Book Review: Let Me Be a Woman by Elisabeth Elliot

Let Me Be a Woman by Elisabeth Elliot was my favorite book from 2023. In a collection of letters Elliot wrote to her then newly-engaged daughter, Valerie, Elliot tackles the question “what is a woman?” What she means is, “who am I?” and to answer it, she first asks, “Whose am I?”

Her daughter Valerie was young, in love, and soon to be married, living away from both her mother and her future husband while the letters were written. Elliot is no doubt writing to her all the things she wished she could say in person while her daughter was readying herself for marriage, gathering the letters into a wedding present for Valerie. 

She also wrote the letters at the height of the feminist movement in the seventies and eighties. 

She begins with, “Women were told that they ought to get out of the house and do something ‘fulfilling.’ They listened, and many discovered what men could easily have told them: that by no means is fulfillment necessarily to be found in any job–in ditch digging or in the office of a CEO–any more than in the kitchen. I knew that real satisfaction and joy come in response to acceptance to the will of God and nowhere else. So I wrote a book as my wedding present to you, putting down in black and white the great eternal principles that distinguish men and women.”

I read this book while pregnant with my own daughter and was deeply encouraged by Elliot’s words on being a godly wife and mother, and more broadly, what it means to be a Christian woman. 

I was also struck by the different ways the title can be interpreted. Yes, she is saying to the culture, "let me be a woman, not a man, not anything else.” But she is also acknowledging that God “let her be a woman,” that God allowed her to be this wonderful being called a woman and that it was no accident.

Part of the reason this book became my favorite is because it addresses something I’ve been praying about for years now. What makes a Godly woman? What is Biblical femininity and how is it different from Biblical masculinity? How do I fit in God’s design, not just as Kayley the individual, but as Kayley the woman, and why is that second defining aspect of who I am not just a roll of the dice? God made me a woman and He makes no mistakes - so what does that mean? How does that inform how I love and serve Him, my husband, my children, my family, my friends?

Personally, I’ve been disappointed in general “Christian” literature marketed towards women. The bulk of women’s discipleship and study materials I’ve encountered are thinly-veiled self-help books (“self-help” being clearly anti-gospel in my opinion). The market is saturated by boss babes, martyred mothers, and selfish wives.

It can be disheartening, especially as a new wife and mother raising a daughter. How do I raise her “to cultivate a gentle and quiet spirit,” as Elliot puts it, in a world (and sometimes, a body of Christ) that celebrates the opposite? 

Elliot was a breath of fresh air and an encouragement. Her words were a reminder of what the gospel does for us and through us, of God’s design and purpose for his people. Below are some of my favorite quotes from the book, but I highly recommend you read it for yourself. I’ve already decided I’ll be giving this book to my daughter(s) during engagement (and since my sisters aren’t yet married, they’ll probably be getting copies, too!). ;)

Her charge at the start of the book is this: 

When you are overwhelmed by all that God has required of you when He “let you be a woman,” read Isaiah 41:10-11, ‘Fear not, for I am with you, be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my victorious right hand” (RSV). 

A Few of My Favorite Quotes from

Let Me Be a Woman by Elisabeth Elliot

From the intro: 

Fathers and mothers are given the awesome task of making saints of their children, but this cannot possibly be done except, first, by godly example and then (line upon line, precept upon precept), by discipline administered with love and prayer.

As an initial response to the question, “What is a woman?”: 

There is, no doubt, a superficial sort of consolation and reassurance to be gained from sitting around telling how you feel about things. You generally find several others who feel the same way, or (what is even more reassuring and consoling) they feel worse than you do. But it is no way to come at the truth.

In order to learn what it means to be a woman we must start with the One who made her.

On worship: 

We are human, we are “selves,” and it takes no effort at all to feel. But worship is not a feeling. Worship is not an experience. Worship is an act, and this takes discipline. We are to worship “in spirit and in truth.” Never mind about the feelings. We are to worship in spite of them. 

On the Lord giving the Elliot’s a daughter, though they had prayed for a son: 

[Jim] was perfectly contented, I could see, to be the father of a daughter instead of a son. So I was content. It was God who had given you to us, God to whom our prayers for a son had been made, and God who knew reasons we did not then know that made His choice far better. 

If you believe in a God who controls the big things, you have to believe in a God who controls the little things. It is we, of course, to whom things look “little” or “big.” 

On God providing Adam a “helper”: 

It was a woman God gave him, a woman, “meet,” fit, suitable, entirely appropriate for him, made of his very bones and flesh.

You can’t make proper use of a thing unless you know what it was made for, whether it is a safety pin or a sailboat. To me it is a wonderful thing to be a woman under God–to know, first of all, that we were made (“So God created man in his own image, the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”) and then that we were made for something (“The rib which the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.”) 

This was the original idea. This is what woman was for. The New Testament refers back clearly and strongly to this purpose: “For man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man.” Some texts are susceptible of differing interpretations, but for the life of me I can’t see any ambiguities in this one. 

On Eve:

What sort of world might it have been if Eve had refused the Serpent’s offer and had said to him instead, “Let me not be like God. Let me be what I was made to be–let me be a woman”?

But the sin was fatal beyond their worst imaginings. It was hubris, a lifting up of the soul in defiance of God, the pride that usurps another’s place. It is a damnable kind of pride. 

On the charge that Elliot is an “ambiguous role model” for modern young women:

I’ve tried to think these charges through. I suppose I am an “ambiguous role model” if a mother is not supposed to write books, or if a wife who is submissive would never be asked to speak on a college platform, or if no college graduate ought to love housework. 

…If I have said that a woman’s highest fulfillment is to be found in subjecting herself to a man in marriage, I meant, of course, the woman to whom God has given the gift of marriage. Her highest fulfillment will be found in obedience to that calling. 

The ‘intellectual’ women who feel stifled by what I say have not yet understood the biblical meaning of freedom. God’s service is, as our Prayer Book says, ‘perfect freedom.’ 

On choices:

When you make a choice, you accept the limitations of that choice. To accept limitation requires maturity. The child has not yet learned that it can’t have everything. What it sees it wants. What it does not get it screams for. It has to grow up to realize that saying Yes to happiness often means saying No to yourself.

On femininity and masculinity: 

It is a naive sort of feminism that insists that women prove their ability to do all the things that men do. This is a distortion and a travesty. Men have never sought to prove that they can do all the things women do. Why subject women to purely masculine criteria? Women can and ought to be judged by the criteria of femininity, for it is in their femininity that they participate in the human race. And femininity has its limitations. So has masculinity. That is what we’ve been talking about. To do this is not to do that. To be this is not to be that. To be a woman is not to be a man. To be married is not to be single–which may mean not to have a career. To marry this man is not to marry all the others. A choice is a limitation. 

On submission in marriage: 

It takes self-discipline and it takes humility to do your job. We can count on the God who issued the order to provide the strength to carry it out. No man has sufficient strength in himself to properly be the head of his wife. No woman can rightly submit to his headship. It takes grace, and grace is a gift, but we are to use the means of grace. Self-discipline helps. Prayer helps. Christ, who is the Head of all of us, stands ready to help any man or woman who asks Him.

I want to be a good wife and mother; I want to be a good friend and daughter; I want to be a Godly woman. All I must do is ask for the One who made me a woman to help me be a true one. Christ, the Head of us all, stands ready to help those who ask.

I ranted about this book often enough last year that I got Elisabeth Elliot’s biography, Elisabeth Elliot: A Life, for Christmas this year and it’s on my to-read list for 2024. And I’m welcoming any and all books/articles on Biblical femininity and womanhood, if you have them! :)