Review: "Rift" by Cait West

Rift by Cait West
Published April 2024 via William B. Eerdmans
★★★★

I'd been told that the world was dangerous for women, writes West, that being out of the protection of my father would be asking for harm. A woman alone was an easy target. I was an easy target. But I ventured out into that danger anyway when I left my parents' home, and with it the Christian patriarchy movement. Only later did I realize how much danger I'd left behind. (loc. 1724*)

When West was growing up, the rules were relatively simple: she would be a child until she married, and who and when she married (and whether she married at all) would be up to the discretion of her father. Under Christian patriarchy, girls were to be silent homemakers-in-training who submitted to their father in everything, and women to be homemakers and mothers who submitted to their husbands in everything. It was a long time before West started to question this.

Under a courtship model of "romance", romance itself was entirely out of the question: West was to keep her emotions strictly in check while she had structured, chaperoned conversations with a potential suitor and had equally chaperoned dates. When a suitor moved away, they wrote letters and emails: When Matthew's letters came in the mail, my father would open them and read them first, to make sure there was nothing inappropriate or overly emotional in them. ... Before I send him my replies, I gave them to my father, so he could make sure I wasn't having any romantic emotions. (loc. 959) Emotion was supposed to come later, only after betrothal or (better) marriage; this was supposed to protect West, to protect girls in general, from broken hearts and loss of purity. Nobody asked the unmarried "girls" whether they wanted to be protected in this manner. Nobody asked the married women whether this model of courtship had brought them the type of relationship they wanted.

Religion is largely beyond the point in West's book. She writes instead about power and control and of course rifts—rifts in family, rifts in culture, rifts in landscapes, rifts in understanding of the way the world was shaped. In later parts of the book the story feels a bit more scattered, which is not unusual for a book that is mostly about being in a particular thing and partly about being out of that particular thing, but she writes with a great deal of thoughtfulness about the ways in which her father's chosen way of viewing the world impacted those around him. I'd be curious to know more about how her mother and sister experienced this patriarchal culture—her sister in particular, because the shift to courtship happened only when her sister was very nearly an adult, and would otherwise have been very nearly free. (Those are, of course, their own stories to tell, but I am curious nonetheless.) It's a fascinating look into a world that I want no part of—West was lucky to make it out on more or less her own terms, and hers is one of so many recent voices speaking against the ways in which the Christian patriarchy (and the patriarchy more generally) acts to tear apart women's agency and freedom.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.