They continue to inspire ladies to seek out the truth in the WORD and how to live a virtuous life. . Anna Sofia and Elizabeth Botkin are our Featured Femina and with us to share on some interesting topics.*

Miss Serenity, FF: I really enjoyed Return of the Daughters. How did the idea get started to make the documentary, and what part did the two of  you play in it’s preparation?

Botkin Sisters: Right after we published our book, /So Much More/, we began to get emails from girls saying they understood the message of the book in theory, but simply couldn’t see it working out in the 21st century. We realized that it has been too long since most people have seen a picture of this kind of life, and began to wonder what we could give them.

We got the idea for a documentary as we were traveling through the US, visiting the homes of a number of families whose daughters lived at home and helped their fathers.

We marveled over how inspiring and encouraging the picture was, and realized we had the answer — through our family’s production company, we could invite thousands of girls into those very homes to see the picture for themselves.

This approach would also give us the opportunity to showcase one of our favorite elements of families embracing these principles: their diversity. It has often been said that Scripture has one true interpretation, but many applications — many ways to be expressed through a family’s own unique flair or ethnic flavor. Seeing this in action has helped many girls catch sight of a vision for how it could work in their own families.

The production was an adventure in itself, neither of us having written or produced a documentary before. We wrote the script, conducted the interviews, and narrated. It was wonderful to be able to work so closely with our brothers, the technical geniuses who really made it happen.

Miss Serenity, FF: Since it seems that you both were exposed to many different people and a variety of situations, can you tell us what guidelines you’ve made yourselves in the area of keeping your hearts pure for your husband? As you know, this is an area all young ladies are interested in.

Botkin Sisters: Good question. Our travels, our work, and especially the fact that we have five brothers and a father who loves to disciple young men, has pushed us into company that is often male-dominant. Being able to interact naturally and comfortably with young men as brothers in Christ has been a learning process for us both and we have learned some great lessons along the way! Here are some tips that have been very helpful to us:

1. View the young men as brothers “in all purity”, not as marriage material. Whether a girl tends toward overt flirtation or blushing bashfulness in the presence of young men, her problem stems form the same source: Selfishness, a lack of genuine love for the young men, and inordinate focus on her own eligibility. Similarly, our brothers have told us that it is much easier for them view the young ladies as “sisters with all purity” when they are behaving like sisters, as opposed to scared rabbits or marital candidates.

2. Pray for the young men…and their future wives. This really helps keep relationships in perspective and facilitates the right kind of sisterly interest in them.

3. Don’t assume that every attention paid you by a young man (e.g. He looked at you, opened the door for you, spoke to you, smiled at you…etc.) is a mark of intention. It might just be a brotherly gesture.

4. Study to be fluent in topics of conversation that will be edifying and interesting to a mixed group; history, theology, current affairs, and books are a few good ones.

5. Keep interaction with young men within a family context. Avoid private or very personal interaction (this includes online!).

6. Last but not least, keep the lines of communication with your parents wide-open. We have made a habit of sharing everything with our parents, and this includes personal struggles, concerns, and our personal observations and opinions of the young men we know. We have discovered that the more faithfully we do this, the easier it becomes — it can really be the best way of relieving the burden of pent-up anxieties and fears that many girls feel during their singleness and one of the the surest way to safeguard her heart.

Miss Serenity, FF: While I am a very interested in your current lives, I would also like to know a little about your childhood. How many children are in your family and what number do the two of you fall in? How did that effect your views growing up?

Botkin Sisters: There are seven of us in all, and we two girls fall in between two older brothers and three younger brothers, so we grew up surrounded on all sides by boys! We both look back on this as being an incredible blessing, as over the years it deepened our appreciation and understanding of men, the God-given differences between the sexes, and the mutual dependence they have on each other. We also think that living in a male-dominated home had a very balancing effect on our developing sense of femininity.

For example, though we both reveled in all the niceties that girlhood usually entails — tea parties, dressing up, playing house, picking flowers…etc., we also enjoyed (and sometimes preferred) a good romp in the woods with the boys, where we indulged in archery, tree fort building and catching frogs. As contradictory as all these activities may sound, I think this enforced in us a very vital truth: that femininity’s context is within a man’s world at a man’s side, and its purpose is to compliment and complete masculinity, rather than to exist independently from it.

We freely admit that we used to struggle with a desire to compete with our brothers , but thanks to the grace of God, and some major repentance on our parts, we learned how the genders can work together and not against one another. Now, we are grateful to be able to say that we love our boys, we are fascinated by their differing interests and skills, and we are always excited about being part of their projects — not as competitors or wanna-be brothers, but as sisters.

Miss Serenity, FF: I’m sure you two have been the best of friends since the start. How did you keep your relationship as sisters strong through the years, and how do you now?

Botkin Sisters: People sometimes seem to think of us as just two physical manifestations of the same entity, but we are really two very different people, with different gifts, different tastes, and what sometimes seem to  be opposite personalities. Thankfully, we are united by the same passion for God’s truth and we share a common interest in building His Kingdom through discipleship of young women. This was not always the case.

To put it delicately, we clashed a lot growing up, and rivalry was fueled by resentment for the gifts and abilities we each saw and coveted in the other. Because working together always became a competition and brought out one sister’s strength and the other’s weakness, the easiest way to get along with egos intact was to go our separate ways and never attempt anything that the other was better at. Deep down, I think we both knew that this was cowardly and selfish, and that we were letting pride get in the way of a very important relationship.

