Latest / The Lila Rose Show / E54: The Truth About Feminism? with Dr. Carrie Gress

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E54: The Truth About Feminism? with Dr. Carrie Gress · The Lila Rose Show

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  Feminism didn't start originally asking the question, how do we
• 0:02
  help women as women? It's it asked the question
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  fundamentally, how do we help women become more like men?
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  That's really the kind of thing that the Communists were trying
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  to replicate in the United States.
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  And they knew that they couldn't do it just with, you know,
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  military power. So they ended up shifting gears
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  and trying to do it on a cultural level.
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  Hey guys, welcome back to the Lila Rose podcast.
• 0:26
  We have been exploring feminism and the patriarchy, toxic, the
• 0:31
  toxic warm masculinity. We had Nancy Pearcy on to talk
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  about that toxic femininity. Some of these things that are
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  really dominant today in a lot of cultural narratives in
• 0:41
  politics, very important. What is femininity?
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  What is masculinity? What are these things mean?
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  We're going to have a great treat today.
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  We're going to be talking with Doctor Carrie Grass, author of
• 0:50
  10 books as well as a philosopher, and she recently
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  wrote the book The End of Woman, which is really a deep dive into
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  the history of feminism, the good, the bad, the ugly.
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  Mostly the bad and the ugly. Let's be real.
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  We're going to get into that with her, but also the origins
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  of what this idea about smashing the patriarchy came from and
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  really what today, the fruit of gender ideology, etcetera, where
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  it originates. So it's a really fascinating
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  conversation we're going to have.
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  I think you're going to love it. First wanted to also thank our
• 1:23
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  I'm so delighted to have Doctor Kerry Grass on the show today.
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  Thanks Kerry for joining. Thanks so much for having me.
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  It's really great to be here with you.
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  Awesome. So what inspired you?
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  You writing the end of Woman? Yeah, now I think that's a great
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  question. I was really focused and and
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  just amazed that we can't define what a woman is at this point.
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  I think that was kind of the big impetus was just that question
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  how, why can we not answer this very easily in our culture
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  today, especially when there's so much focus upon being a woman
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  and, you know, all of the language that we see out there
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  in the rhetoric. So that that was part of it.
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  I'm also a mom and, you know, I have two girls and three sons.
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  So I worry about both of them equally.
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  And I, you know, I don't want to see my sons, you know, or my
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  daughter's mistreated. So I think that that's it.
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  I also think, you know, I've been looking at feminism for a
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  long time and looking at women and looking at the data on our
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  women happier because of feminism.
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  And it's just not fleshing out the way that people think it is.
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  And so all of those things just kind of led me to start really
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  digging into this. And I had already looked back at
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  the first wave or the second wave of feminism, but I, I
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  really dove into the first wave for this book and found some
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  really startling results. So yeah, it was just a myriad of
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  things. It just felt like it was the
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  right time to finally write on this topic and for a broad
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  audience. Now, the first half at least of
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  the book is really an in depth history of the thought behind
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  feminism. And I think you start in the
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  1700s and I want to start with terms, and then I want to go
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  through that history because it's really fascinating and I
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  think surprising. It will surprise people
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  listening, whether they're more towards the right or the left.
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  It's just very compelling stuff. So let's start, though, with the
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  definition of the word feminism or feminist.
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  These words are used frequently. They're thrown around.
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  How do you define feminism? Yeah.
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  I think that's a fantastic question and that's why we have
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  so many problems is it's very hard to define it.
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  But what I did was going back to the very beginning of feminism,
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  I, I discovered that there were three elements to it that we can
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  see actually up to our own day that just kind of kept cycling
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  through over and over again. You see them just resurface and
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  go under and resurface and they've become very omnipresent,
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  I think in the, the current age. So the, the three elements that
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  I think belong to feminism, the way to define it is to consider
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  first of all, the, the idea of free love.
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  That's always been a part of, of the movement.
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  And then the second idea would be the occult.
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  That's been another element that's, that's key to it.
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  And then the third is this idea that came to be known as
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  smashing the patriarchy. This is one of the earliest
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  ideas really, this idea of, of restructuring society and kind
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  of collapsing down any kind of hierarchy like the military or
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  anything related to Christian churches.
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  And so that those, those are the three sort of cornerstone ideas
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  that then, you know, fan out as I, as I just mentioned, but that
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  that's really how I would define it at this point.
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  And I know obviously there are plenty of people that define it
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  differently, but those are the three hallmarks that I've
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  discovered, you know, throughout the, the the movement itself.
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  So how does this how does this fit with there are many self
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  identified Christian or Catholic feminists who say, well, we're
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  not looking to smash any men or to, you know, undo morality
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  around sex or to destroy children and marriage.
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  We're looking to uphold the equal dignity of women and their
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  unique contributions and make, you know, any space that's
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  available to men in terms of commerce and business and
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  educational opportunities or civic engagement.
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  We want to make those spaces open to women as much as they
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  are to men, not to force women into the space if they don't
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  want to choose to go there, but to say you're welcome if you
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  choose it. How do you, you know, look at
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  those two, You know, the very negative view of feminism that
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  you just opened with, which I agree, there's definitely a lot
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  of history that fits that. But then this more positive view
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  that some people have today. Yeah, no, I think this is a
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  great question and something that I've really wrestled with
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  for years. I'm a Catholic, and so I've
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  really, I know the work of John Paul the Second has dove into
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  this. And Ederstein.
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  The hard thing is the fact that it's feminism has become so
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  nebulous in the minds of so many people.
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  And I think, you know, if they're Christians or Catholics
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  that want to embrace it, then they have to be incredibly
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  specific about exactly what they mean.
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  Because this has been part of the problem is that we, you
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  know, we sort of have this sense that feminism has been this
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  very, you know, benign grandmother who's sort of been
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  guiding women to to a better future.
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  And when you start looking at what has really happened, you
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  really actually start seeing that it hasn't been benign at
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  all. And in fact, it's actually been
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  arguably the most deadly ideology in all of the, you
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  know, 20th, 2020 first century, the numbers of abortions that
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  have been a direct result because of feminist ideology
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  completely, or if anything that Hitler did or Stalin did Mao,
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  you know, on and on. We've seen all these huge
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  numbers of, of people slaughtered because of ideology.
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  So I think that that's a real thing that people have to
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  consider is that this isn't just some sort of friendly loving
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  thing. It, it, it's actually been
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  incredibly deadly and dangerous and has, you know, really been
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  actually, I think you could call it a gateway drug to what we are
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  seeing in the woke culture because the feminism hadn't been
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  so effective, we wouldn't have the, the issues that we're
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  seeing now in the, in the woke ideology as well.
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  So again, I think, you know, there's not really much room, if
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  you look at this core definition for Christians to be engaged in
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  those things. I think it can be done.
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  You could you could argue there's there's a feminism
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  that's that is different than that.
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  But you have to be incredibly specific and very clear about
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  about your terms. And I think that's just a hard
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  thing to do at this point because the the word so
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  nebulous. What's the etymology of of the
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  word feminist? You know, I think that it, it
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  didn't start from the very beginning, actually came from
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  the the French and was picked up late in the 1800s, I think.
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  But yeah, it's, it was something that was developed over time.
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  Mary Wellstone Craft is considered sort of the godmother
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  of feminism, and she certainly was not considered a feminist
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  herself. So that it came about much later
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  as the movement grew and, you know, England and and France
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  and, and. Do we do we need a new term, do
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  you think? I mean, for those that are
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  trying to advocate for, you know, equal dignity of men and
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  women and this more ultimately the Christian view of womanhood
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  and and manhood and marriage and all these things, which is still
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  counter cultural, not just because it rejects feminism, but
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  I think it does reject, you know, A and maybe a more hyper
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  fundamentalism as well that I think doesn't see the equal
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  dignity of the sexes. And so, you know, kind of sees
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  that women have this like independent moral nature from
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  men and they have these different moral natures and so
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  they need to be treated differently.
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  I think there's a lot of philosophical danger.
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  You can go down a different path.
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  Obviously, I think the most dangerous thing today is the pro
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  abortion, anti marriage feminism that you're doing a great job of
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  exposing in your book. But I guess, you know, the
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  question here is what do we do in terms of the language?
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  Because it is such a problem that we have Christians and
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  Catholics who and I've in the past identified as I'm a
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  pro-life feminist. I wrote an op-ed about 10 years
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  ago, you know, trying to shatter the stereotype that being pro
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  woman means to be pro abortion because it's not, obviously.
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  But it is a problem because feminism today at large, I think
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  is more rooted in what you started off with, the occult
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  free love movement and smashing the patriarchy, you know,
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  attacking men basically versus goodness and truth about women.
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  Do you have a, you know, an opinion on that at what maybe
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  Christian Catholics can do to change the language?
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  Yeah, no, absolutely. I think that's a great question.
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  It's something that I've asked myself because I think, you
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  know, all of us have been that stage.
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  And the one thing that the left has done that's been so amazing
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  and, and kind of overriding is just they've created this binary
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  that we either think of ourselves as feminists or we
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  think, or we are painted as like doormats or, you know, this,
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  this cult like, you know, we've got to put on our red robes and
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  our red bonnets cult like fertility sort of image.
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  And so I think that that's the hard thing too, because nobody
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  wants to be, you know, Christians, kids don't see
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  themselves in the the radical feminist camp, but they also
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  don't feel at home in this other, you know, option.
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  And so I really think it's there's some, some threading the
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  needle with just normal women, you know, that that can move in
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  this this direction. But yeah, I would love to it if,
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  if people came up with new language, a new, a new word.
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  It just feels like the word itself is so fraught with, you
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  know, damaging ideas that it's it doesn't have enough, it's not
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  clean enough to really lead people to the right direction.
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  There's just so much room for for confusion and people falling
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  into a lot of these ideas. So I think that's a problem.
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  And I think, you know, the other thing that's really important
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  for us to to point out too, is that there's been, you know,
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  feminism didn't start originally asking the question, how do we
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  help women as women? It's asked the question
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  fundamentally, how do we help women become more like men?
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  And so this is what we've seen for the last 50 years is, is
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  just this masculine ideal of really put on a pedestal and
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  moving away from motherhood, moving away from all these these
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  very, you know, female characterizations that, you
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  know, people are uncomfortable with now.
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  So I think that that's something we also have to keep in mind
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  too, that when we're talking about the problems with
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  feminism, that that's another key one and another great reason
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  why we need to start embracing something better.
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  But yeah, I'm all for a new a new term.
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  I just haven't come up with one. Next book before we get into the
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  the history of feminism, you know, the common response to
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  critiques of feminism today. I sort of an eye roll, you know,
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  you even your your ability to even critique, you know, in the
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  public, you know, square in the kind of school of ideas, like
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  being able to go and present your ideas and be educated and
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  vote like all of these things you didn't have the same way you
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  had post feminism as a woman. So what's your response to that?
