Journal: Journal for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood
Volume: JBMW 21:1 (Spring 2016)
Article: A Review Of Courtney Reissig. "The Accidental Feminist: Restoring Our Delight In God’s Good Design." Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2015. 176 pp. $14.99.
Author: Megan Hill

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JBMW 21:1 (Spring 2016) p. 109

A Review Of Courtney Reissig.
The Accidental Feminist: Restoring Our Delight In God’s Good Design.1
Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2015. 176 pp. $14.99.

Megan Hill

Pastor’s Wife
West Springfield Covenant Community Church
West Springfield, Massachusetts

When I was a young girl, my friends and I spent our time acting out epic stories. My friend Courtney and I were undiscovered and extremely talented ballerinas who were often held captive by an evil dancing mistress. Ami and I played women in the grand tradition of Little House on the Prairie. We dressed up in a bonnets and shawls and parked my little brother outside the door with his toy shotgun. At Katie’s house, we were modern teens, orphaned and abandoned to survive in whatever harsh wilderness we could imagine that day. In a girlhood’s worth of Saturday afternoons, we constructed elaborate narratives for our imaginary lives as artists, pioneers, and survivors.

My life today as a suburban pastor’s wife and mother of three is hardly the exciting story I imagined when I was 10. No spotlights and stages or wolf attacks and imminent starvation here. Just laundry, dirty dishes, and more laundry. Still, there’s a narrative if I think about it.

The fact is we all have stories to tell. And this is precisely the point of Courtney Reissig’s new book The Accidental Feminist: Restoring Our Delight in God’s Good Design. Whether we dance or do laundry, Reissig wants women to ask themselves what story they’re telling with their lives.

Two Kinds Of Stories

It’s a good question. Recently, I re-read the introduction to Lena Dunham’s new memoir, Not That

JBMW 21:1 (Spring 2016) p. 110

Kind of Girl. Dunham, creator of the HBO television series Girls and a pioneer of this generation’s feminism, writes, “There is nothing gutsier to me than a person announcing that their story is one that deserves to be told, especially if that person is a woman.”2 The story Dunham tells is quintessentially modern—unapologetic and intensely personal. Such is the spirit of our age: I tell my story because it proves something about me. It says who I am, what I’m capable of, and what I want to accomplish. I’m the meaning of my own story.

Feminism like Dunham’s may come naturally to us as self-focused sinners (hence, the accidental in Reissig’s title), but only God’s good design for womanhood truly enables us to thrive and see ourselves as part of a bigger story.

In The Accidental Feminist...

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