[Percy Bysshe Shelley is] writing . . . right after Marquis De Sade, 1740-1814, who is all about pushing taboos, and Shelley is good friends with Lord Byron who are all dastardly, awful men. Shelley's got this trail of dead women from suicide, ex-wives, children who died, children that he fathered but wasn't involved with . . . --Carrie Gress
Woods: What is it exactly the role that the occult plays in [feminism]?
Gress: The attraction to it was that you didn't need male clergy. It was women at home, at the table, who became these spiritual priestesses who are in charge of everything
Carrie Gress, who holds a doctorate in philosophy. Her earlier book, The Anti-Mary Exposed: The Rescuing the Culture from Toxic Femininity, 2019. Find more of her work here.
5:00 Starting in the 1780s, 1790s, women have got really hard lives. A lot of them had a lot of children, a lot of them died bearing children, a lot of the children died, so they were trying to figure out how to help women. The answer got off on the wrong foot, "Let's help women become more like men." Add to that all of the ideologically trends and threads. Mary Wollstonecraft [A Vindication of the Rights of Women, 1792] is considered the godmother of the movement was very much involved into egalitarianism, which rolls into socialism and into communism, so that thread was there from the very beginning. I called this concept, "Smashing the Patriarchy," and that started from the beginning.
The next thread that gets picked up is the occult and we can see that in our own time how much the occult and witchcraft is very alive in the feminist movement.
And then the 3rd piece is the concept of free love and getting rid of monogamy, getting rid of the nuclear family, and trying to allow women to have sexual relations without consequences the way that they perceive men to do.
So those are the key elements that we can consistently see throughout the 1800s and then they just get on steroids with the New Left and the Second Wave and up to what we're seeing today. It's incredibly challenging to pin it down and figure out what people mean by it, especially since people have sort of this general sense that it means to be pro-women. So if you don't embrace feminism, you must not be pro-women.
The term patriarchy came from Mary Wollstonecraft. She's writing along with Thomas Paine trying to justify what's happened in the French Revolution. She thought that a lot of the problems that society is having that you can got rid of them by eliminating monarchy, any kind of hierarchy, in the church, in the military, all these things needed to be collapsed down into something more egalitarian. So that's where it started.
The first person to really coin "Patriarchy" in a negative way was Engels. He wrote [Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, 1883] after Marx died [1818-1883] about the family when talking about landowners and Pater familias, and Engels is trying to say that this is a bad thing, and that's where patriarchy gets tagged as a bad thing by feminists and communists; the two really overlap from about the 1930s on. A lot of people think it's just toxic masculinity or they plug into it whatever concepts they want, which is one reason that has made feminism so flexible.
10:30 I don't really pin upon her the real heart of the feminist core, because she was a spark for it, but the real core of it came from her son-in-law, Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792-1822, whom she never met but she certainly influenced because he knew her work, he knew her husband, William Godwin's work, who was very much a free-love anarchist, totally against marriage even though he and Wollstonecraft married when Mary got pregnant. Percy created the movement, ironically, as a man.
11:20 Three people in your story: William Godwin, Percy Shelley, and Mary Shelley. They all have roles to play, and they all have ideas that are not particularly well-known to the general public. If we know anything about them it is through their literary works; even with that, we might not know precisely what they're driving at.
11:40 People think of Shelley as this bucolic, romantic poet, highly influential in his 29 years. He's writing . . . right after Marquis De Sade, 1740-1814, who is all about pushing taboos, and Shelley is good friends with Lord Byron who are all dastardly, awful men. Shelley's got this trail of dead women from suicide, ex-wives, children who died, children that he fathered but wasn't involved with, really horrendous when you read a biography about what this man was doing. This was the real fruit of it, Women's Revolution, he called it. He's the one who put all of these pieces together that had this dramatic effect because while his wife, Mary Shelley is creating Frankenstein and Frankenstein's creature, he's writing about this woman named Cythna, who was the very first independent woman, who was completely . . . she didn't have a husband or children. Her only relationship was with the Devil, and she really captured the imagination of a lot of women who would later call themselves feminists as this is the kind of woman that we want to be because there's no fertility there; there's all kinds of freedom they imagine. And it's really this radical idea of breaking taboos, and that's really what that whole Romantic period was focused on was how do we tear down these taboos?