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  You know, the, the, the argument that, you know, we have, you
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  know, suffrage, we have economic opportunities, we have even the
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  ability to divorce a husband if there's abuse.
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  I mean, these things, again, I'm not, I'm not here to pick a side
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  with this question right away. I want to ask, what do you say
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  to that response coming from critics of those that are
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  critiquing feminism? No, I think that's another great
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  question because that's really the, the response that I think
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  silence is women into even thinking about this question.
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  I know it did for me for a long time was just you, you know, you
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  can't even call this into question because you should feel
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  guilty for questioning it because you have these things.
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  You know, I have an advanced degree.
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  I, I work, you know, all of these things that I, you know, I
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  get told over and over again that I, I couldn't have done if
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  it weren't for feminism. And I, I think that that's kind
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  of the remarkable thing because you realize on a natural level,
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  you know, this is these are sort of natural law ideas.
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  These are sort of fundamental things that very easily could
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  have come about without this radical ideology, and I think
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  that that. Would have, I mean, I think
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  that's something I think about a lot.
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  If there hadn't been the rise of the bad feminism, would there
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  have been the rise of a good feminism that was more about
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  opening up opportunities as opposed to forcing men women to
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  be like men? Or, you know, the bad version of
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  of bad men? Yeah.
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  No, I think it absolutely could have happened and I think it was
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  happening in many different ways.
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  You know, you're always going to see changes.
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  What is that typical? I have a history degree at my
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  undergraduate and there was always that classic answer.
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  You know, the rise of the middle class was always the go to
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  answer. If you didn't know what to say,
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  it was that was going to be the answer on the question on the on
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  the test. But I think that we see that
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  especially a lot of the changes that happened after the wars
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  and, and the financial success from that.
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  And I think that that plays into it so much is, you know, the
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  technology that we have, the leisure time that we have.
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  You know, these things, things changed dramatically in the last
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  100 years. And women weren't no longer, you
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  know, tied to trying to get their laundry done or sewing new
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  clothing for their children. You know, these are things that
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  I don't think we think about how much has changed and, you know,
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  the opportunities that we have. And I think so many of them
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  would have come about even degrees, women getting degrees.
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  There's different pockets where you see women getting degrees,
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  you know, throughout history in certain spots and areas.
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  And so I think these things very naturally could have happened.
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  They, they absolutely did not have to come about because of
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  the, the ideology that it really drove it in so many ways,
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  especially when you start digging into kind of what was
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  underneath them and, and what was motivating them more
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  specifically. So it's a it's a really
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  interesting comment that and I agree with you, I don't think we
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  needed the bad in order to have some of the good.
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  And I think we can make that clear distinction.
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  And, you know, Nancy Pearcy and her latest book really credits a
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  lot of the reaction of feminism, not so much to and a credit is
• 16:43
  the wrong word. It would say more.
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  It was a consequence of, you know, technological changes in
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  the workplace, you know, men leaving the sort of family farm,
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  the family business and being separated from the family, you
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  know, not even a nine to five. Usually those were like 6 to to
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  8. So I mean, those were long, long
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  days in a factory or, you know, away from the home.
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  And then they come home and they're a stranger to the home
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  and they're already there Creates some almost like an
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  animosity between men and women and the sense of separation.
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  And then that kind of got worse when women now said, well, we
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  want to have more connectivity to the public space that we've
• 17:18
  kind of lost because you separated, you know, the
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  business from the home And and then you open, you know, then
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  they wanted, you know, women started to want suffrage.
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  Before many women didn't even bother because they're like, I'm
• 17:27
  part of my household. We have a household vote for
• 17:29
  property owners. It's not a big deal.
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  I'm happy, you know, where there's harmony here.
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  But the disharmony economically created this sort of disharmony
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  politically. I mean, this is kind of I'm I'm
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  doing a bit of a, a bad job of explaining Nancy's thesis, but
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  this is a bit of it. This is a bit that backs up her
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  argument. What's your take on that?
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  Yeah, I think that that's a fascinating aspect to dig into
• 17:51
  again, because I don't think we think enough about just the way
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  things that used to be. We sort of have this blanket
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  like, oh, women were just chattel and whatnot.
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  And I think that that idea of the the how the family used to
• 18:06
  operate together, you know, you send the sons out with the
• 18:08
  father in the day and learn a trade and the daughters are
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  learning what they need to learn.
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  And, you know, all of it is working alongside fertility as
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  well. I think that that's another
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  aspect that we have really turned away from.
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  And so it's, you know, it's easy to see how a mother would want
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  to stay home when she's pregnant.
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  She doesn't feel well and she has daughters who can help her
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  and, you know, all of those kinds of things.
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  So, yeah, I think that has a tremendous amount to to do with
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  that. Is that disconnection.
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  And, you know, even as a as I'm largely stay at home mom at this
• 18:39
  point, you know, I can tell you just the the remarkable kind of
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  loneliness, you know, you hear about just what neighborhoods
• 18:46
  used to be like. I know in my neighborhood, it's
• 18:47
  older neighborhood and there used to be families.
• 18:49
  I hear about the, you know, the baseball games that were playing
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  the cul-de-sac and, you know, all of those kinds of things
• 18:54
  that, you know, I just dreamed up when I was at a young when I
• 18:57
  had really small children and just needed, you know, someone
• 19:00
  to have a cup of coffee with in the morning would be great.
• 19:02
  And so all of those things have have changed significantly
• 19:05
  because of our wealth and our our technology.
• 19:08
  And yeah, I think that that goes into it a lot.
• 19:12
  But the, the, the bigger force that we got from feminism was
• 19:15
  really this push towards erasing our our fertility.
• 19:18
  And I think that that is something that absolutely did
• 19:21
  not need to happen. That we have certainly the
• 19:23
  wealth to be able to manage our fertility in ways that we don't
• 19:27
  need abortion. You know, we don't need these
• 19:29
  things to allow women to, to function fundamentally like men.
• 19:34
  And that, that's been the big push, I think.
• 19:37
  I love what you said to a bit ago about the the idea that the
• 19:40
  family sort of business was in in part based around the woman's
• 19:46
  fertility and the the fertility of the family because her
• 19:49
  bringing life into the world. I mean, that was the whole
• 19:51
  family project is the next generation.
• 19:54
  And if she's, you know, having that baby or, you know, there's
• 19:57
  a very young child in the home or she's, you know, struggling
• 19:59
  with the pregnancy, there's a focus on, OK, yes, we have these
• 20:02
  chores to do, but we're here to make sure that that's healthy,
• 20:05
  you know, that's that you're. Getting taken care of.
• 20:08
  And again, I don't want to be idolizing, you know, the family
• 20:10
  farm as if it's some easy project because, you know, the
• 20:13
  little I've heard of friends that have ventured into that
• 20:15
  space today are like with all the technologies we have for
• 20:18
  family farms today, they're like, it's a not easy job.
• 20:21
  But the point is it's a family project where we're In Sync.
• 20:25
  We're in it together. It is hard, but we're doing it
• 20:27
  together as opposed to the severing of the family, which
• 20:31
  can lead to, can lead to division.
• 20:34
  So yeah, it's, it's it's an interesting, interesting theory.
• 20:37
  And I, I do think, I think Jordan Peterson might make this
• 20:41
  argument as well, that technology has done more to
• 20:44
  impact the state of women today than any ideology like feminism.
• 20:48
  And we, we, we forget that. It's very easy to forget that
• 20:52
  just the, like you said earlier, you know, all of the
• 20:55
  conveniences that we have and the opportunities that we have.
• 20:57
  You yourself, I think you, you know, you called yourself a stay
• 21:00
  at home mom who's doing this very meaningful work from home.
• 21:03
  I get to be at home most of the time, despite my work that I do.
• 21:06
  In addition, because of the flexibility and the ability to
• 21:08
  work from home, home, so there's new opportunities that women
• 21:11
  have and and families have quite frankly, men too that just they
• 21:14
  didn't have before. No, absolutely.
• 21:17
  And at one point I lived in Italy, actually.
• 21:19
  It was pretty amazing how just to see how much the, the, you
• 21:23
  know, afternoon lunch is still this honored, revered thing.
• 21:26
  You know, people come home from work and they have lunch and
• 21:29
  that's the big meal and then they go back to work.
• 21:31
  And, you know, that's something that it was just so wonderful to
• 21:35
  have that sort of built in of the day.
• 21:36
  You know, certainly nice to have a nap in there too.
• 21:39
  But you know, it's just amazing that these things can sort of
• 21:41
  still exist and be reminders of the way, you know, what what has
• 21:45
  happened with technology. And obviously not to vilify
• 21:48
  that. It's been an incredible boon for
• 21:50
  from us in so many ways. But there's something really
• 21:53
  amazing about having that family dynamic still intact in certain
• 21:57
  places around the world. Before we got married, my
• 22:00
  husband lived in Italy for two years and he still talks about
• 22:03
  we still sometimes entertain and what it would it be to move back
• 22:06
  to, you know, to move to Italy as a family and try it out.
• 22:09
  Did you live there when you had kids or were you there before?
• 22:11
  I did not. I actually, I met my husband
• 22:13
  there and he's American, but we met there and and lived there
• 22:17
  for a very short time in our marriage and then moved back to
• 22:19
  the US. Beautiful.
• 22:21
  But yeah, so I couldn't, but I was in Rome.
• 22:22
  I could imagine having five children, so it would be pretty
• 22:27
  challenging. I.
• 22:28
  Think it's own chaos. Pull that one off, yeah.
• 22:31
  All right, well, let's go to the history of feminism now.
• 22:33
  You started in the book in the 1700s with Mary Wollstonecraft.
• 22:38
  Tell me why she's significant and how her early ideas were the
• 22:41
  first seeds of feminism. Yeah, so she's a really
• 22:44
  fascinating character because she's she's given just
• 22:47
  incredible amounts of credit for the the, the birth of feminism,
• 22:51
  really. But what most people don't
• 22:53
  realize is how much she was also integrated into the French
• 22:56
  Revolution and all the revolutionary ideas that were
• 22:58
  were coming to the surface at that stage.
• 23:00
  She was very influenced by Thomas Paine, who of course, is
• 23:04
  known for his part in the US Revolution.
• 23:06
  He wrote that that pamphlet called them Common Sense that
• 23:10
  really, I think kicked off the revolution and inspired a lot of
• 23:13
  people. But Thomas Paine ended up just
• 23:15
  becoming more and more egalitarian in his thinking and
• 23:18
  was very much involved in the French Revolution.
• 23:20
  Of course, the French Revolution was incredibly bloody.
• 23:23
  It was incredibly anti everything.
