A House Not Built With Hands: The Quiet Work of Women in a Reformed World
Cassidy Franklin
BIO: Originally from Boise, Idaho, I moved to Spokane to attend Whitworth University, where I became a four-year starter on the Whitworth Volleyball team. As an active leader within the program, I was named First Team All-Conference in both the 2021 and 2024 seasons, earned Freshman of the Year in 2021, and received the Humanitarian of the Year Award in Spring 2024.
Major: English
Minor: Theology
Beyond athletics, I held several campus roles, including Marketing Director for the Honors Program, Library Reference Assistant, and Writing Consultant where I co-led a workshop at the IWCA Conference on the use of AI in academia and co-authored a faculty workbook on AI policy. I also served on the executive board for Whitworth’s Student Athlete Advisory Committee (SAAC), received a Professions in English Summer Internship Grant to assist in the Idaho State Archives, and was inducted into Sigma Tau Delta, the English honors society.
Within the English department, I was honored with multiple academic awards: the English Department Achievement Award Scholarship (Fall 2022–Spring 2023), the Outstanding Honors Student Junior Award Scholarship (2023–2024), the Multi-Modal Writing Composition Award (Spring 2024), and the Enhanced Talent–Writing Award (Fall 2025).
This fall, I will begin a master’s program in Youth Literature at Simmons University in Boston, Massachusetts. Through this next chapter, I hope to glorify God by pursuing a writing career focused on creating edifying, biblically grounded children’s books that inspire wonder, truth, and a love for God’s Word.
Project Overview: My project exists to bring glory to God and honor His creative design for men and women by mirroring the literary structure of Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies. In this piece of creative nonfiction, the symbolic building of a Protestant church—beautiful, unadorned, and rooted in Scripture—serves as the framework for showcasing the biblical femininity of six extraordinary women from the Protestant Reformation.
The narrative follows a young woman who, burdened with doubts about the roles and value of women according to God, is visited by St. Anne. Together, they embark on an edifying journey through the lives of Reformation women—such as Katharina von Bora and Idelette Calvin—who model the gentle and quiet spirit of biblical femininity. Through this pilgrimage, the young woman learns how Scripture and the theology of the Reformers offer a vision of womanhood marked by joyful selflessness, submission, and immense value and dignity.
The Protestant Reformation not only challenged the authority of the pope and reformed doctrines of grace and works—it also reshaped views on family, marriage, and the roles of women. This project contends that biblical femininity, as embraced by Reformation leaders and their wives, offers a liberating alternative to both the 16th-century Catholic context of the value of women existing in their participation in Holy Orders alone, and modern feminist ideologies of women finding purpose in the workplace. Rather than diminish women, a biblical, patriarchal view elevates their beautifully unique femininity in love, grace, and purpose.
In dialogue with history and Scripture, this work seeks to encourage women to reconsider their God-given identity and calling; not as burdens, but as beautiful reflections of God’s design.
