A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy

Holly says: Tia Levings was newly married when she and her husband were recruited into the fundamentalist “Quiverfull” movement, which advocates for large families and is guided by a long list of strict principles of behavior. What Levings initially saw as an encouraging community of fellow mothers and families soon became a secretive world of pain and abuse. This memoir shows how she came to recognize the threat to her and her children and she leveraged the new technology of the internet—and the communities of support it offered her—to make her escape. I first discovered Levings through her educational and entertaining videos on social media; you may also recognize her from her appearance in the Amazon documentary Shiny Happy People. Content warnings apply.