• 23:26
  And you know, This is why you had so many people that lost,
• 23:29
  literally lost their heads through the guillotine was
• 23:32
  because it was just trying to tear everything down and start
• 23:34
  anew. And so Thomas Paine wrote this
• 23:37
  piece called The Rights of Man. And then he was responding to
• 23:40
  Edmund Burke, who was had an Englishman who had written about
• 23:44
  the massacre of in France and the Revolution and very
• 23:48
  specifically. And so she's responding to work
• 23:52
  as well in her own way. And she first wrote the book the
• 23:55
  the the vindication of the rights of man.
• 23:58
  And then she wrote the vindication of the rights of
• 24:00
  woman. And it's the vindication of the
• 24:02
  rights of woman that when most people read, I know I read it
• 24:05
  when I was in college and are familiar with, and it's sort of
• 24:07
  extracted out, you know, as this cause celeb for for women.
• 24:12
  And in it she, you know, she makes some some lovely
• 24:14
  arguments. There's not, you know, not
• 24:15
  everything about what she says I would take issue with.
• 24:17
  But I think what really was the problem was that she had embrace
• 24:22
  this idea of of this collapse of this egalitarianism of making
• 24:26
  men and women the same. And she also, you know, she's a
• 24:29
  tragic woman. She had these horrible parents,
• 24:31
  I mean, awful parents. And they were really her model
• 24:35
  of marriage. And then she, you know, she got
• 24:39
  married, she got pregnant out of wedlock when she lived in Paris
• 24:42
  and by an American man who they told the embassy she was an
• 24:45
  American so that she wouldn't be killed.
• 24:48
  And that saved her life. But then she went back to
• 24:49
  England and she met her husband and who became was William
• 24:55
  Godwin. And they got pregnant before
• 24:57
  they got married. And, and he was actually,
• 24:59
  curiously very much against marriage and, you know, was
• 25:03
  known for being this anarchist. And so they got married largely
• 25:05
  because she'd already had a child out of wedlock and saw how
• 25:08
  hard it was for her daughter. And that's they, they had the
• 25:11
  daughter Mary Godwin, who became Mary Godwin Shelley and wrote
• 25:15
  Frankenstein. So anyway, her her big role
• 25:18
  really was this, this, this kernels of ideas of this, you
• 25:23
  know, what became smashing the, the patriarchy ultimately.
• 25:27
  And then she inspired others who really picked up the gauntlet,
• 25:29
  one of them being her son-in-law, Percy Shelley, whom
• 25:31
  she obviously never met because she she died in childbirth about
• 25:34
  10 days after Mary Godwin was born.
• 25:37
  But yeah, she was really what I think the, you know, ignited the
• 25:41
  movement and this idea of, you know, collapsing everything into
• 25:45
  a kind of equality. And she also looked around her
• 25:48
  and saw the all these women with very hard lives.
• 25:50
  And she thought, you know, fertility is really the issue.
• 25:52
  We've got to get around fertility and men have much
• 25:55
  better lives. So why don't we try and help
• 25:57
  women become more like men? Was really kind of the the push
• 26:00
  behind a lot of her work. That was a common theme of all
• 26:04
  the sort of historical analysis you did of these different
• 26:07
  characters that were behind feminism at different points in
• 26:09
  history. And, you know, I think you wrote
• 26:12
  this in the book. In your book, too, there are
• 26:13
  these very, very challenging personal lives, largely that,
• 26:18
  you know, included abuse and, you know, very damaged marriages
• 26:22
  or lack of marriage and people, you know, really hurt, painful
• 26:26
  childhoods. And then you get someone who's
• 26:27
  really bright and he's typically ambitious or really driven, and
• 26:32
  they're able to sort of, you know, create this ideology that
• 26:35
  is their kind of manifesto to explain themselves or explain
• 26:38
  their own existence to, you know, themselves as well as how
• 26:42
  do they think the world should be or can be.
• 26:44
  And you get this sort of mix. You get a mix of some good
• 26:47
  things, like you said, and then you get some bad things, too,
• 26:51
  out of that brokenness. What were the bad things in what
• 26:54
  Mary Wilson Craft wrote? Yeah, Well, I think the biggest
• 26:58
  thing was of course, just this idea of of collapsing culture,
• 27:01
  of getting rid of that, that she really didn't like the the
• 27:04
  church, she didn't like the military.
• 27:07
  You know, she saw all these things as, as fundamentally bad.
• 27:11
  And and, you know, just even picking up that ethos of the the
• 27:14
  French Revolution, I think it's just fundamentally so damaging.
• 27:17
  And we can, there's actually a really great book and by Yuval
• 27:21
  Levin, who's also EPBC, but he is called the great Debate.
• 27:26
  And he says, you know, Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine are
• 27:28
  really the two that ignited what we see in the left and the right
• 27:31
  today, that Burke represents kind of the arguments of the
• 27:34
  right and and Thomas Paine represents those on the left.
• 27:37
  And so she's very much in that Thomas Paine sort of leftist
• 27:42
  direction where, you know, start out as egalitarianism, move to
• 27:45
  socialism, and then of course exploded as communism.
• 27:49
  So that that's, I think really it was more her influence more
• 27:52
  than anything. Her her writing is very, I mean,
• 27:55
  it's not easy to read. I I think especially if you're
• 27:58
  trained as a philosopher and you want very rational, clear
• 28:00
  argument. We all.
• 28:01
  Read it in in high school and it was like a little bit a little
• 28:05
  bit hard to get there. Yeah, it's hard to get through.
• 28:07
  Even, you know, with PhD, it's painful.
• 28:09
  It's just very emotive and whatnot.
• 28:11
  So anyway, I think that was the the worst thing.
• 28:13
  But that the the next layer, you know, what goes on to her, her
• 28:17
  son-in-law, Percy Shelley, I think is really for the damage.
• 28:19
  And he adds the occult piece and the free love piece.
• 28:22
  And, you know, those are things that he really lived in his life
• 28:26
  to the to the hilt. And that that's really where the
• 28:30
  damage I think came in because this is his wife is writing
• 28:33
  Frankenstein. You know, he's developing this
• 28:35
  woman Sithna, who becomes the first independent woman that
• 28:38
  really inspired later feminists, especially someone like
• 28:41
  Elizabeth Cady Stanton. But he's also, you know,
• 28:44
  there's, there's an interesting thing that happens in a lot of
• 28:47
  feminism where they try to go back to the very beginning, back
• 28:49
  to Eve and the, you know, the Garden of Eden.
• 28:52
  And this is one of the things that Shelley does is he, he
• 28:55
  changes the garden of Eden's you know what, what happens?
• 28:59
  And he says, you know, the temptation by the serpent is
• 29:01
  really not a temptation. It's actually an opportunity for
• 29:04
  Eve to become, you know, to know the secret knowledge and become
• 29:09
  some something different. So it's, it's that kind, those
• 29:13
  kinds of threads are, are really fascinating to see that there
• 29:15
  was this impetus of like, we've got to go back to the beginning
• 29:18
  and rewrite this so that people understand this in a new way.
• 29:21
  So it wasn't superficial. It was very, you know, they were
• 29:24
  really trying to uproot and and undermine the Christian message
• 29:29
  and, and very specific kinds of ways.
• 29:32
  Do you think that stemmed from for both Shelley and for Wilson
• 29:35
  Craft and then we're going to get to many others once we had
• 29:38
  the 1800s and 1900s came from a a loss of sense or grounding
• 29:43
  about identity. I mean what what does it even
• 29:45
  mean to be a woman? What does it mean to be a man?
• 29:48
  Obviously you're an adult biological female versus male,
• 29:50
  but what does, what is the, you know, you could also call it a
• 29:54
  Christian anthropology, You know, the kind of it starts with
• 29:58
  an origin story of obviously why where we came from and why we
• 30:01
  were made, but you know, what are we moving towards?
• 30:04
  And if they were rejecting Christianity at large, like the
• 30:07
  Christian vision of the dignity of the person and that they're
• 30:09
  made for love and they're made to love and be loved and for,
• 30:12
  you know, eternal love with God, they have to drum up some other
• 30:16
  purpose, right? They have to drum up some other
• 30:18
  identity. And they don't even necessarily
• 30:20
  do that very clearly, but they just pick up things and you get
• 30:23
  this sort of, you know, you get like a, you know what you
• 30:26
  mentioned, you mentioned Mary who wrote Frankenstein, the
• 30:29
  daughter of Mary. You get kind of a Frankenstein.
• 30:33
  You know, you get this sort of mix of things.
• 30:35
  Yeah, no, I think that's a great question.
• 30:37
  I may think what really is is happening at the era is just
• 30:40
  this trying to smash any kind of taboos.
• 30:42
  You've also got the Marquis Desad, who's writing at the same
• 30:45
  time, writing sort of similar ideas.
• 30:48
  And this is really Percy Shelley's whole goal was to just
• 30:50
  destroy everything when he just felt himself this kind of force
• 30:55
  of nature and wanted to really just fight everything and
• 30:59
  destroy everything. So it was that that was really,
• 31:02
  I think part part of it was, you know, how do we undermine this
• 31:05
  because we think this is bad. He actually was thrown out of, I
• 31:08
  think it was Oxford for writing some tract on atheism.
• 31:12
  And yeah, he just couldn't be bound by anything.
• 31:15
  I mean, that was sort of his motto, that sort of, you know,
• 31:18
  force of of will at the expense of everybody around him.
• 31:22
  I mean, that's one of the tragic tragedies of about reading about
• 31:24
  his life is just how many suicides and dead children and,
• 31:28
  you know, just awful relationships he inculcated
• 31:32
  throughout his, you know, his short 29 years of of life
• 31:36
  because of this drive to just destroy whatever he could, you
• 31:39
  know, any kind of taboo or convention.
• 31:41
  He just thought they were all, you know, rotten to the core and
• 31:45
  or corrupting or something like that, you know, and imagination
• 31:48
  was really how you could measure if someone was moral or not,
• 31:51
  even though of course he had incredible imagination was
• 31:53
  totally immoral. So just totally different terms
• 31:56
  is what he was was focused on. So, yeah, I think it is that
• 31:59
  abandonment though, for sure if that if we could use that
• 32:01
  language of the the Christian anthropology and really having
• 32:04
  any kind of understanding of, you know, human flourishing in
• 32:08
  its own way. He just saw it as, you know, you
• 32:11
  can sort of do whatever you want.
• 32:12
  That laissez faire attitude was what motivated him.
• 32:16
  Was he was Shelley a narcissist, a very creative narcissist?
• 32:20
  Or do you think he was a true ideologue?
• 32:23
  Oh, I'm sure he was a narcissist.
• 32:25
  I mean, he was just. Yeah, you know, grouped together
• 32:29
  with the the romantic, the Romantic poets.
• 32:31
  Lord Byron was a good close friend of his.
