Finding Women of Valor: Rachel Held Evans’s A Year of Biblical Womanhood

By Nina Howe-Goldstein (SC ‘25)

The premise was simple: Evans would spend a year taking “biblical womanhood” literally, while simultaneously researching existing scholarship and meeting women from other (often more traditional) faith backgrounds. Some commandments she would undertake for the entire year — like taking on all cooking and housekeeping responsibilities — while others (like sleeping outside in a tent while menstruating) would only last one month. Along the way, she would visit and interview women of other traditions to learn about their interpretations of what it means to live as a godly woman.

When Rachel Held Evans died suddenly in 2019, she left behind an extensive (though tragically truncated) bibliography. My favorite among these writings is her acclaimed 2012 book, A Year of Biblical Womanhood — perhaps a testament to the depth of Evans’s scholarship and the value of a straightforward title alike. Prompted by seeing so many friends give up promising careers in favor of “traditional” roles and motherhood, while a self-imposed deadline to have children also approached, Evans set out to explore what the Bible actually had to say about the roles of women. She would combine the journal of her progress with detailed scholarly analysis on each source from the Bible. With her typical thoughtfulness, Evans asked, “could an ancient collection of sacred texts … assembled over thousands of years in cultures very different from our own, really offer a single cohesive formula for how to be a woman?”

The premise was simple: Evans would spend a year taking “biblical womanhood” literally, while simultaneously researching existing scholarship and meeting women from other (often more traditional) faith backgrounds. Some commandments she would undertake for the entire year — like taking on all cooking and housekeeping responsibilities — while others (like sleeping outside in a tent while menstruating) would only last one month. Along the way, she would visit and interview women of other traditions to learn about their interpretations of what it means to live as a godly woman.

As a part of the so-called “exvangelical” movement, Evans’s departure from the evangelical tradition happened young. However, her book is still full of references to her family’s faith. Her spiritual crisis only began after the United States invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, when gruesome footage of women being executed by the Taliban played on the nightly news, causing her to push back against the teachings of her youth — she found it unfair that salvation could be a matter of geography. Throughout the book, though, Evans recalls that same youth without condemning herself or others that carried the same views.

When forming her list of commandments, of particular interest to Evans was the woman cited in Proverbs 31 as the model wife. The “P31 woman’s” influence in the evangelical world can’t be understated, says Evans — “there are three things a girl’s got to know before she gets her period: (1) Jesus, (2) Ronald Reagan, and (3) the Proverbs 31 woman.” She decides to spend January literally following the virtues listed in the poem, including making a purple dress (“her clothing is fine linen and purple”) and holding up a sign declaring that “Dan is awesome!” at the entrance to town (“her husband is respected at the city gate”). While much of the chapter is dedicated to sewing-related difficulties (“her hands hold the spindle”) and her trouble switching from running to bench presses (“[she] makes her arms strong”), Evans also carefully draws on the text and scholarship to analyze how our interpretation of Proverbs 31 went from a text praising a wealthy Jewish woman’s skilled work in a household-based economy to acting as a checklist for a woman to earn her husband’s praise. The text was never meant to admonish women, she says, only to “draw attention to the often-overlooked glory of the everyday.”

Similar sentiment comes to Evans through her correspondence with Ahava, a rabbi’s wife in Israel. Despite her atheist upbringing, after discovering her Jewish ancestry Ahava was beginning to embrace her heritage when she met her future husband. His priestly descent required him to marry a Jewish-born virgin, and he liked redheads, which made Ahava a perfect match. She tells Evans about misconceptions concerning Orthodox Jews, and informs her that in Jewish tradition it’s the husbands who memorize Proverbs 31, not the wives. Ahava’s husband sings it to her at Shabbat, in praise of her many accomplishments. Eshet chayil (“woman of valor”) is a frequent compliment in her community, which Evans comes to adopt as her own motto.

Many women contributed to Evans’s progress, from talented seamstresses at her church who helped her finish the Proverbs 31-mandated purple dress, to women of different Christian traditions who contributed to her scholarship for the book. She later interviews a woman who grew up in a Quiverfull Christian (a loosely-defined movement that emphasizes procreation- hence, a full quiver) family about the ups and downs of the experience. The woman tells her about all the emotional labor placed on eldest daughters and the experience of growing up in relative poverty (due to the needs of a large family), in contrast with the joys of companionship that comes with having many siblings. Evans also visits a devout Amish family, where she learns a simple trick they use to get around the rule forbidding family who have left the Amish tradition from eating at the same table: simply put another table in the room. Evans gives a compassionate — but not uncritical — view of the joy that these women have found in their cultures, still noting the limited options that many give women while celebrating the individual “women of valor.” While describing her hesitancy to critique the ways others have become closer to God, she says “I guess we’re all a little afraid that if God’s presence is there, it cannot be here.”

The book is certainly not without its shortcomings, though few, if any, are egregious or impossible to understand. The voices of women from what Evans describes as “liberated” traditions are limited to being cited in her research, instead of being the subject of interviews or visits like the chapters devoted to the Amish, Quiverfull, or Catholic monastery are. Necessarily limited by budget and scope, Evans rarely ventures further than the Midwest (with the notable exception of a service trip to Bolivia) or outside of American Christianity. References to the Black American church are nonexistent, in spite of its scale and relative proximity to Evans. Evans is necessarily focused on the niche in which much of her life exists: primarily white, midwestern, and relatively accepting of her life’s path. It’s an understandable limitation, and the direction that she chose for the book is masterfully executed, but the boundaries still do chafe.

In a book based on what is essentially a “challenge,” it’s not only the undertaking, but the scholarship and the writing itself which take center stage. The story overflows with the wit and love which Evans was known for. All signs indicate that she would balk at the praise, but I think that Rachel Held Evans is just as worthwhile for a young Christian girl to know as the Proverbs 31 woman. Remembering her in a recent New Yorker article, family and friends recall how she always kept an open mind and was forever accepting of the possibility that she could be wrong. Even once her year of biblical womanhood was over, the lessons learned would inspire Evans and her readers for years to come. In fact, her tombstone is inscribed with the honorific that she would introduce to so many through her writing: “Woman of Valor.”