I genuinely wondered if this should go somewhere in P&E or not, but decided against it, since you can want to follow a “traditional” lifestyle and not be politically conservative (in the MAGA sense of the word. It’s unsurprising and yet disquieting to me that these schools exist, but I guess capitalism abhors a vacuum. If you’re not sure what a “tradwife” is, the best way I can describe it, to my knowledge, is the stereotypical 50’s TV marriage: the wife cooks, cleans, and raises the kids, and the husband makes the decisions and leads Bible study. As long as everyone walks in with their eyes open…
I had never heard of Hyles-Anderson College until a couple years ago, when this incredibly tragic crime happened. TL : DR and trigger warning: A young man murdered and dismembered his married, pregnant SISTER, who had attended HAC, probably to major in sacred music, which she did perform.
The college is not accredited, and has existed for a very long time. It’s run by the Independent Fundamental Baptists, who are Duggar-level cultish, and the church and school have, probably to nobody’s surprise, been fraught with scandals. Hang on tight if you want to do any kind of deep dive. This will get you started.
And there’s the rub, I suppose.
I would strongly suspect that young women who attend that college were born and raised in Fundamentalist Christian families, and have been lifelong members of Fundamentalist Christian churches. They are adults, but they may not know much, if anything, about other possible lifestyles, or anything that goes against what they have been taught, other than “it’s evil.”
Vanity Fair emphasizes the “tradwife” angle, but based on the program/course offerings listed on the Hyles-Anderson website, it appears one could get at least exposed to a regular college curriculum in certain tracks, as in the “major” designed to produce teachers for Christian high schools which includes English lit., higher math, calculus, physics, chemistry and biology (but probably not mainstream evolutionary biology). Going into the marriage and motherhood track, there are nifty courses for various credits, like:
Baking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Beginning Cooking . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Canning & Freezing . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Clothing Design & Construction II . . . . . . 3
Clothing Design & Construction III . . . . . . 3
Home Decorating . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
How to Rear Infants . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
and
Women Used of God (whatever that might be)
Those wanting to homeschool their future kids might want to take some credits in non-godly subjects.
I’ll take a wild guess that there are no coed dorms at Hyles-Anderson.
Normally I would agree, but the problem is it is rife with the potential for abuse. I’d wager a disproportionate number of men looking for tradwives are likely abusers. So it just seems like an easy way to catch victims. And a lot of these women may not have alternatives depending on their family situation. They are just being passed from one patriarchal system into the next one without much agency about it.
So I guess I’m going to say I’m against this sort of thing.
It was not uncommon in the 70s for high school girls to major in Home Economics. There was one young lady that got straight A’s in her studies but was not allowed to be the class valedictorian because it was not considered to be a real course of study. She was stunningly beautiful (to me at least) and was married at age 16. The concept boggled my 15 yo mind.
Home Ec was required for all genders in my high school. That included nutrition education IIRC.
Just to clarify, I don’t really care if people want or need to be stay at home parents, generally, it’s this specific cult/culture I have a problem with. It’s never seemed anything but crazy toxic to me.
I guess it depends on what you mean by “abusers”, but I don’t think so. Yes, they are rigid in their thinking, but I don’t think they are any more likely to be physically or mentally abusive than any other class of men.
Mine too. So was Industrial Arts, also for all genders.
I live in Indiana, and work in higher education, but I’ve never heard of this place. It definitely sounds like one of those schools that cater to a very specific subculture.
I think Christianity, especially evangelical Christianity, is inherently patriarchal, and patriarchy is directly tied to the abuse of women, so that’s what I’m basing my opinion on.
I don’t know anything about this specific school.
There’s a woman who posts on another site whose major was nothing related to fine arts or home economics, but she needed one more non-major class to graduate, so she chose “Clothing Construction”, thinking it would be a breeze since she had grown up operating a sewing machine in various capacities. She realized quickly that it was actually for people majoring in fashion design, but she did complete it, and it was the most challenging class she took in all her college years.
I agree that this, like BYU or Bob Jones University, is the kind of school that would be appealing to a very narrow segment of the population. Getting credits to transfer to an accredited school could certainly be difficult in many cases, to say the least.
Regarding men who were raised in IFB or are sincere adult-converted practitioners of that faith, you’re probably right, but men outside the cult who are looking for a woman who will put up with just about anything and never leave them? Yeah, women who were raised this way would be easy pickings.
In my school district Home Ec was for the girls and the Shop/IA was for boys.
When I asked to for shop instead of Home Ec (because I already knew how to cook and clean and sew) this upset the apple cart and was kicked all the way up to the school board because no one wanted to make a decision on this “radical” notion, there was concern about me being the only girl amongst all those teen age boys, etc.