• 32:33
  And I just read a couple weeks ago about how Lord Byron tried
• 32:37
  to buy a 12 year old Greek girl for £500, which you can imagine
• 32:41
  was an awful lot of money back in the day.
• 32:43
  But the mother, of course said no way, you know, are you crazy?
• 32:46
  But yeah, I mean, these were just really horrible men, and
• 32:52
  they just really thrived off of this sense of, of doing whatever
• 32:58
  whatever they wanted. But you also have to remember,
• 32:59
  too, that there was new technology.
• 33:01
  And this is part of the motivation of Frankenstein.
• 33:03
  There's this new technology and this idea of creating life out
• 33:07
  of, you know, cobbling things together.
• 33:09
  Electricity is sort of coming onto the scene throughout the
• 33:12
  1800s. And so people are really
• 33:15
  enthralled by fire and, you know, the concepts that that
• 33:19
  were being used in new and different ways than what they
• 33:22
  had been used before. So it felt like a new age, I'm
• 33:25
  sure, in many respects. And they were just sort of
• 33:28
  putting their own, you know, impulses, you know, upon it.
• 33:32
  I recently was on a pretty dark podcast called the Whatever
• 33:37
  podcast and the conversation was with two pornographers who were
• 33:42
  married. I know they they had this
• 33:44
  marriage of sorts, but they were obviously creating all of this
• 33:47
  pornography. And but it makes me kind of
• 33:49
  think of that, that kind of type, that person, somebody who
• 33:54
  is just, you know, no rules apply to me.
• 33:56
  I mean, they'll pick a couple rules maybe, but ultimately it's
• 34:01
  sort of the shock value that helps them continue and
• 34:04
  perpetuate this sort of licentious lifestyle because
• 34:07
  that's effectively how this couple is building, you know,
• 34:09
  their money and everything else is through the shock value of
• 34:12
  what they're doing. And obviously the, you know,
• 34:13
  selling of pornography. But, you know, pornography
• 34:16
  wasn't distributed the same way as it was, you know, back then
• 34:20
  as it is today. But there were different kinds
• 34:21
  of shock value type, you know, ideologies and writing and
• 34:25
  poetry that had its own audience that was growing people that
• 34:29
  also wanted to buck the system and that started to build sort
• 34:32
  of a persona and in a career around some of these people.
• 34:37
  Yeah, no, you can absolutely see the connections.
• 34:39
  I mean, the marquee decade is of course, the father of sadism.
• 34:42
  And that that was sort of those ideas were mingling.
• 34:46
  We know that that Laura Byron had a copy of one of his works.
• 34:49
  And so anyway, yeah, it's really interesting.
• 34:52
  It just see sort of these exact patterns, you know, that sort of
• 34:55
  force of will. And I don't think it was really
• 34:57
  articulated. This all of these ideas were
• 34:59
  they articulated until Nietzsche articulates them.
• 35:02
  And that's not really in the book.
• 35:03
  I didn't want to go too deep into philosophy in the book.
• 35:05
  I wanted it to be much more readable, you know, something of
• 35:07
  a page Turner instead of an academic tome.
• 35:11
  But yeah, it's just this fascinating pattern of, you
• 35:14
  know, here's Percy Shelley, but then you see it in Nietzsche and
• 35:16
  then you see it in your podcast couple.
• 35:19
  So yeah, it just doesn't go away.
• 35:21
  And that's I think one of the reasons why there's that the
• 35:25
  second to last chapter. I really go into this idea of,
• 35:28
  you know, what's it what's happening, you know, with these
• 35:29
  people. And it's really this what what
• 35:31
  Whitaker Chambers calls the the world's second oldest religion.
• 35:34
  It's that worship of self and of our own will instead of
• 35:38
  worshipping God. And that's really where, you
• 35:40
  know, the wheels come off and, and we see all this decadence
• 35:44
  and the destruction of culture and, and in Percy Shelley's
• 35:48
  case, you can see it, you know, in real time as all of these
• 35:51
  women are dying or committed committing suicide or children
• 35:55
  are dying from different diseases.
• 35:57
  Part of it because they're travelling at times they ought
• 36:00
  not to be travelling. And you know, you've got cholera
• 36:03
  outbreaks and things like that that are happening.
• 36:04
  So it's it's incredibly sad to to just see the fallout of lives
• 36:10
  live that way. If I remember it correctly, that
• 36:12
  was a particularly tragic part of your book where you talk
• 36:15
  about Mary, the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Godwin,
• 36:19
  right, who married, who kind of married Shelley and or she took
• 36:23
  up with Shelley and she lost two of her children, one I think 3
• 36:27
  years old and one at 1 or 18 months to disease because he
• 36:30
  wanted her to stick around in Rome at one point when there is
• 36:33
  a disease outbreak, she wanted to leave with the kids.
• 36:35
  He, you know, he was selfish. She's like, no, I'm going to
• 36:37
  stay here. And the children died because.
• 36:39
  But yeah, it's just you. Know more of the consequence of
• 36:44
  of that me focused life. Yeah, no, absolutely.
• 36:47
  And it just is very clear that that's, you know, what was going
• 36:51
  on and and incredibly tragic too.
• 36:53
  And I think, you know, one of the things that was interesting
• 36:56
  about the Mary Shelley's, you know, I think it was a letter
• 36:59
  that she had written that's expressing all of this just
• 37:01
  heartbreak because especially her three-year old son who was
• 37:04
  the last to survive. And his nickname was his, his
• 37:07
  name was William. And he went by Will Mouse and,
• 37:10
  you know, just this heart rending letter that she sends
• 37:14
  about how she just, you know, she wants to tussle his hair.
• 37:17
  And you know, I mean, for any mom, it's just like so tear
• 37:19
  jerking to read that. Or for anyone with a heart, you
• 37:22
  know, you could just imagine what it would be like to lose a
• 37:24
  child like that. And but fascinatingly that these
• 37:28
  are that she's one of the the later sort of descriptions of
• 37:31
  this tender relationship between mother and child.
• 37:34
  And as feminism moves on, those are not published anymore, you
• 37:37
  know, 1900s hit. And it's very hard to find
• 37:40
  descriptions like that. It's always there's, it's almost
• 37:43
  this sort of listserv event that happened wherever it was, like
• 37:46
  we're just going to talk about feminism or motherhood as
• 37:49
  drudgery and in the 1900s. So it's much harder to find
• 37:52
  those kinds of tender testimonies.
• 37:54
  So that's one of the reasons why I included some of them because
• 37:56
  I just thought we don't hear this enough.
• 37:58
  This, you know, it's heartbreak, especially in light of the fact
• 38:01
  that we don't see our children die from these kinds of diseases
• 38:06
  the way they did, especially in the 1800s.
• 38:08
  But to. Yeah, I think those are really
• 38:10
  tender things that we, you know, we need to be reminded of
• 38:13
  because so many of us have lived through them or live them or,
• 38:17
  you know, we need to just be reminded of that.
• 38:19
  The beauty of that relationship between mother and and child on
• 38:22
  in general, and not just see it as something that's drudgery or
• 38:25
  suffering or, you know, not fun. Yeah, it's hard to totally
• 38:29
  invert or break nature, you know, and the, and the nature,
• 38:32
  your nature as a woman, as a as a parent, man or woman, father
• 38:36
  or mother is nurture, is protectiveness, is connectivity,
• 38:40
  that bond. I mean, if if something is
• 38:41
  broken in nature, that can break down.
• 38:43
  But that's the natural response. So, you know, feminism later on
• 38:47
  has this especially difficult job, but they succeed and let's
• 38:50
  sever those bonds totally. And let's get to that because
• 38:54
  you, let's go into 1800s and, and early 1900s.
• 38:57
  You walk us through, you took us to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, you
• 39:01
  took us to Susan B Anthony. What's the what's the truth
• 39:05
  about them and the feminism that they promoted?
• 39:08
  So this was probably the most shocking, one of the most
• 39:10
  shocking parts of the book for me was just to look into the
• 39:13
  work of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, because I didn't, I never really
• 39:16
  spent much time looking at her writings or anything like that.
• 39:19
  And so I was kind of I was really shocked actually, because
• 39:22
  I expected to find sort of nice platitudes and lovely statements
• 39:26
  about women. And what I found was, you know,
• 39:28
  much more sinister. And, you know, I I'll probably
• 39:30
  speak more of Elizabeth Katie Stand because Susan B Anthony
• 39:33
  was much more of a kind of a mouthpiece.
• 39:35
  It was most of the ideas were Elizabeth and Susan B Anthony
• 39:39
  was single and could travel and she became sort of the the voice
• 39:42
  of of Elizabeth who was home with her children and raising
• 39:46
  her family. So she didn't have the capacity
• 39:48
  to to be out travelling the way that Susan B Anthony did.
• 39:51
  So she was the brains behind it. But yeah, she was amazing
• 39:55
  because, you know, she was raised in this Calvinist home
• 39:57
  and and at some point her older brother dies and there's all
• 40:01
  this lament that she was born a girl and of course she's trying
• 40:05
  to to battle all that. She also falls in love with her
• 40:08
  brother-in-law and her brother-in-law falls in love
• 40:10
  with her and they realize, you know, they're going to just
• 40:13
  destroy their family if they pursue this relationship.
• 40:16
  So they you know wisely and prudently.
• 40:19
  Avoided any kind of relationship but of course there, you know,
• 40:22
  there's all this discussion about how they still secretly
• 40:25
  remained in love with one another and and very quickly
• 40:28
  after all of these things happened, Elizabeth Cady married
• 40:31
  her husband, whose first name is totally escaped me right now.
• 40:34
  Stanton, Mr. Stanton and they it's it's they had a very sort
• 40:41
  of bucolic early few years with the children.
• 40:44
  She describes very much how, you know, she loved being a
• 40:47
  homemaker and just all the the order and whatnot things she
• 40:50
  learned from her grandmother's and things like that.
• 40:53
  But anyway, I think, you know, there's a lot of speculation
• 40:56
  that she was just her marriage shouldn't remain a happy one.
• 40:59
  There was all this division between once the the feminist
• 41:04
  piece kind of came into play that that was really a severing
• 41:07
  of the relationship. But she's, she becomes very
• 41:11
  focused on this idea of feminism, but it's all within
• 41:13
  the context of the occult. I mean, she's she's in New York
• 41:18
  City. You've got the, the new, the
• 41:22
  great awakening, second great awakening that's happening in
• 41:25
  the United States and everybody's doing going to these
• 41:28
  revivals. But they're not just revivals
• 41:30
  with that we would imagine them to be they, they end up kind of
• 41:32
  devolving into seances and orgies.
• 41:36
  And, you know, all kinds of colorful things are going on at
• 41:39
  these events. And so she's in New York City
• 41:42
  where they're actually people that are having seances.
• 41:45
  And there's this wrapping on these tables that that's where
• 41:47
  they're getting the answers from the spirits.
