Stacy: There was a rumor circulating that your book says that girls who go to college are harlots. Did you say this or is this what you believe?
Botkin Sisters: Of course not and of course not. We are astonished that anyone would circulate such a false and destructive accusation. No, we do not believe that Scripture teaches that a woman who goes to college is a harlot. Though we consider college a lesser option for those who want to be thoroughly educated (for reasons clearly stated in our book), we have never called college attendance a sin, or passed moral judgment on girls for going. (More on our position on this issue in an upcoming question.) We certainly never said anything about harlots, or quoted any verses about harlots, in any connection with college or full-time jobs.
Here is our one mention of the word “harlot” in its original context, in Chapter Twelve, about the home and the attitude of the godly woman toward it:
The weight of biblical passages seem to strongly indicate that the home is the woman’s domain. Why should this be true only for married women? Proverbs 7:11 describes one of the wiles of the harlot: “She is boisterous and rebellious, her feet do not remain at home.” This description could match many of the Christian girls we know. They would be outraged and insulted to be likened to harlots, but they are unwittingly acting like them. The godly woman loves to be in her home. Chapter 12, p. 173
Please note that we used the words “unwittingly acting like.” Of course most girls who are boisterous and rebellious are not actually harlots; they’re just behaving in a similar manner, sharing these characteristics with the woman of Proverbs 7.
We understand this verse to be a broad warning, not just to men who might be destroyed by a boisterous, forward and rebellious woman. It holds wisdom for girls who live at home, as well as girls who live elsewhere, single women and married women alike. The Bible, and especially the book of Proverbs, tells us many things about the harlot. Three of the things God wanted women to know about her are these: A, she is boisterous; B, she is rebellious; and C, her feet do not remain at home. Because of many of the other things we know about the harlot, these three things might surprise us in how innocuous and common they seem. Why did God want us to know that the harlot is like this? To tell us that all women who do A, B and C are harlots? We hope not, because, like all women, we have the tendency toward all three.
As Christian women who should tremble before God’s Word and want to see both the exhortations and the warnings for women in God’s Word, we should consider that this was stated to let us know that A, B and C are not the attitudes of a godly woman. In other words: This is how bad women act. We do not want to be like bad women. We should avoid all the attitudes of the bad woman, including attitudes A, B and C.
Because A, B and C all do boil down to attitude. The trouble with the woman of Proverbs 7 is not that she opens her mouth; her counterpart, the virtuous woman of Proverbs 31, is praised for “open[ing] her mouth in wisdom; the teaching of kindness is on her tongue.” It is the defiant, loud, tumultuous attitude that we are warned away from. The trouble with the wayward woman is not that her feet leave the house; her counterpart, the virtuous woman, “is like the merchant ships; she bringeth her food from afar.” What’s interesting is the wording in Proverbs 7: Her feet do not remain at home. As John Gill wrote in his commentary of verse 11: “Her feet abide not in her house; to attend the business of it; but she is gadding abroad to seek her lovers, and bring them in; it is the character of good women that they are keepers at home, but it is the sign of a harlot to gad abroad…” (emphasis added)
What comes across is a restless, discontented urge to ignore our duties at home and gad about; an unbridled affection and addiction to the things of the world, as opposed to the home-focus of the Proverbs 31 woman. Even women who live at home and don’t keep full-time jobs must wrestle with this temptation. Being home isn’t an inoculation against becoming a Proverbs 7 woman—the Proverbs 7 woman could technically have called herself a “keeper at home.”
And a case could be made that there are more manifestations to this discontent, gad-about spirit than just roving from “the house.” Christian women have many new, high-tech alternatives to the old, pedestrian gadding-about. Now we can “be idle, wandering about from [blog] to [blog]; and not only idle, but tattlers also and busybodies, speaking things which [we] ought not,” (1 Timothy 5:13) without even leaving our own thresholds. It’s more easily justified, and therefore we must be even more vigilant to keep our consciences tender and our hearts willing to be convicted.
