A woman who decided to live “biblically” for one year and wrote a book about her findings is garnering heaps of praise and criticism for her decision.

Rachel Held Evans, who describes herself as a feminist Christian, says her end goal had everything to do with being a woman, despite what her critics are saying.

Evans says she wanted “To call into question that there is a single blueprint of how to be a woman. There’s no single model in the Bible – as soon as you think you have found it a woman comes along and breaks it. Everyone picks and chooses. There are verses that say ‘submit to your husband’, but also those that say ‘submit to one another’. The more women know about the bible the more they can respond when people try to silence them.”

During what she calls “The Womanhood Project“, Evans made her own clothes, grew her hair out, lived outside her home in a tent when she was having her period, called her husband “Master”, and sat alone on the roof of her home as penance after deciding she had been gossiping or nagging, which comes from the Bible verse “it is better to live in a corner of a roof than in a house shared with a contentious woman”. In doing so, she hoped to gain a greater understanding of the Bible and a woman’s role according to it, which is sometimes presented as contradictory passages.

Unfortunately, because her book, “A Year Of Biblical Womanhood”, contains the word “vagina” it will not be carried by Christian bookstore chain Lifeway. When asked about it, Evans said, “I don’t know if they were more offended by my vagina or my brain. The only thing I know is that my editor said, ‘If you leave this word in, there’s a good chance LifeWay won’t carry it.’”

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