• 41:49
  And so, you know, it's she sits at one of these spirit tables
• 41:53
  and that's where she gets the idea for the Seneca Falls
• 41:55
  Convention. And that table I think is in the
• 41:58
  Smithsonian today, but. Not a origin story.
• 42:03
  No, it's not. It's not the greatest story.
• 42:05
  And that's The thing is that there's so many of these layers
• 42:08
  that are just polished over in her life.
• 42:09
  I mean, she became very anti Christian.
• 42:11
  She was very much focused on get getting rid of Christianity.
• 42:15
  She wrote this book called the the Women's Bible.
• 42:17
  That's it's actually pretty funny to read because it's so
• 42:20
  much like an like an angry teenager sort of commenting,
• 42:23
  going back to first, you know, the Old Testament and commenting
• 42:27
  anytime there's a woman in it that there's there's this
• 42:29
  commentary about how things ought to have gone.
• 42:32
  But, and there are other women that are involved in this that
• 42:35
  are considering themselves Theosophists and this and
• 42:40
  Elizabeth herself is involved in it to a degree.
• 42:43
  So there's and this is was this sort of spiritual, you know,
• 42:48
  it's just woman Madame Blavatsky sort of weaves together all
• 42:53
  these crazy religions from around the world.
• 42:55
  Apparently she traveled to Tibet and then to, you know, she
• 42:59
  picked up voodoo somewhere with from Native Americans.
• 43:01
  And anyway, it's just this kind of cobbled together spiritual
• 43:04
  mess. And that's what they were
• 43:05
  involved in. That was their big thing.
• 43:07
  And anyway, she ends up actually getting thrown out of the group,
• 43:12
  the organization that she established for suffrage because
• 43:15
  first of all, her the all of the drama and scandal really of her
• 43:21
  women's Bible. And then then she gets involved
• 43:23
  with this woman named Victoria Woodhull, who was renamed by the
• 43:30
  press, Mrs. Satan. Victoria was very much a medium.
• 43:33
  She'd been one her whole life. She'd been a prostitute.
• 43:36
  I mean, she was just a mess. And there's this huge scandal
• 43:38
  erupts, and I won't go into the details of that because it's
• 43:40
  just way too long, but it's everybody sort of the whole
• 43:45
  both. They're two competing suffrage
• 43:47
  movements at that point and all of them are implicated in it.
• 43:50
  And that just, it really kind of destroyed the movement because
• 43:54
  of all of the infighting And it, you know, that's why suffrage
• 43:57
  shouldn't happen for another 30 years.
• 44:00
  So anyway, she's she, there was a lot of really awful things
• 44:05
  happening that I don't think, you know, makes it to the, the
• 44:09
  museum story. You know, there's a lot of
• 44:10
  racism, all kinds of things going on.
• 44:13
  So Elizabeth Cady Stanton, you're sharing you had a very
• 44:15
  complicated personal life and then she's into, you know,
• 44:19
  basically witchcraft. And she is inspired by that
• 44:25
  according to her own story for this for Seneca Falls.
• 44:29
  Seneca Falls is this it's called the first real meeting where
• 44:34
  they got gathered a lot of abolitionist women, right, who
• 44:38
  were kind of left out of abolitionist meetings because
• 44:41
  they were women to now get together and not just call for
• 44:44
  abolition, which was great, but to also say women need more
• 44:47
  opportunity in civic life. Am I understanding that
• 44:51
  correctly? Yeah.
• 44:51
  No, I think that's a really great articulation of it because
• 44:55
  and it, you know, it's interesting to see how the at
• 44:57
  that point it's it's this is after the Civil War.
• 45:01
  So they're kind of working on, you know, piggybacking on the
• 45:05
  ideas that came from abolition. And then we can see that again
• 45:07
  later on in the with the civil rights movement, feminism sort
• 45:10
  of gloms on to that. So you see sort of these these
• 45:13
  patterns emerging in that in that respect as well.
• 45:16
  But yeah, I think that's a great way to to to put it is that that
• 45:20
  was something that she sort of threw herself into because she
• 45:23
  really saw again, that there was this double standard for men and
• 45:25
  women and she wanted to to rectify that in many respects.
• 45:29
  And, you know, so it's that that's really the motivation for
• 45:32
  it. What seems so tragic to me is it
• 45:34
  didn't have to go the the way, the dark way in the sense of you
• 45:38
  could have had a Seneca Falls without the occult.
• 45:41
  You could have had a Seneca Falls without now, now the
• 45:44
  argument by some sort of in the very fundamentalist world would
• 45:48
  say, no, it's impossible to sort of have women in civic life
• 45:53
  equal to men without all of these evil things because
• 45:56
  women's nature is more evil than men.
• 45:59
  They're more, you know, they, they were deceived first by the
• 46:01
  serpent. This is their interpretation of
• 46:04
  Genesis. They were deceived first.
• 46:06
  Women were deceived first by the serpent.
• 46:08
  Eve took the first bite. Women can't be the leader in
• 46:12
  politics because she's more by nature deceivable.
• 46:15
  Therefore it is the occult and Satan that wants women in
• 46:19
  politics. I mean, that's kind of the and
• 46:20
  in and in business. That's kind of the the argument
• 46:22
  right from some folks on the I mean, hyper traditionalist, I'm
• 46:27
  just going to call them I'm not it's hard to give them a a name
• 46:31
  for what even that ideology would be.
• 46:32
  What's your response to that, by the way, that interpretation,
• 46:35
  that response to the truth about, you know, can't state
• 46:40
  Elizabeth Cady Stanton's inspiration of Seneca Falls and
• 46:43
  you know, the that the account in Genesis.
• 46:46
  What would be your response to to their argument?
• 46:49
  Yeah, I mean, I don't know, it's funny.
• 46:51
  I, it's just not really even ever come up because it feels so
• 46:55
  beyond the, the, the, you know, limits of rationality, given the
• 46:58
  fact that we know how, how capable both men and women are,
• 47:03
  you know, in sinning and behaving badly.
• 47:06
  And so I, I think that there's, women have an incredible set of
• 47:10
  gifts and it, you know, it's great when we can bring them
• 47:12
  into the public square, but when it happens at the expense of,
• 47:17
  you know, what we have seen later on, then it becomes a
• 47:19
  problem. But I, I don't, I don't think
• 47:21
  that there's much of A leg to stand on in light of the fact
• 47:24
  that we, you know, we know Adam and Eve fell together.
• 47:27
  I think that the fundamental difference is just really
• 47:29
  recognizing the the value and importance of, you know, the
• 47:34
  family and the gifts that people have and the different ways in
• 47:36
  which they're they're being used.
• 47:37
  So yeah, I, I guess I just haven't really thought about
• 47:41
  that aspect because it just feels so far fetching it.
• 47:44
  There are are certainly people that that would make that
• 47:47
  argument, obviously. But yeah, I think that all of
• 47:50
  these things had the capacity to be done without witchcraft, you
• 47:54
  know, to be done without giving free love and the destruction of
• 48:00
  the family, a real, you know, platform to to focus on.
• 48:04
  And that that seems to be the the bigger issue is, you know,
• 48:07
  it's it hasn't just been, it's not just been the elevation has
• 48:11
  happened where it's it hasn't elevated women in that way
• 48:14
  that's been healthy. It's destroyed the family.
• 48:16
  And I think that that's the bigger piece to to focus on is
• 48:19
  that element and not so much on, on what it is that we are doing
• 48:24
  in civic life or not doing. Right, right.
• 48:26
  And I think that's the that's the great opportunity that you
• 48:29
  are seizing right now with what you've written in your work,
• 48:32
  Carrie. And what I'm trying to do in my
• 48:33
  own way is how do we how do we restore what's been been lost?
• 48:39
  And then how do we also purify some of the things that have
• 48:43
  goodness in them, but there's also brokenness.
• 48:45
  And so how do we steer it steer it all forward?
• 48:48
  All right, So one quick question though, on Susan B Anthony,
• 48:52
  because there's a pro-life organization, you know, we work
• 48:54
  with that later action named after her, right?
• 48:57
  Susan B Anthony list and you, but you mentioned she was more
• 49:00
  sort of a mouthpiece for Katie Stanton's ideas.
• 49:03
  She was kind of on the road when Katie Stanton was not so much
• 49:06
  what was there any harm to what Susan B Anthony advocated for,
• 49:12
  in your view? Was there anything problematic
• 49:14
  with her? Yeah, ideology.
• 49:16
  This is a harder piece to answer because they're one of her
• 49:19
  biographers spent four days destroying, burning up her
• 49:23
  personal letters and all of her personal writing, so there's
• 49:27
  very. Little.
• 49:28
  Why? That's the question.
• 49:30
  We don't know why, you know, that that if she was really
• 49:33
  doing all this remarkable stuff, you know, why, why would a
• 49:37
  biographer of all people burn that instead of preserve that?
• 49:41
  So there's all kinds of speculation.
• 49:43
  You know, some of it too. She she obviously was very much
• 49:45
  involved in the the seances. In fact, she, I think at one
• 49:48
  point said she was kind of nervous.
• 49:50
  Speaker And she said, you know, I wish that I she basically
• 49:53
  said, I wish I was a medium so that the spirits could speak
• 49:55
  through me so that I didn't have to do it myself.
• 49:58
  So I, I think that she was very much engaged, engaged in these
• 50:01
  kinds of things that, you know, wasn't foreign to her.
• 50:05
  I think it's also interesting too, that one of the things that
• 50:07
  that Elizabeth Cady Stanton did was actually rewrote Seneca
• 50:10
  Falls with her involved in it. And they hadn't even met at that
• 50:13
  point. So what she was trying to do was
• 50:15
  sort of brand them as the, you know, authentic source of, of
• 50:19
  the, the origins of feminism and that kind of thing.
• 50:22
  And that, you know, there was all kinds of, of argumentation
• 50:25
  with the other groups and whatnot because of that.
• 50:27
  So, and the other big factor is that they the two groups broke
• 50:31
  off over over racist issues. I mean, the Elizabeth Kennedy
• 50:36
  Stanton very much didn't did not she resented very much that that
• 50:40
  black men had the capacity to vote before she did.
• 50:43
  And that was really what ended up defining the work that she
• 50:47
  and Susan B Anthony did. That was their kind of their
• 50:50
  platform. And the other group encouraged
• 50:53
  it and didn't have a problem with with minority men voting.
• 50:58
  So yeah, I, I think that there's a lot of there are a lot of
• 51:01
  things that, you know, we would sort of raise eyebrows now
• 51:04
  about. And you know, so it's there's,
• 51:07
  there's not really a, a clean story there either.
• 51:11
  But besides their personal lives and besides their sort of
• 51:14
  engagement in the occult, which is all very bad of course, what
• 51:18
  was there anything in their actual ideology that they were
• 51:21
  publicly promoting regarding women's role, the the role of
• 51:26
  women in civic life that you think was problematic?