The becoming-best-friends process took us both through the fire as it consisted chiefly of the very thing that was the most mortifying to us both: collaboration, which in time taught us to work out our differences, to learn from each other, and even to become grateful to God for the strengths we saw in each other. In short, it taught us that we needed each other. Even today though, the foundation of our friendship together is love, humility, and a shared focus on something that is much bigger than ourselves.

Miss Serenity, FF: Something I struggle with is using my time wisely. How do you determine for yourselves which priorities to put on the top of your list?

Botkin Sisters: It does seem as though there is never enough time in a day (or in a lifetime!) to accomplish everything we would like to. We’ve had to learn to prioritize carefully, and many pursuits and interests have had to fall by the wayside. Our goal in how we decide to spend our time is “to engage in good deeds /to meet pressing needs/, so that [we] will not be unfruitful.” (Titus 3:14, emphasis added). That the activity be wholesome or “feminine” is not enough; it must be inspired by an understanding of the pressing needs of the hour, and designed to wisely meet that need. We always loved how John Adams summed up this principle of recognizing what the times require:

“I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.”

Our criteria for judging every project or pursuit is basically this:

Does it meet a pressing need? (Titus 3:14)
Will it shepherd His sheep? (John 21:16)
Is it crucial to disciplining all the nations, teaching them to observe
All that He commanded? (Matthew 28:20)
Will it build on the foundation with gold, silver and precious stones,
or with wood, hay and straw? Will it withstand the test of fire? (1
Corinthians 3:12-14)

On a more practical level, we ask:

Will it help our family?
Will it help the church? (local and worldwide)
Will it equip us to be more effective servants of Christ?
Is there anything more effective we could be doing with that time?

Miss Serenity, FF: You both seem really grounded in the Word. Can you tell us a little bit about your devotional times at home? Both family and personal?

Botkin Sisters: We usually have our personal devotions in the morning, though of course we consider our entire day “devoted” — we try to think about the things of the Lord, read about them, talk about them, and pray about them, all throughout the day. Our father leads family devotions at least once a day, usually in the evening.

Miss Serenity FF: What new things are you working on – now that Return of the Daughters has been out for a while?

Botkin Sisters: You’ll just have to wait to find out. ;-)

Miss Serenity, FF: From reading your book, So Much More, I was amazed at the level of writing and understanding you have. What curriculum did you use when you home schooled, and what did a typical day look like for you at that time?

Botkin Sisters: That is very kind of you. Our curriculum was a hodge-podge of resources our parents collected on all the subjects they thought most important for us to know. Our father’s educational priorities for us were theology and worldview, history and understanding the times, and writing and communication, and he and our mother designed our curriculum themselves.

Our mother talks practically about her methods in her two CD’s of Curriculum Advice. The core of our curriculum has always been /lots of reading/, of hard and significant books, the books our parents were reading. As John Taylor Gatto said, “Close reading of tough-minded writing is still the best, cheapest, and quickest method known for learning to think for yourself. … Reading, and rigorous discussion of that reading in a way that obliges you to formulate a position and support it against objections, is an operational definition of education in its most fundamental civilized sense.” One of our favorite methods now is to ask the most educated and effective people we meet which books were most significant in their lives, and then read those books.

If you’re wondering how we learned to write: /So Much More /demanded such new strains of effort from us that we soon felt like beginners learning to write for the first time. That was our great crash course in communication. However, what got us through was a foundation our parents laid long before we began the book: teaching us to care about things, to have something to say, and to strive to say it well.

Some of their most effective measures:

They both speak very well. They are conscientious about what they say and the way they say it (and are both always working on improving their grammar.)

Our mother made it a priority to read aloud to us for at least two hours each day when we were little, and our father always read aloud to us at the dinner table – Scripture, and also other  books, articles, letters, news items, etc.

They encouraged us to read extensively from the best writers.

They taught us to recognize and appreciate what makes some writing good, and some poor.

They had us practice writing. Each day we would synopsize what we had read in our history, theology, science or literature reading (which had the added purpose of forcing us to pay attention, understand, process, and remember what we learned in our reading).

They are both excellent and ruthless editors. Thanks to the high standards they held us to, we rewrote /So Much More/ over nine times.

Miss Serenity, FF: Bottom line – I loved your hair in Return of the Daughters. Tell us the truth: did you do it yourselves? :)

Botkin Sisters: Thank you! We did do our hair ourselves, as we always have (though we do occasionally help each other out if necessary).

Elizabeth and Anna Sophia – I want to thank you for being positive role models for myself and other girls in our generation. I look forward to your upcoming projects. I sure appreciate the time you took to answer these questions. You can find out more about the Sisters and their projects at Visionary Daughters.

Miss Serenity is a teenage girl swimming upstream, fighting to minimize the backlash of feminism to our generation. She writes about her journey and family at Femininity in a Feminist World.

Please note that the Feelin’ Feminine site does not endorse all the Botkin’s theology, but believes we can learn from all peoples of every walks of life. Thank you for reading.

Related Articles

• Featured Femina: Jasmine Baucham (12)
• Fully Female (3)
• Decoding The P31W Graphics (0)