In lieu of making up something to blog about I'm reposting a comment I made to The Dane's blog wherein he questions the teaching that a woman ought to remain under her father's authority until she marries.

Seth, I don't think this is an issue that can be decided in a hard and fast way, and there's no chapter and verse to reference on either side of the discussion.

When the Bible presents something as being "normal," i.e. the expected family situations of women, I think that the burden of proof rests on the person who thinks there should be discontinuity between the norm in the Bible and our practice.

I can't think of any Biblical reason why we should view an unmarried woman living out from under her father's authority as a positive moral good and something to be sought after. The baseline assumption in Scripture is just that normally, a woman lives under her father's or brother's authority until she marries. There are exceptions, like Zelophehad's orphaned daughters who had no brother, and of course Dorcas and Lydia, whose situations are not explained.

I don't think we should be too quick to dismiss this kind of thing as being merely cultural. In Christian society until relatively recently, women were expected to obey their fathers until they married – even middle-aged women and even when the father was a tyrant (except, or course if he commanded her to break God's law). The fact that it's a fairly modern innovation and coincides with the woman's suffrage and feminist movements makes it highly suspicious.

The main difficulty with your examples is that in each them the father is being somewhat unreasonable – he's treating a grown woman as though she were still a child. It was extremely trying to me when at the age of 19 I wanted to attend a Christian college, and my parents forbade it – for idealogical, not financial reasons. I was not glad when at the age of 20 I wanted to join a different church, and my mother told me she believed it was God's will that I not do so. By the age of 21, when my husband first asked my father for permission to marry me and was told "No," I was a little better at waiting on the Lord. Each of these circumstances was an opportunity for me to submit myself to God and to trust in his sovereign care of me, and he used them for my sanctification and for his glory.

You have to admit that in modern American culture, even within Christian circles, we prize independence, and we especially don't like it when some people, unmarried men for instance, have certain privileges that certain other people – unmarried women – don't have.