• 51:30
  Yeah, no, I mean, I think absolutely because this gets
• 51:33
  back to that idea. I mean, free love was something
• 51:35
  that they this is where they ran into trouble with with Victoria
• 51:38
  Woodhull is they gave some gave her a platform to speak and she
• 51:43
  scandalized everybody because she came out and started talking
• 51:45
  about free love. And so this was, you know, it's
• 51:48
  one of those things that's hard to know, like are they doing
• 51:50
  this so they can get publicity or do they really believe in
• 51:53
  this? And those are sort of left open
• 51:56
  questions. But we know based on where
• 51:58
  Elizabeth Cady Stanton was going with the the rejection of
• 52:02
  Christianity and, you know, this idea of also restructuring
• 52:07
  society, those, you know, all this anger directed it.
• 52:10
  What was at that point, it wasn't, they weren't, it wasn't
• 52:12
  called the patriarchy either, but trying to sort of, you know,
• 52:17
  do that, do the same thing that Mary Wollstonecraft was doing
• 52:20
  was just this egalitarianism. Those are problems.
• 52:24
  So it's, it's those 3 core ideas of are are certainly get
• 52:29
  involved in what they're doing. You know Katie.
• 52:33
  Stanton damage but to understand too clearly because like the you
• 52:37
  know, the legacy of Susan B Anthony the whole again back to
• 52:39
  the pro-life organization named that named that named after her
• 52:43
  is that she was pro-life. And actually many of the these
• 52:46
  sort of feminist forebears, I'm talking about this and the
• 52:49
  suffragette movement, the early suffragette movement, not the
• 52:52
  second wave feminist because they were very pro abortion and
• 52:55
  very off the reservation. But some of these early
• 52:58
  feminists, you know, were pro-life, that they were
• 53:01
  actually pro family. Is that true?
• 53:04
  Do you? Do you?
• 53:05
  Yeah. Oh, no.
• 53:06
  I mean, they were. Outstanding of the history, no.
• 53:07
  They were they were absolutely pro-life.
• 53:09
  I mean, I think that that I think partially because it was
• 53:11
  just unconscionable to them that this wasn't something that they
• 53:16
  thought was appropriate. Although there was absolutely
• 53:20
  there was an abortion clinic in New York City that they, this
• 53:23
  woman, Victoria Woodhull, I was involved with.
• 53:27
  There were brothels. You know, I mean, this was not a
• 53:29
  very Victorian time. And I think that that was
• 53:32
  something that was also sort of surprising and that I surprised
• 53:34
  a lot of people is sort of this sense that we have that these
• 53:38
  women were very prim and proper. And, you know, those are just
• 53:42
  not things that were going on because they were they were
• 53:44
  first and foremost focused on suffrage and they were sort of
• 53:47
  willing to do all kinds of things to to achieve that.
• 53:51
  But but yeah, that the abortion issue is something that they
• 53:54
  were of course, you know, it wouldn't even be something that
• 53:58
  they would, you know, could conscionably promote in any way.
• 54:03
  So yeah, I think there's there are certainly things that that
• 54:06
  came about in the second wave that they would not agree with.
• 54:09
  So it sounds, it sounds like your criticism was that they
• 54:12
  basically platformed and partnered with people and they
• 54:15
  were involved in the occult themselves, which is very, very
• 54:18
  problematic. But in addition to that, and
• 54:20
  that was kind of in vogue at the time, you know, as part of the
• 54:22
  second Great Awakening, they kind of, it was not just women
• 54:25
  doing it, but men doing it was just in vogue thing to do, kind
• 54:29
  of like today's tarot card reading or in like Urban
• 54:31
  Outfitters and like, what the heck, right.
• 54:33
  But this is what it's in vogue for kids today.
• 54:35
  It's very, very tragic. But I think your criticism is
• 54:38
  really centered around around the lack of sort of maybe
• 54:41
  philosophical purity where they were inviting in like Victoria
• 54:44
  Woodhall and they're inviting in some of these folks that are
• 54:47
  already dabbling with or straight up promoting the free
• 54:50
  love movement. Ultimately they're going to lead
• 54:52
  right into Margaret Sanger and the, you know, pro anti
• 54:56
  fertility, let's call it anti child movement.
• 54:59
  And so they because they didn't have a a strong foundation
• 55:04
  philosophically, all they knew is we are not being treated well
• 55:08
  in civic life. And then they were very
• 55:09
  intelligent. So they kind of had their own
• 55:11
  ideology that they spun up around that, but they lacked
• 55:13
  this philosophical grounding. It was very easy for the free
• 55:18
  love ideas, some of the more hyper occult stuff to take its
• 55:22
  route and say, oh, this is, you know, women's suffrage.
• 55:24
  Oh, that's a that's a good idea. But now I'm going to hijack.
• 55:27
  I mean, this is Sue Ellen Browder's argument in her book
• 55:29
  subverted How I helped the sexual revolution hijack the
• 55:33
  women's movement, that basically these other ideologies found a
• 55:36
  nest in some of the good aspects of early feminism and the early
• 55:42
  feminists weren't wise enough, quite frankly, and and strong
• 55:45
  enough to keep it out. And they and some of them have
• 55:47
  been accepted it. And then it became this, you
• 55:50
  know, terrible thing that it is today.
• 55:52
  You know, I don't, I don't know if that's the case because that
• 55:54
  the a lot of the ideas originated more from the
• 55:59
  philosophy than the other way around.
• 56:01
  You know, that the, the suffrage movement ended up becoming sort
• 56:04
  of a, a platform for them, but we don't see it change
• 56:08
  dramatically. In fact, it just keeps getting
• 56:10
  worse and worse. So I think it's, you know, it
• 56:11
  goes back to Shelley and this idea of the independent woman
• 56:14
  and this idea of how do we make women like men?
• 56:17
  I mean, that's that these are the kind of fundamental
• 56:19
  questions that they're asking. And so suffrage is sort of part
• 56:22
  and parcel of that. So I don't, I don't think that
• 56:24
  there was a hijacking that happened.
• 56:26
  I think it was these ideas were already there and they're just
• 56:29
  sort of fascinated by them and see that they these could have
• 56:33
  good value and are are moving forward trying to push them
• 56:37
  forward. So I don't think that there's,
• 56:40
  you know, there were certainly women who were more innocent,
• 56:43
  but they weren't these were not the main leaders of the
• 56:46
  movement. The main leaders very much had
• 56:49
  kind of all of these aspects that Shelley had already
• 56:52
  espoused. And we're we're really kind of
• 56:54
  tugged into to all of it. So yeah, I don't I don't think
• 56:57
  you could say that there was a hijacking that happened.
• 56:59
  I think that, you know, Sue Allen and I have talked about
• 57:03
  the later ones and she she actually just recently wrote a
• 57:05
  review. She endorsed your book, I think.
• 57:08
  Yeah, she was great. Well, she didn't endorse it.
• 57:09
  She wrote a review of it and said that, you know, we had a
• 57:12
  disagreement. And she basically says I was
• 57:13
  right and she was wrong because my point was, you know, we can
• 57:16
  we can we save this word. And she thought we could.
• 57:21
  And I, I don't know that we can. So anyway, I don't yeah, I would
• 57:24
  not agree with the idea that somehow there was this sort of
• 57:27
  this pure idea. I think they've all all of it is
• 57:30
  sort of enmeshed with one one another throughout the the 8
• 57:34
  hundreds for sure. Wow, so Susan B Anthony List
• 57:37
  should perhaps consider a name change.
• 57:41
  I'm not going to recommend that. I think that they they've
• 57:43
  they've branded that well and I think it's true.
• 57:45
  She was pro pro-life. I think that's, that's great.
• 57:48
  But I think that yeah, there's, there's a lot of baggage there
• 57:50
  that most of us don't know. So anyway, that's.
• 57:53
  So we don't have a ton of time yet, but I have two more things
• 57:55
  that I really want to get into if we if we can do it.
• 57:59
  So one of them is enter communism and Marxism and the
• 58:04
  way that feminism evolved alongside those ideologies,
• 58:10
  those political theories. And then I do want to, this is
• 58:14
  connected to the patriarchy. You know, what is the
• 58:15
  patriarchy? Where did we even get this term?
• 58:19
  It's all kind of caught up in in this is all all together.
• 58:23
  So meaning I know that the you talk about the term patriarchy
• 58:26
  comes from actually the communists who are assigning it
• 58:30
  in the first time in a negative context.
• 58:32
  So tell us about how feminism is connected with Marxism and
• 58:37
  communism. Yeah.
• 58:38
  So this is a huge, huge question and I think a really important
• 58:42
  one. The the word patriarchy was was
• 58:46
  articulated in a negative sense first by Engels, who of course
• 58:48
  was the co-author with Karl Marx.
• 58:50
  Karl Marx died and Engels wrote this piece on the family and
• 58:54
  picked up kind of a lot of the issues that that Marx never
• 58:57
  talked about, one of which was the, you know, motherhood and,
• 59:01
  and production of children and whatnot.
• 59:04
  And so he actually uses the word patriarchy in the first negative
• 59:07
  way, really referring to in the class distinctions.
• 59:10
  You know, you've got the land owners who are the oppressors
• 59:13
  and then you've got the proletariat who are the
• 59:14
  oppressed. That was kind of the the dynamic
• 59:17
  that they had set up. And I think it's a familiar one
• 59:19
  to us now because we've seen Marxism sort of invade different
• 59:23
  ways. But what first happened was that
• 59:26
  this application of this, this oppressor and oppressed was then
• 59:30
  shifted on to women. And, you know, we there's a lot
• 59:34
  of communist infiltration. I mean, certainly around this
• 59:38
  1917, you know, you've got the Bolshevik revolution and you you
• 59:41
  see what happens to the family. You know, the the first thing
• 59:44
  that the Marxists are always against is the family because
• 59:47
  they see how strong a family is together.
• 59:50
  And so they're trying to always break that up.
• 59:52
  And So what happens is, you know, children are sent to be
• 59:55
  parented by someone else. The moms go to work just the
• 59:59
  same way that the men do. You know, this idea is to create
• 1:00:01
  these perfect workers. And abortion ends up becoming
• 1:00:04
  completely just commonplace. You know, you can't even own a
• 1:00:07
  stitch of land, but you can have an abortion at the drop of a hat
• 1:00:10
  and. So the, the problem is women
• 1:00:15
  actually used it too much and they, and they had to stop, they
• 1:00:18
  had to start limiting it because they weren't repopulating
• 1:00:21
  themselves at all. But that's really the, the, the
• 1:00:25
  kind of thing that the communists were trying to
• 1:00:27
  replicate in the United States. And they knew that they couldn't
• 1:00:29
  do it just with, you know, military power.
