Available Now!
August 29 2023
Singular and compelling, The Woman They Wanted will inspire women looking to reestablish connection with themselves, their inner wisdom, and their purpose.
The Woman They Wanted recounts Shannon's remarkable experience inside Big Church--where she was asked to live within a narrow definition of womanhood for almost two decades--and her subsequent journey out of that world and into a more authentic version of herself. Entering conservative American Christianity was like being drawn out to sea, she writes, inexorable and all consuming. Slowly, her worldview was narrowed, her motivations questioned, her behavior examined, until she had been whittled down to an idealized version of femininity envisioned as an extension of her husband and the church. This decidedly patriarchal world, perpetuated even by the other women, began to feel like a slow death. However, when Sovereign Grace Ministries fell apart and Shannon found herself outside church circles for the first time in years, she heard her intuition calling to her again. As she began to shake off the fog of depression and confusion, that voice grew louder. In honoring it, she awakened to the realities in which she had been trapped and found her truest self.
“I needed to understand my own story. I needed to know how a bright, capable woman from a good and loving family could end up so far removed from herself as I had.”
"It was there in the stillness and quiet that I began to find the missing pieces. My missing pieces. Like a woman walking along the beach among the shells, one by one I came upon my own glistening bits. A bit of my truth here, a small piece of my worth there. Important parts of me that had gotten lost in the ocean of men’s voices and loud clapping and hymns."
“In silken prose and boundary-shattering perceptions, Shannon Harris tells her story of ascending, alongside her famous husband, to the heights of the Evangelical world only to learn—slowly, painfully, honestly, triumphantly—that who she was got lost. The Woman They Wanted will become the vanguard of a new movement of women rediscovering themselves, their dreams, and their futures. This book will grieve you, anger you, and inspire you. In one word: stunning. I could not put this book down.”
— Scot McKnight, author of A Church Called Tov and The Jesus Creed
“Shannon’s story will captivate you. Her brave, brilliant, and beautiful narrative smashes the myth of biblical womanhood, and her courage will help women trapped in purity culture find hope for a better life.” ”
— Beth Allison Barr, James Vardaman Professor of History at Baylor University and author of The Making of Biblical Womanhood
“The Woman They Wanted reveals the dark underbelly of how evangelicalism views women and its degrading efforts to silence, shame, and mold women into submissive, oppressed shells of themselves—all billed as ‘God’s plan’. In her own story of healing from high control religion, Harris shares her journey of picking up the pieces that were discarded in favor of becoming a good woman and finding peace and wholeness within herself.”
— Laura Anderson, founder of the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery