This elevation of motherhood in addition to wifehood, specifically, is a marked shift in women’s spiritual authority from historical church tradition. As Beth Allison Barr writes in The Making of Biblical Womanhood, the Protestant Reformation changed things: before it, women could gain spiritual authority by rejecting their sexuality, by becoming nuns and taking religious vows. But after the Reformation, the opposite proved true for Protestants. “The more closely they identified with being wives and mothers,” Barr writes, “the godlier they became.”
