I have wanted to be Laura Ingalls Wilder since I was about seven years old.
Not the TV version — the real one. The one who described the smell of prairie grass and the sound of Pa’s fiddle coming through a thin log wall. I wanted a little house on the prairie, a kitchen garden, a root cellar full of things I’d grown with my own hands.
I still kind of do.
My sourdough starter died this week. Too much water, inconsistent timing — I’m still learning. I water my garden now with a toddler in charge of the hose, which means it takes three times as long and we both end up muddy, and I wouldn’t trade it. I’m impatiently watching my kale and cabbage push through the soil. I just figured out how to make my own gummies to avoid the corn syrup, and today I started my first ginger bug for homemade probiotic sodas — we’ll see how that goes. I’ve only recently started the work of eliminating processed food from our table, not as a trend but because I genuinely believe food should heal, not harm. I’m at the beginning of that. I make things from scratch when I can. I love the rhythms of a kitchen. I find deep satisfaction in feeding people well.
So when the tradwife aesthetic started flooding my Instagram feed — the linen aprons, the bread rising on the counter, the soft morning light over a farmhouse table — I felt the pull. Of course I did.
I still feel it, honestly. Some mornings I scroll past a woman tending her kitchen garden and think, yes, that. The dresses are beautiful. The slowing-down is real. The desire to feed your family real food, to know where things come from, to build something with your hands — none of that is wrong. None of that is even questionable.
But here’s where I have to be honest with you, as someone who has walked alongside women who were badly hurt: the theology attached to that aesthetic is another matter entirely. And the version of Proverbs 31 that gets used to support that theology is, I’d argue, a misreading of the text.
Not a minor misreading. A significant one.
What Eshet Chayil Actually Means
The famous passage — the one that gets printed on mugs and cross-stitched onto pillows and read aloud at women’s retreats — begins in verse 10 with a Hebrew phrase your English Bible almost certainly softens.
Eshet chayil.
Most translations give you “wife of noble character” or “virtuous woman” or “excellent wife.” All of those are fine translations in the sense that they’re not technically wrong, but they lose something essential in the rendering.
In the Hebrew Bible, chayil appears 224 times. The vast majority of those appearances describe armies and military valor. It’s the same word used when the angel calls Gideon a a mighty or valiant warrior in Judges 6. It describes David’s elite soldiers — his mighty men of chayil — in 2 Samuel 24. It is a word saturated with strength, courage, and force.
The Proverbs 31 woman is an eshet chayil. A woman of valor. A warrior woman.
That’s how the poem opens. And when you hold onto that — when you read the rest of Proverbs 31 knowing that the opening word is a warrior word — the whole passage shifts.
What She Actually Does in This Poem
She buys a field. Independently, from her own earnings, she evaluates real estate and makes a purchase (Proverbs 31:16). Then she plants a vineyard with those earnings. In ancient Judea, planting a vineyard meant clearing rocky hillside terrain, building protective walls, terracing slopes, and hiring laborers. It was serious capital investment.
She manufactures and distributes goods. “She makes linen garments and sells them, and supplies the merchants with sashes” (Proverbs 31:24). She has buyers and suppliers and margins to track.
She sees that her trading is profitable and monitors it (Proverbs 31:18). She is financially literate and economically independent.
“She girds her loins with strength, makes her arms strong” (Proverbs 31:17) — a phrase used elsewhere in Scripture exclusively for men preparing for battle.
“She speaks with wisdom, and faithful instruction is on her tongue” (Proverbs 31:26). She teaches. She has something worth saying and people who listen.
And then this: “Let her works praise her at the city gate” (Proverbs 31:31). The city gate was ancient Israel’s public square — where legal cases were heard, commerce was conducted, and civic life happened. The text doesn’t say her works should be praised at home, or privately, or only by her husband. It says at the city gate. In public. In the male-dominated civic space.
Yes, she also feeds her household and cares for her family. She does all of that too. But she does it alongside real estate deals and manufacturing operations and public recognition — not instead of them.
The Poem Was Never Written for Women
Proverbs 31:10–31 is an acrostic poem — each verse beginning with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet, aleph through tav. This structure was used for texts meant to be memorized, carried, recited. It signals this is important. Learn this by heart.
