As an evangelical Christian growing up in the Deep South, Rachel Held Evans was surrounded by the concept of “biblical womanhood.” Over the last 30 years of culture wars, this term has been used by evangelicals as a foil for second wave feminism. At one biblical womanhood conference that Ms. Evans attended, one of the main speakers held up 1950s sitcom heroine June Cleaver as the exemplar of biblical womanhood.

Having always been a girl who asked too many questions, Ms. Evans decided to spend nearly a year, October 2010 to September 2011, exploring “biblical womanhood,” living out and examining a mixture of the actual practices of the Bible’s women along with some of the modern-day evangelical stereotypes.