Jinger Duggar Ditches Infamous Family Rule — Here’s Why

Counting On fans know that Jinger Duggar Vuolo marches to the beat of her own drum. She’s doing exactly that by ditching one of the Duggar family’s most well-known rules which outlines that pants are inappropriate for women to wear. Duggar has since incorporated the clothing item into her own wardrobe and she’s revealing the reason behind the change, per E! News.

Dugger penned a book titled The Hope We Hold: Finding Peace in the Promises of God with her husband, Jeremy Vuolo. In the book, the Counting On star wrote that she started to “reexamine” the rules that she used to follow that were set by the Duggar family. She explained, “I wanted to see if the convictions I’d always held were true. I wanted to examine why I believed what I believed, and if those beliefs were supported by the Scripture.” Duggar continued to write that she grew up with a certain “set of standards” that she wanted to revisit as she got older in order to form her own opinions. She noted that once she did reexamine these standards, she realized that her “convictions were changing.”

One of those very convictions tied back to her wardrobe, as she explained that she has since started to wear pants. Duggar wrote that she does not believe that it’s inappropriate for women to wear pants, writing, “Modesty isn’t about what you wear. It’s about the position of your heart.” She added, “I wanted to follow what the Bible said, and as I searched the Scriptures for answers, I never found a passage specifically forbidding women from wearing pants.” In The Hope We Hold, Duggar went on to explain the reasoning behind the fact that the women in her family only wear dresses and skirts. She noted that her mother, Michelle Duggar, adhered to this rule based on a passage in the Bible.

“My mom had always dressed us girls in skirts and dresses, a standard that was taken from Deuteronomy 22:5 (ESV), which says, ‘A woman shall not wear a man’s garment,’ and I never really questioned it,” the mom-of-two wrote. “Modesty was a huge topic in our house, and we believed that wearing skirts instead of pants was a central part of being modest.” Even though she wrote that her heart felt “free” upon forming her own opinion on the matter, Duggar does not want this change in attitude to affect her family members who still hold these beliefs, as she continued, “Still, I struggled with believing something that was different from my family. I knew they deeply cared about their convictions, and I didn’t want to hurt them now that I didn’t share those convictions.”