I got approval to take shop and drafting, the world did not end, the boys were cool with it (really, the adults were much more upset than us kids), and four years later they decide everybody really should get exposed to all of it so everyone wound up taking Home Ec and “Industrial Arts”.
The drafting teacher quit rather than have to teach another girl, though. Always kind of wondered about that…
Anyhow, I first heard about Hyles-Anderson back in the 1990’s when the place I was working employed a bunch of students from the Moody Bible Institute. The overlap in populations is pretty obvious.
Living in Lake County, Indiana where Hyles-Anderson is located I have also heard of it and sometimes encountered people from that sub-culture. Outside of that sub-culture it doesn’t have a good reputation, between the criminal sex abuse cases and some of the creepy aspects of the sub-culture. Well, creepy to those outside of it, those on the inside seem to regard it all as perfectly normal.
My brother was the only guy to take a home economics course in our high school in 1975. For his course project he embroidered a big Marijuana leaf on the back of his jean jacket. 
Damn my brother was (and still is) cool.
If they’re hoping for their graduates to become high school teachers, won’t they need to have accreditation so the teacher-hopefuls can receive state licensure as teachers?
BYU has a long history, is accredited, and has challenging majors like any other decent real university; however, it has had issues with academic freedom (per this Wiki page. BJU also is accredited, but has had some interesting controversies, one of which was the admission of Blacks only if they were married, and also racial discrimination (per this Wiki page). AFAIK, BJU has not expanded. BYU has campuses in Utah, Idaho (one of my nieces graduated from that one), and Hawai’i.
I don’t believe either BYU or BJU’s offerings for their female students constitute “tradwife preparation” in the sense HAC does.
Regarding home economics, when I was in eighth grade in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, the boys had shop class one semester and home ec the other. The girls had home ec in the opposing semesters. I’m still disappointed the class is called “home economics” when it was just cooking. It would’ve been far more helpful if it included such things as what’s actually involved in running one’s home, such as managing income and out-go, balancing a checkbook, knowing how to deal with facilities issues, etc. As it turnss out, my seventh grade mathematics class at Fort Benning, Georgia covered those.
'Zactly. Also agree w @Spice_Weasel’s comments.
I’m reminded of some animal development studies from the IIRC 1960s.
As we all know, kittens are born with their eyes closed and are blind. It takes a few-many days for the eyes to finish developing and the kitten to open them and see.
Some clever scientists decided to see what happened if they sutured one eyelid shut on a batch of kittens and then only weeks or months later removed the sutures. Turns out the kittens’ eyesight is screwed up in the delayed eyes. And the later the sutures are removed, the more profound the functional blindness of that one eye. Given enough delay, like a couple months, the brain structures needed to perform vision have already solidified in “I was born blind in that eye” mode by then. And then an anatomically normal eye simply does not see.
Whenever I hear of women like this raised in culty hyperpatriarchical surroundings, I think of kittens with both eyes sewed shut from birth. They cannot see and cannot know what seeing is. These women have been trained, as a tree or vine is trained, into a contorted shadow of a real human.
By definition, these sorts of women can’t possibly enter a thing like Hyles-Anderson with “eyes wide open”.
That’s horrific. I’d be very unhappy with those scientist. Very very unhappy. I really wish my eyes didn’t work so that I hadn’t read that story.
You’ll be pleased to learn that experimental ethics have changed a bit in the 70 years since that kind of stuff was routine.
Maybe you were the one who paved the way for the rest of us!
Just kidding, as I believe that you’re somewhat younger than me. But at my school, it was standard for both genders to take both classes. I did a bit of the obvious “But why do I have to learn to cook and sew!?” whining, but I’m glad I took that class, because it turns out that cooking and sewing are actually rather valuable skills to have! Even for boys. Who woulda thunk it?
you’re making some really broad sweeping statements here that I’m not comfortable with and I’d like to understand what you mean by “directly tied”. Speaking from a Catholic perspective, yes the official decisions of the Church are all made by men in so far as the Pope, cardinals, bishops, etc. are all men, so I guess in that sense it is certainly “patriarchal”, but there is absolutely no modern teaching or doctrine that states or suggests women are in any way inferior to men or should subject themselves to them. Yes, to be fair, there are bible passages that suggest the same, but no mainstream Catholic movement teaching or belief to that effect. I’m not as familiar with other Christian denominations, but certainly there are some that believe that, perhaps southern Baptist and various evangelical denominations. But even there, I would like to see a cite that abuse of women is more prevalent in those, or Christianity at large.