Proverbs is addressed, from chapter 1, to a young man. “My son” is the refrain of the entire book. The whole of Proverbs is a parent instructing a son in wisdom. When you arrive at the end of the book — at this famous poem — the son is being shown what wisdom looks like in a woman. What to honor. What to seek. What to celebrate.
It was written for him, about her, as praise.
And in Jewish tradition, this is exactly how the poem has been used for centuries. On Shabbat eve, husbands sing Eshet Chayil to their wives — not as a standard she must achieve, but as a blessing spoken over her. A love song. An act of honor. A thank you.
The Midrash Mishlei proposes that each line in Proverbs 31 honors a different woman in history. Twenty in all.
We took a love song honoring women and turned it into a performance review for each of us.
*note – in writing this post I discovered that there are commentators who believe this poem refers to Sabbath or the Bride of Christ (the church, or all believers). This is something I will be exploring further and hopefully share with you in the near future.
The Selective Reading Problem
I need to say something carefully here, because I don’t think the people who taught me this passage had bad intentions. Most women’s Bible study leaders and retreat speakers are genuinely trying to encourage the women in the room. I believe that.
But the version of Proverbs 31 most of us received had a shape to it. It emphasized the early rising, the household management, the care for family, the tireless work ethic. It held up the domestic elements. And it quietly set aside the real estate transactions, the independent earnings, the wholesale business, the civic recognition at the city gate. And it left out the warrior component completely.
That’s not a neutral editorial choice. It has a direction. It points women toward home and away from everything else.
And when you combine that selective reading with teachings about wifely submission — when the cultural aesthetics of homemaking get wrapped in theology and presented as the biblical ideal for women — the stakes get higher. Because now it’s not just a lifestyle preference. It’s framed as obedience to God.
That’s where I have to pump the brakes, hard.
I’ve walked alongside women who stayed in dangerous situations because they were taught that submission was non-negotiable. I’ve known women who gave up financial independence completely and found themselves desperately vulnerable when their marriages ended — through death, through divorce, through abandonment. I’ve seen what happens when a theology of female dependence collides with the actual unpredictability of real life. The aesthetic is lovely. The consequences of the theology can be devastating.
You can read more about how this plays out in the tradwife space specifically in So You Want to Be a Tradwife? A Biblical Reality Check, and about what the Bible actually says about submission in What Does the Bible Say About Submission in Marriage?
Both Things Can Be True
I still want the little house on the prairie. Someday I’d love a few acres, some chickens, maybe a goat. I want to grow more of our food, put things up for winter, bake bread that takes two days and is worth every hour of it. I want to sit on a porch at the end of a day and feel the satisfaction of something made with my hands.
None of that requires a theology that diminishes women.
The Proverbs 31 woman — the real one, the eshet chayil — had a kitchen and a business. She fed her family and she bought fields. She cared for her household and she traded in the marketplace and she was honored in the public square. The text doesn’t ask her to choose. It celebrates her in the fullness of what she does.
That’s the inheritance I want to pass down to my kids. Not a narrowed-down version of womanhood dressed up in linen and photographed in golden hour light. The real thing. The warrior woman. The one who rises early and plants vineyards and speaks wisdom and gets praised at the city gate.
Eshet chayil.
That’s who she was. And I think she’s a lot more interesting than the version we were handed.
This article is part of the What Is Biblical Womanhood? The Complete Guide series at Grace in the Margins. Continue with What Does the Bible Say About Submission in Marriage? or Should Wives Obey Their Husbands?
Go Deeper: The Full Series
What Is Biblical Womanhood? The Complete Guide — The history, the Hebrew, the hard passages, and why the stakes are higher than an aesthetic.
What Does the Bible Say About Submission in Marriage? — A close reading of Ephesians 5 that starts at verse 21, not verse 22.
Should Wives Obey Their Husbands? — The difference between obedience and mutual submission, and why that distinction matters more than you might think.
Should Husbands Obey Their Wives? — Coming soon.
So You Want to Be a Tradwife? A Biblical Reality Check — The theology, the history, and the financial realities behind the aesthetic.
When God Leads You Out, Not Through — On leaving a marriage, faith, and what Scripture actually says about divorce.
Complementarianism vs. Egalitarianism: What the Bible Actually Says — Coming soon.
Purity Culture and What It Cost Us — Coming soon.
Raising Daughters in a World That Keeps Shrinking Them — Coming soon.
This conversation is most alive when real women bring their real lives into it. I read every comment.