Ruby Slippers

I love Jonalyn Fincher. I've never really met her, although she did speak at a chapel at Biola last year with her husband. But she is really smart and really good at articulating her thoughts into a really amazing book called Ruby Slippers. It's about women, the soul of women and a lot of other things. Men should read it too because it is..fantastic.
I've been reading it slowly over the past couple weeks and I still have one chapter left, but I'm so distracted by her ideas ad I want other people to know what she says because she talks about a lot of things that I think are important.

I tried to start writing to talk about the book, about what she says. But I was 1 giant paragraph in and had barely started talking about what's important in he first chapter. But the book is seriously seriously awesome. her chapters can be long, but they're all so so good. She's talking about femininity, how it's been used to force women into a specific 'gender role' and used to constrain who we think we 'ought' to be. She talks about what femininity should be, how God designed it and how God designed women to bear His image. As a woman, I bear God's image just as much as a man does. I bear God's image in my soul, in the attributes and characteristics that I share with Him, attributes and characteristics that are different that the attributes and characteristics of men.
She talks about six broad, general traits of being a woman, six things that most women have. They're not things that are necessary to e feminine or to be a woman, but they're general 'family characteristics,' is what I think she calls them. She says that no women is ever ore or less feminine. Whether I'm sitting on my couch in a tank to and basketball shorts (as I am now) or dressed up for prom - I am always a woman and I am always feminine.
The chapter I read today talked about some of the weaknesses of women, things we tend to do. She frames them as our strengths and our attributes gone bad and says that men's weaknesses are often the same thing. She talks about a tendency to be passive aggressive, to send silent, subtle barbs at other women to hurt them. She talks about her own tendency to end over backward to please someone, about women's emotional sensitivity to others and how we need to be needed, and why that's a bad thing. She talked about the tendency of women to not like other women, which is something that always bugs me so much. I always hear from girls that "I just don't like other girls" and I understand what they mean but it's so...awful to perpetuate a 'girl-hating culture.' (Another book I read Reviving Ophelia talked about our girl-hating culture). She talked about our tendency to classify things as feminine or girly and dismiss them, to think that more masculine things are better and cooler and thus to degrade women.
I feel like I could read this book over and over and continue learning from it. I read the first couple chapters last year and loved it, but when I started it over this year, they were just as good. I want other women, other girls, to read this book. I want them to know and understand what she talks about.

I love Ruby Slippers.  You should read it. I will seriously buy it for you. Email me, Facebook message me. It is the best ever.

Vaya con Dios.