But just examine the blog Homeliving Helper , belonging to LAF's other co-founder, one Lydia Sherman (WHO HAS THE SAME NAME AS A NOTORIOUS SERIAL KILLER!). She's got more Victoriana going on than every period costume film made in the last ten years.
Much as LAF emphatically claims that they are not trying to emulate some bygone glorious past, I can't help but to wonder whose Word they're going by: God's or vintage Western culture's? Because their dream of the ideal Christian life is ultimately as much American as it is (supposedly) biblical. It's the nineteenth-century vision of the "Republican Mother" I discussed in my last post, which was, oh irony of ironies, very much a novel, "feminist" concept in its own day! As Elizabeth Kerber discusses in her book, the soaring rhetoric of the Revolutionary War demanded a new generation of strong, educated patriots, and it was now believed that the home was foundation of American liberty, and women, as keepers of the home, would play a vital role in the shaping of American destiny. "The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world." But evolution is inevitable (in both society and nature, although here I'm talking about the former), and this innovative model that came out of the Revolution eventually settled into the bourgeoisie "angel of the house," the well-dressed genteel lady who kept a beautifully-decorated abode for her world-weary husband. But the influence of both is glaringly evident on LAF.
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