Somewhere along the way, we stopped teaching women the standards that formed the strongest among us.
The Forgotten Standards for Women is a reclamation. Across ten categories - Womanhood and Identity, Sisterhood, Motherhood, Marriage and Devotion, Leadership, Work and Purpose, Physical Discipline, Mental and Emotional Strength, Legacy and Influence, and Faith and Spiritual Warfare - this book offers one hundred lists of ten. One hundred chances to pause, to measure, and to ask whether the standard a woman has been handed is the one worth keeping.
Each list is brief. Each item is direct. No hedging. No performative humility. No curated confession. Just the standards themselves - paired with scripture, with voices from the women who have taught this generation, and with concrete practices for the days ahead.
Every category opens with the principles themselves and closes with two things the modern world rarely puts together: ten quotes worth remembering, and ten ways to begin putting it into practice. Across all ten categories, that is one thousand items, one hundred quotes, and one hundred practices - a thousand small recoveries, layered together into a whole life.
This is a companion to The Forgotten Standards, written for men. This volume is not a softer version of the same book. It is the parallel work - shaped by the particular calling, the particular pressure, and the particular power of being a woman in this moment.
Read it in order. Open it at random. Mark it up. Hand it to a daughter, a sister, a friend who is tired of being told what to want but is no longer sure what to stand on. Use a single list as the spine of a weekly conversation. Pull one practice and try it for a month. Let one quote sit on the dashboard or the bathroom mirror until it is no longer just words.
The voices gathered in these pages include Priscilla Shirer, Lysa TerKeurst, Jennie Allen, Ann Voskamp, Jackie Hill Perry, Christine Caine, Sadie Robertson Huff, Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, Beth Moore, Lauren Daigle, CeCe Winans, Carrie Underwood, Joni Eareckson Tada, Shannon Bream, Harris Faulkner, Erika Kirk, and many more - women whose lives are the proof of the standards their words describe.
The Forgotten Standards for Women is for the woman who wants to live deliberately. For the wife rebuilding what marriage was supposed to be. For the mother whose children are watching closer than they are letting on. For the daughter just beginning, and for the grandmother whose example was the standard before anyone wrote it down.
The standards have not been lost. They have only been forgotten. This book remembers them.
Arbuckle, Geoffrey: - "Geoffrey Arbuckle is the author of Complicit, Only a Fool's Gold, The Surveillance State, and the Forgotten Standards series. His work moves across fiction and non-fiction - political thrillers, literary novels, near-future surveillance fiction, children's books, and direct-spoken commentary on the standards modern life has quietly let go of.A single conviction runs through all of it: that the standards a culture forgets are usually the ones it needed most, and that remembering them is not nostalgia but recovery. He writes for readers who are tired of being told what to want and are looking for something they can stand on.He lives in Kansas City with his wife, China Polly - a Proverbs 31 woman whose life is the architecture beneath nearly every page he writes. The Forgotten Standards for Women is dedicated, in part, to their daughter Madison on the occasion of her marriage, and to the generation of women she now belongs to."