• 1:00:32
  So they ended up shifting gears and trying to do it on a
• 1:00:35
  cultural level. And this is where we really see
• 1:00:38
  the work of the Frankfurt School, you know, Marcusa and,
• 1:00:42
  and Wilhelm Reich, Wilhelm Reich actually wrote a book was
• 1:00:46
  published in 1936 called The Sexual Revolution.
• 1:00:48
  And that really became the the blueprint for the movement.
• 1:00:52
  But, you know, Fast forward to the 1940s and you've got someone
• 1:00:55
  like Betty Friedan who was already, you know, even when she
• 1:00:58
  was in college, very much involved in leftist politics.
• 1:01:02
  And she joins this organization called the Congress for American
• 1:01:05
  Women that ended up being disbanded by the Congressional,
• 1:01:10
  you know, Committee for an American Activities because it
• 1:01:14
  was such a piece of propaganda. So she was involved in that,
• 1:01:18
  even though she, you know, always said she was very much
• 1:01:20
  just a housewife and she wasn't interested in women's issues
• 1:01:22
  until the 50s. But she clearly, in fact, there
• 1:01:26
  were articles that I found written by her prior to that
• 1:01:29
  that made it clear that she knew what she was doing with, with a
• 1:01:32
  communist ideology. So she's fascinated by this
• 1:01:36
  whole the communism by communism.
• 1:01:38
  She wants, she hates Hitler, she's fighting against Hitler.
• 1:01:41
  But she ironically, she has this quote in one of her notebooks
• 1:01:45
  that talks about how she, she firmly believes that women will
• 1:01:48
  never be free until they are producing things in the the
• 1:01:52
  marketplace. They have to be working the
• 1:01:54
  home. She calls in her book The
• 1:01:55
  Feminine Mystique, which was published in 1936.
• 1:01:59
  It's a comfortable concentration camp.
• 1:02:00
  She actually uses that language, which is really ironic because
• 1:02:04
  of course, that was the the, you know, what's the phrase at
• 1:02:08
  Auschwitz, albeit mock free work will make you free.
• 1:02:11
  So she's engaging the exact same kind of ideology that she thinks
• 1:02:14
  she's fighting against. And this is just exploded on the
• 1:02:18
  American scene. 3,000,000 copies and 1st, you know, few years she
• 1:02:23
  sells of of this book. And that was really, I think,
• 1:02:27
  what set off in many respects, the second wave of feminism was
• 1:02:30
  this idea of getting out of the home.
• 1:02:32
  And then of course, it just keeps multiplying by women like
• 1:02:35
  Kate Millett and Angela Davis, who were trained by Wilhelm
• 1:02:40
  Reich and Herbert Marcuse to start infiltrating colleges and
• 1:02:46
  the culture with their ideas. And this is really where
• 1:02:48
  feminism takes on that oppressed versus the oppressor ideas that
• 1:02:52
  I just talked about in in classes.
• 1:02:54
  Men are the oppressors automatically because they're
• 1:02:56
  male, and women are the victims automatically because they are
• 1:02:59
  female. And you know, that's that those
• 1:03:03
  that piece, you know, that that central idea of the oppressor
• 1:03:06
  and the oppressor is absolutely what we see in what culture and
• 1:03:09
  and you know, it's just manifest itself all over in what we're
• 1:03:12
  dealing with today. But it wouldn't none of those
• 1:03:14
  things would have come about if it hadn't stuck so well in in
• 1:03:18
  the 1970s. And, you know, even all these
• 1:03:20
  radical ideas like how do we get rid of gender?
• 1:03:23
  You know, these are all come directly from the, from the
• 1:03:27
  Marxist vision and rather than the occult, atheism was really
• 1:03:32
  their focus, but they didn't care because the occult didn't
• 1:03:36
  harm them. You know, they, they were
• 1:03:38
  focused on atheism, restructuring society and free
• 1:03:41
  love. Those are the three things that
• 1:03:42
  feminism had also been engaged with.
• 1:03:44
  So they work together just almost perfectly.
• 1:03:47
  And that's really where the movement just exploded and you
• 1:03:50
  know where we sit today because that's the the vision that was
• 1:03:54
  passed down and created the dominant narrative of what it
• 1:03:57
  means to be a woman in the culture today.
• 1:03:59
  So how did it go from, you know, originally, women should be able
• 1:04:03
  to be like men in terms of the way they work and the way they
• 1:04:07
  operate politically and the way they behave.
• 1:04:11
  And then to OK, women are the victims and men are the
• 1:04:15
  aggressors. And then to today, you, you
• 1:04:18
  write in your book extensively about how these, the, the, the,
• 1:04:22
  the foundations of feminism has brought us to in part, the
• 1:04:26
  gender ideology of today that has led to, you know, the social
• 1:04:29
  contagion of young boys and girls being trans.
• 1:04:32
  And you know, all the nightmare that we're seeing with, you
• 1:04:35
  know, pronouns and, you know, all of the LGBTQIA plus,
• 1:04:39
  whatever, you know, 1,000,000 letters, what's where does that
• 1:04:43
  connection explain that connection for folks?
• 1:04:45
  Yeah, and that it's obviously not a short answer, so I'll try
• 1:04:49
  and make it as short as I can at this stage.
• 1:04:51
  But the real focus is, is a question of power.
• 1:04:54
  I mean, this is what the the communists have been so
• 1:04:57
  effective in, in terms of, you know, just their success in our
• 1:05:01
  culture is the focus is on power and manipulation.
• 1:05:04
  And so, you know, they're, they're going from this, this
• 1:05:09
  place where they want women to get out of the home, They want
• 1:05:12
  to break up the family, that that's really the goal because
• 1:05:15
  the family has a kind of power that they don't, they don't
• 1:05:18
  want. So that what happens in terms of
• 1:05:22
  getting women out of the home. You also have, of course, the,
• 1:05:26
  the very important piece, which is, you know, you know better
• 1:05:28
  than anybody, the abortion piece.
• 1:05:30
  I mean that this is this is has to happen because this is what
• 1:05:33
  allows women to operate and function much more like men than
• 1:05:37
  embracing our own fertility and managing around that at
• 1:05:41
  certainly as a family. So those things happen.
• 1:05:43
  But in the midst of all that, you also have this ideal that,
• 1:05:46
  you know, Gloria Steinem talked about all kinds of feminist
• 1:05:49
  women spoke about very openly of just getting rid of gender
• 1:05:53
  altogether and getting rid of men altogether.
• 1:05:55
  I mean, this is the idea of smashing the patriarchy.
• 1:05:57
  There are oppressors. There was a real privileging of
• 1:06:00
  the the lesbian relationship. There was even discussion about,
• 1:06:03
  you know, killing all men. And and this is, you know, this
• 1:06:07
  isn't old. I mean, we, it's, it's come
• 1:06:10
  back. You can hear it, you know,
• 1:06:11
  people talking about this in culture and in different ways.
• 1:06:15
  And I have some examples of it in my book.
• 1:06:17
  So those things are all happening.
• 1:06:18
  But this this underlying idea is that sexuality and and our sex
• 1:06:23
  is not fixed anymore. And that comes from Simone de
• 1:06:26
  Beauvoir meets its own thread where this idea that we can sort
• 1:06:30
  of express ourselves as in any way that we want.
• 1:06:33
  We can identify ourselves in any way that we want.
• 1:06:36
  And that, you know, this is part of the L and the G, the, the,
• 1:06:39
  the gay and the lesbians. That's that started out.
• 1:06:41
  And then it just kind of keeps spiraling outward.
• 1:06:45
  You know, people are have different ideas.
• 1:06:47
  And, you know, we're adding more letters all the time to the LGTB
• 1:06:51
  alphabet, you know, list so that that's part of it.
• 1:06:56
  But that's but fundamentally, it's really becomes about power
• 1:06:59
  because you're breaking up the family.
• 1:07:01
  You're also breaking people. I mean, there's, we even have on
• 1:07:03
  record, you know, magazine editors getting together and
• 1:07:06
  seeing the value in, you know, telling women they need to look
• 1:07:10
  and be this body size and they can help them, you know, all the
• 1:07:12
  products that are sold from the brokenness of women in the
• 1:07:15
  family. You know, there's definitely a a
• 1:07:19
  engine for profit that's that's at work here.
• 1:07:23
  But I think that another big piece of it is also just the
• 1:07:26
  role that birth control has played in it.
• 1:07:28
  And obviously people have so many different ideas about the,
• 1:07:31
  the merits or demerits of it, but it's, it's unavoidable to,
• 1:07:34
  to, you know, you can't skirt the issue that what it has done
• 1:07:38
  is changed the, the sexual relationships between
• 1:07:40
  heterosexuals to look much more like the relationships of same
• 1:07:45
  sex couples or whomever, because there's no fertility in it.
• 1:07:50
  So as we get rid of fertility, I think this is ultimately the
• 1:07:53
  the, the biggest question, the biggest problem is that it's
• 1:07:57
  just all sexuality just becomes about pleasure.
• 1:08:00
  It's not at all related to fertility.
• 1:08:03
  So that that's these are the kind of the steps that have led
• 1:08:06
  us to this place where we actually don't see a distinction
• 1:08:09
  between same sex marriages and our own marriages.
• 1:08:12
  Whereas, you know, you go back 50 years and people are still
• 1:08:15
  sort of scratching their heads about it because they see the
• 1:08:18
  important role that fertility plays into it.
• 1:08:20
  And this is also why, you know, we can't define what a woman is
• 1:08:23
  because we don't, we have so detached it from our own
• 1:08:26
  fertility that those things feel, you know, antiquated or
• 1:08:30
  sort of unimportant. But we can see, you know, we
• 1:08:33
  know that that a woman's fertility isn't, you know, being
• 1:08:37
  a mother isn't just about being a biological mother.
• 1:08:39
  It's also psychologically and spiritually.
• 1:08:41
  Those are really important roles that women have always played
• 1:08:43
  throughout history. And, you know, we see as more
• 1:08:46
  and more women are not having children, What?
• 1:08:48
  Well, what's happening? Well, we're, we're, we're
• 1:08:50
  finding surrogates. We have pets that have become
• 1:08:53
  children. You know, people actually use
• 1:08:54
  that language if had parents. So that desire to still mother
• 1:08:59
  hasn't gone away, which I think in a certain respect is
• 1:09:01
  incredibly hopeful. We haven't fundamentally changed
• 1:09:03
  when the way that we think that we have.
• 1:09:05
  We've just found kind of a new direction for it.
• 1:09:07
  So yeah, it's it's it's complicated and I you know, I
• 1:09:10
  just condensed into 4 minutes or whatever, but I I make it, you
• 1:09:14
  know, the argument for and and like or chapters, but yeah, I
• 1:09:18
  think it all it all. It's amazing how much it come.
• 1:09:22
  One leads to the next very, very easily.
