# Mary Pride **Mary Pride** (b. 1955) is the author whose 1985 book *The Way Home: Beyond Feminism, Back to Reality* became a founding text of the [[Quiverfull]] movement and of the patriarchal wing of Christian homeschooling. She built a publishing business on that audience and has run it for four decades. ## From feminism to fundamentalism Pride earned bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical and computer systems engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1974–75. She described herself as a feminist activist before converting to evangelical Christianity around 1977, and then moving to fundamentalism. That arc is the backbone of *The Way Home*, which presents it as testimony: she had tried the feminist life and found it false. ## The argument *The Way Home* (Crossway, 1985) argues that a wife's God-given calling is full-time motherhood and homemaking under her husband's authority. It rejects **all** family planning, and treats contraception as the gateway to abortion (see [[Mary Pride - family planning is the mother of abortion]]). Children are to be received without limit, which is the "quiver full" of Psalm 127. Journalist Kathryn Joyce wrote that the book "did much to recreate the homeschooling movement along patriarchal and militantly fertile lines." Pride softened slightly in the 1989 sequel *All the Way Home*, conditionally accepting natural family planning. ## The homeschooling empire Pride turned her audience into infrastructure. *The Big Book of Home Learning* (Crossway, 1986, with editions through 1999) became a standard reference for evangelical homeschooling parents. Her magazine *Practical Homeschooling* made her one of the movement's commercial hubs. That is how an argument about childbearing became an education movement: large families needed home schools, and home schools needed curricula. ## Why she matters now Pride is one origin point for ideas that returned in the 2020s under new names: - the "trad wife" aesthetic - [[Pronatalism]] as a political program - the right's hostility to contraception - homeschooling as a way to separate from secular institutions The pronatalist tech right and the Christian-patriarchy right arrive at the same policy (more births, fewer working mothers, less state schooling) from opposite starting points. Pride is the Christian source text. ## See also - [[Quiverfull]] · [[Pronatalism]] · [[Antifeminism]] · [[Misogyny on the Right]] - [[Reformed Christianity]] · [[Kinship and Political Order]]