened upon Kathryn Joyce’s article, Women’s ‘Liberation’ Through Submission: An Evangelical Anti-Feminism Is Born.  As I read about the “Quiverfull movement” ~ I was so astonished ~ I had no idea that anyone who was not actually practicing this lifestyle was even aware of what is unambiguously taught and believed among “Quiverfull” women.

The more I read, the stronger I felt an urge to talk to Kathryn ~ I wanted someone to know that, “Hey ~ this is what I was doing ~ I was Quiverfull!”

[Read more →]

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NLQ Earns Up To 1,000 Swagbucks When You Click Here to Join.

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by Arietty

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. ~ L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

When looking back at my family during our days of patriarchal fundamentalism this opening line in the novel The Go-Between often comes to mind. In the last decade we have journeyed so far from where we once were we may have well have moved countries entirely. In the beginning of our journey we were like refugees, clinging to our past forms and beliefs while trying to figure out what part of this new culture wouldn’t damage us. For we had read and been preached to and fervently believed that our now adopted culture–The World–was one of poison and sure death to family bonds and values. And yet, we could not go back. Like refugees we were now unacceptable to what had once been our home, unacceptable for the same reasons many seek refugee status: religious and gender persecution. The U.S. Immigration department defines it this way:

Refugee: A refugee is a person who is unable or unwilling to return to his or her native country due to a well-founded fear of persecution or because the person’s life or freedom would be threatened.

We could no longer co-exist in our old world of quiverful families and sincere bible believing fellowships. Our freedoms.. so small and invisible to The World.. made us unacceptable and increasingly the subject of harassing phone calls and cold looks in the street. My children were grilled about their mother’s behavior when they tried to continue past friendships, and looked down on for their clothing, schooling, reading and entertainment choices when they tried to connect to those who they had once loved in our old homeschooling circles. The World on the other hand did not notice us at all and there were times when this was quite a relief despite the gripping loneliness and confusion.

With time we adapted and grew to love our adopted country. The World, it seems, grew to love us back as we discovered that it was full of joys and kindness and creativity and amusements which far from destroying the family bound us together with common interests. We lost our fear of The World and came to see that fear was actually the language of fundamentalism and we had been well trained in it. And so I take a brief tour here through the (carefully scrapbooked) snapshots of our family long ago in the foreign country, as refugees and as we are today. [Read more →]

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Part 1: Introduction
by Runawaybride

I didn’t start my marriage out to be a Christian, in fact, I was a practicing solitary Wiccan at the time, being in rebellion from my Presbyterian Country Club Church upbringing. 

However, I had and still have a voracious appetite for reading about different faiths, philosophies and beliefs. At the same time, the internet was just beginning to get off the ground, which, for a person who researches for fun, was the best toy I could have gotten for Christmas. I got my first PC in 1992, and signed up for Delphi.

It was on their religion board that I first encountered a Patriarchalist, who asked if he could correspond with my husband via regular mail. He did so, and sent him some very poorly but strongly worded letters, with copied and pasted printouts of other people’s writings to support what he felt were truths. My husband, being a very lapsed but well trained Catholic, said the man was well intentioned but somewhat ill informed.

[Read more →]

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One of the goals for the NLQ Blogathon has been to raise $1,000 in donations ~ we actually have exceeded this goal with a total to date of $1,075!  As promised, I am linking to the Bennett Family Online Journal ~ the family blog I kept from August of 2006 until the end of 2007. 

Keep in mind as you read that in the 16 months covered on the blog, my Christian faith suffered a complete upheaval and by the end of that period, I no longer considered myself a Believer and follower of Jesus Christ.  Some of that comes through in the blog posts ~ but you have to look for it, because through it all, I was careful about appearances so did not let on to much of what was really going on in my mind and in our lives.

Here’s a bit of “behind the scenes” info. from that time period:

[Read more →]

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by Calulu

Of all the things that happened during my ten years in the Quiverful movement I think that the one thing that caused me the most pain was my inability to bear children. Being infertile in a movement based upon the notion that God grants the righteous a full quiver of arrows led to all sorts of interesting assumptions by people that swore I was their Sister in Christ.

Based upon the ways I was treated because of my fertility challenges I came to realize that my church ‘family’ was as dysfunction and rude as any family featured on a sleazy television talk show.

I’d been an only child, growing up in a large home in south Louisiana.  My parents had an arranged marriage, which wasn’t uncommon in Cajun culture of the time. But they could barely tolerate each other long enough to produce me, much less brothers and sisters. As a kid I always wanted brothers or sisters.

My childhood was a lonely one. I spent my time either under the watchful eye of the nuns at school, in my room playing quietly or sitting in the kitchen talking to Mamie, our family maid. There weren’t many kids in the neighborhood.

Those early experiences made me determined to have more than one child, to have at least three or four.

[Read more →]

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Tooting our own horn here ~ which is something NLQers give ourselves permission to do.

by Vyckie

A couple of days ago, I sent out an email message to NLQ forum members and Facebook followers giving an update on the No Longer Quivering book project.  In my letter, I listed several reasons for the decision I’ve made to hire a collabrative writer in order to get the book written in a timely fashion:

1)  With five children at home, it is extremely challenging to get any writing done ~ who knows how long it would take me to produce the book on my own? 

2)  Timing ~ QF is a hot topic right now.  True, it’s likely to continue to be a hot topic in the foreseeable future given the popularity of the Duggars and the exponential growth of the Quiverfull movement ~ so we don’t have to worry that interest will wane any time soon.  However, it would be best to take advantage of the momentum of public awareness of QF while it is on the upswing ~ having the book already in print now is a good way to establish NLQ as the “authoritative resource” to counter the movement’s growing popularity.  IOW, having the book written sooner, rather than later, will mean that whenever Quiverfull makes the news, reporters/journalists will have access to the memoir of a high-profile QF walkaway to “balance” their news stories.

3)  The No Longer Quivering blog is already such an authoritative resource ~ but it must be maintained and promoted so that the popular media is aware of its presence ~ and also so that the general public has access to our stories to counter-balance all the glowing QF testimonials which are proliferating on the Internet. 

When I am writing the book, I cannot keep up with the blog.  Several guest writers have been tremendously supportive in supplying new material for the blog, but I am receiving quite a lot of feedback to the effect that it is my story and commentaries on QF which generate the most interest and when I’m not able to post, traffic slows down considerably.

This is kind of a catch-22 situation as having an active, popular website is going to make the NLQ book more attractive to prospective publishers.  So ~ if I’m busy writing the book to the neglect of the blog ~ it is less likely that I will be able to get a mainstream publisher for the book.

So ~ for all these reasons, I will be working with a professional writer/editor to get the book finished.  I received a tremendous response to that email.  The replies were very supportive ~ many of you sent words of encouragement and inspiring suggestions for ways to make this all work.  I’ve also received enough to pay the up front cost for the writer.

Wow, huh?!

I am deeply moved ~ touched, and kind of speechless ~ to realize that NLQ readers feel so strongly that my No Longer Quivering story needs to be told ~ you all are so eager for the book to be published! 

I already said, Wow, right? LOL

In appreciation for this outpouring of support ~ and because all this reader enthusiasm has me inspired to get back to writing my story for the blog ~ I’ve come up with “a plan.”  I had suggested in my letter that I might do “something like a blog-a-thon in which I do a marathon writing session on my NLQ story ~ and every time a donation comes in, I would post another installment of my story.”  Everyone liked that idea ~ and I like it too.  But ~ since I don’t need to “blog for cash” now ~ (THANK YOU!!!) ~ I’m planning to blog for fun.  [Read more →]

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