• 1:09:24
  Well, and we didn't even get into it in this conversation,
• 1:09:27
  but it's in your book and it's something a lot of our listeners
• 1:09:29
  know about is, you know, the history of Margaret Sanger in
• 1:09:32
  Planned Parenthood. And it started with right
• 1:09:33
  control and medicating a woman's fertility out of existence so
• 1:09:37
  that they can be sexually available basically to men and
• 1:09:40
  just kind of and to them to whatever they want to do.
• 1:09:42
  And in part that breaks down marriage, breaks down family and
• 1:09:45
  obviously leads to the abortion mindset where I'm entitled to
• 1:09:50
  sex without children, without having the, the, the natural
• 1:09:53
  consequence, the blessing, really, it's a blessing of a
• 1:09:56
  child. And so if I do get pregnant, you
• 1:09:58
  know, using birth control, I'm entitled to backup
• 1:10:01
  contraception, which is abortion.
• 1:10:03
  That is what that is why we have there's some global estimates.
• 1:10:07
  It's in the billions, billions of abortions worldwide since in
• 1:10:12
  the second-half of the 20th century and then in the century
• 1:10:15
  because of the proliferation of that idea that we should have as
• 1:10:20
  adults, sex without family, without children, without
• 1:10:22
  marriage, right? So all, all, all the way back
• 1:10:26
  to, you know, the first seeds of feminism and the ugly fruit of
• 1:10:30
  today. What is the take away you want
• 1:10:34
  your readers and the listeners today to have?
• 1:10:38
  Yeah, I, I think the biggest issue is to really, you know,
• 1:10:43
  start being critical of the narrative that we're being fed
• 1:10:47
  over and over and over again. I think that that is, is hugely
• 1:10:51
  important for all of us to start seeing, you know, this is
• 1:10:53
  there's an alternative way to understand ourselves as women.
• 1:10:56
  And the way that we're getting, we're being presented and told
• 1:10:59
  in our lives is not the right one.
• 1:11:02
  And you know, we when you get to this place where you're told
• 1:11:05
  that your children are actually your enemy husband is an enemy,
• 1:11:09
  you know, which is not to say that there aren't bad husbands
• 1:11:12
  and of course happens, but the the reality that this these are
• 1:11:15
  the impediments to your happiness instead of an Ave. to
• 1:11:17
  your happiness. I think that's the real piece
• 1:11:20
  that needs to leave all of us sort of questioning, you know,
• 1:11:23
  what is going on? What, what are we being fed?
• 1:11:25
  What are we being told? And, and start looking deeper
• 1:11:28
  and seeing, you know, there's, there's just this wasteland and
• 1:11:32
  you can't really build a culture when you've got, you know, the
• 1:11:35
  two sexes have this deep, deep resentment towards one another
• 1:11:39
  and you can't even form families because of it.
• 1:11:42
  You know, those are the, the, these are really important
• 1:11:45
  things that we need to start reconsidering and, and looking
• 1:11:47
  at again, especially if, you know, we know that there are
• 1:11:50
  there civilizations have a lifetime and, you know, there's
• 1:11:55
  very clear evidence that we are on certainly a path that of, of
• 1:11:59
  decadence. And I think all of us are seeing
• 1:12:00
  it and feeling it. And so much of it has to do with
• 1:12:03
  because we've absorbed these ideas of, of Marxism and, you
• 1:12:07
  know, such deep ways. So I, I think that's really what
• 1:12:11
  I'd love people to start with, is just start scratching beneath
• 1:12:14
  the surface and seeing that maybe what they're hearing isn't
• 1:12:17
  always true. So we I saw Barbie recently.
• 1:12:21
  You wrote a piece on Barbie. And so we'll kind of close with
• 1:12:24
  a little mini analysis of Barbie.
• 1:12:27
  It's a huge film, obviously over a billion dollars in the box
• 1:12:29
  office. And I saw it and I think I saw
• 1:12:33
  what you saw, which was just, you know, all the negativity
• 1:12:36
  around men, around children, around marriage.
• 1:12:39
  And then the sort of me centered, the me centered
• 1:12:43
  purpose of that Barbie discovers in the end, it's all it's really
• 1:12:46
  all about her. And it was very telling.
• 1:12:49
  I thought that she went to the gynecologist office in the end
• 1:12:51
  and not the OBGY NS office in the end, because it was
• 1:12:55
  gynecology without fertility, without root, you know, there's
• 1:13:00
  no babies in in this gynecologist office.
• 1:13:01
  And that's what Planned Parenthood is.
• 1:13:03
  Remember, Planned Parenthood, you could say in its best light
• 1:13:06
  is a gynecologist, but it's one that also kills babies.
• 1:13:08
  So it's like the opposite of an OBGYN, but it was kind of like,
• 1:13:12
  I'm going to Planned Parenthood as opposed to I'm going to go to
• 1:13:14
  a family, you know, or a doctor that's more about holistic
• 1:13:17
  Women's Health and can, you know, appreciate children and,
• 1:13:21
  and how to bring children into the world.
• 1:13:23
  So what's your message to folks listening, especially the ones
• 1:13:28
  that really wanted to see the good in Barbie?
• 1:13:30
  Because I do know people who found it very entertaining.
• 1:13:33
  And it's fun to dress up in pink for those, you know, some women
• 1:13:36
  and go with their friends. And there were a lot of jokes
• 1:13:38
  and it was very, you know, there's some, there's some good
• 1:13:40
  like, you know, kind of a motive moment in the film.
• 1:13:43
  Like I found myself sort of feeling the emotion when Barbie
• 1:13:45
  is seeing, you know, the world in the real world and all these,
• 1:13:48
  like, you know, families and she's seeing an old person and
• 1:13:51
  she's sort of feeling humanity, a sense of humanity.
• 1:13:54
  But what would be your word to people that want to see the good
• 1:13:57
  in Barbie but to really, you know, say, hey, this is really
• 1:14:01
  what Barbie was about. What's your take on that?
• 1:14:04
  Yeah, no, I I couldn't agree with you more.
• 1:14:07
  Your articulation of I think the biggest issue is really to see
• 1:14:11
  what it is that we're responding to because Barbie is, is
• 1:14:14
  presenting the same old message. You know, the patriarchy is bad.
• 1:14:17
  And when we need women at, you know, to control everything so
• 1:14:20
  that we can, we can make the world a peaceful place, which we
• 1:14:23
  know is a big myth. And, you know, there wasn't a
• 1:14:26
  single necessary man in the whole movie.
• 1:14:29
  You know, it's just, they're all just fluff.
• 1:14:32
  But I, I think this is where, you know, women really have to
• 1:14:34
  be discerning because again, you know, all they did was add some
• 1:14:38
  pink, a few emotional moments and some nostalgia to to that
• 1:14:44
  movie. And that's really what is is
• 1:14:46
  riding on. I mean, This is why women really
• 1:14:48
  love it. And I think that that's what we
• 1:14:51
  have to see. Like which what what ways are
• 1:14:53
  they manipulating me? How am I being manipulated into
• 1:14:56
  sort of going to that movie and absorbing all the other content
• 1:15:00
  that they're promoting? But I'm not seeing it because I,
• 1:15:03
  I'm really, you know, taken in by these these other aspects.
• 1:15:08
  So, you know, I think that's part of the brainwashing is just
• 1:15:10
  really paying attention to the way that these things are
• 1:15:12
  presented. I think it also in light of
• 1:15:15
  that, creates a huge opportunity for those of us who are pro-life
• 1:15:20
  to say, how do we create a movie that's actually funny that can
• 1:15:23
  use these kinds of elements and for the good.
• 1:15:26
  And, you know, this is what my co-author, Noel Marrying and I
• 1:15:28
  have done with our our work theology of home is really to
• 1:15:31
  try and promote how do we take our message and present it in
• 1:15:34
  beautiful and attractive and compelling ways instead of, you
• 1:15:38
  know, just what the left is done, which is just their ideas.
• 1:15:40
  And I think this is what we an area that is so, you know,
• 1:15:44
  beckoning for us to get into as pro-life years to to start
• 1:15:48
  making movies that are, you know, actually funny and
• 1:15:51
  humorous. I think we have a much better
• 1:15:52
  message. And, and I think that there's so
• 1:15:54
  many opportunities for really changing hearts and minds
• 1:15:58
  through that kind of medium instead of just always, you
• 1:16:01
  know, just being critical of what they're doing.
• 1:16:02
  What, you know, why can't we start doing that?
• 1:16:04
  And that's one of the things that my research has borne out
• 1:16:07
  is this is how women have been destroyed through the these kind
• 1:16:10
  of tactics that really appeal to our emotions.
• 1:16:13
  And so I, I think we need to do the this the same thing, but do
• 1:16:17
  it in a way that's, that's healthy and beautiful and
• 1:16:19
  compelling because we've, we've got all of that.
• 1:16:22
  It's sad too, because they didn't need to have that those
• 1:16:24
  bad messages in Barbie. They could have had a Barbie
• 1:16:26
  that in the end celebrates, you know, the beautiful harmony
• 1:16:31
  between men and women and that celebrates marriage and that
• 1:16:34
  celebrates children and that celebrates beauty.
• 1:16:36
  I mean, it could have gone a completely different direction
• 1:16:39
  and it could have been just as fun and sparkly, but it's like,
• 1:16:42
  no, they had to like jam a chock full of Marxist and feminist
• 1:16:47
  ideology that was kind of sprinkled over with glitter, so
• 1:16:51
  and a couple jokes. So it kind of made it, you know,
• 1:16:53
  fun and palatable. Right.
• 1:16:55
  No, I think you're exactly right.
• 1:16:56
  So I think we've got a great opportunity.
• 1:16:58
  Well, listen Carrie, you have done such amazing and and
• 1:17:02
  groundbreaking, I believe work on feminism.
• 1:17:04
  Where can people by the end of woman and continue to follow
• 1:17:09
  what you're doing? If they want a signed copy, then
• 1:17:12
  get it at theologyofhome.com, my blog, or it's certainly places
• 1:17:16
  like Amazon and my publisher Regnery.
• 1:17:19
  But yeah, that's those are the best places.
• 1:17:22
  And of course my work, I published a lot of it at my
• 1:17:24
  website, carriegrass.com. And then I've got a daily
• 1:17:27
  blog.forwomen@theologyofhome.com as well.
• 1:17:31
  Awesome. Well, we'd love to have you out
• 1:17:33
  here in studio in California next time you're in town.
• 1:17:35
  There's lots more to talk about. Thanks so much for coming on the
• 1:17:38
  podcast, Carrie. My pleasure, thanks so much for
• 1:17:40
  having me. Thanks so much for listening to
• 1:17:44
  this episode with Doctor Kerry Grass.
• 1:17:46
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• 1:17:49
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• 1:17:51
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