13:15 The Romantics are interesting because there's a part of them that is drawn to things that are far away distance-wise, or conceptually. Diderot was not a Romantic, though in some ways in that tradition, but he theorized about what intimate relations of people were like in Tahiti, and he developed this wild theory that they all believed in free love when that was not the case. There was a current in the Romantic movement that was very interested in the Middle Ages because it was distant and remote from us and strange to our sensibilities.
14:00 Also the fascination with the Greeks and a Greek ethos and morality that is not connected to the Old Testament and the Ten Commandments. Ushered into the work was how to establish something virtuous without using anything connected with Christianity or even Judaism.
14:30 Starting with the Renaissance and forward, there was an attempt to portray the Greeks as if they were an entirely religion less society and they just walked around and occupied entirely by reason. If you actually study what Greek religion was like, it was part of everyday life. The head of the household was the head of the cult of that home. They had to make it into the "Little Enlightenment society" that they wanted to live in, so they have to force everybody into that mold and then make the rest of us pretend that was how they really were.
15:05 Areligious untethered from anything but they think it's tethered to reason, but, of course, we know that reason alone doesn't have the inner structure to lead to a moral society. Look at how much things have changed in the last 15 years alone. There's just not enough grounding in that once you take something like the 10 Commandments away.
15:30 The United States now. A couple of names that will be recognizable to most people: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. It's not uncommon for people talking about feminism contrast modern feminism unfavorably with what was taught by Susan B. Anthony or Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Do you think that's a legitimate tack to take?
I hadn't studied 1st Wave Feminism. I'd only studied 2nd-Wave feminism for a book that I wrote
1st-wave feminism, mid-19th century to 1965; 2nd-wave feminism, 1965 to 1975; 3rd-wave feminism, 1975 to 2012; 4th-wave feminism in Spain began in the mid-1990s.
Betty Friedan kicks off 2nd Wave Feminism. 1st-Wave is really the Suffrage Movement and the early stages of women's rights. And then the 2nd Wave starts with Betty Friedan and the connection with the New Left where it takes on totally radical overtones related to gender equality, gender erasure, and really changing the culture altogether. So I went back to Cady Stanton [1815-1902] and Susan B. Anthony [1820-1906] who are just for suffrage, maybe nice writings about women, . . . most aren't interested in reading what feminists have to say. Judith Butler's work is impenetrable. Cady Stanton and B. Anthony really branded themselves as a team kicked off the women's movement despite the fact that they didn't know each other until after the Seneca Falls [1848] meeting where Cady Stanton drove her stake into the ground of intellectual territory. Anthony was also a mouthpiece for Cady Stanton, so the ideas came from Cady Stanton. One of Susan B. Anthony's biographers spent 4 days burning all of her papers, all of her letters, all of her correspondence, all of her journals, speeches, so we don't know as much about her as we do Elizabeth Cady Stanton. We tend to think that the time in which they lived, 1848, was puritanical, Victorian, prim and proper Jane Austen sensibility and yet this was more like the wild west. It was a mess. Most of their work was done after the Civil War. This revival is going on but it has all kinds of mediums and seances and contacting the dead, mimicking technologically. You have telegraphs going up and people being able to connect long distances. Saw it as a spiritual element. So many had died in the war, so many children were dying in early stages, and this was really appealing to people to get some kind of solace by contacting the spirits. Cady Stanton got the idea for the Seneca Falls Conference, where the movement starts, from the Spirit Table [or seance table], now at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. Demonic wrappings going on, answering questions akin to a Ouija Board where you're getting answers in some bizarre, esoteric way. She started out as a Calvinist, but then abandoned her Christian faith and worked to try to get rid of it. She focused on Spiritualism, which was connected to the seances. She wrote, The Woman's Bible, which was very anti-Christian cookie. It feels like a teenager wrote it; it feels very juvenile. That lost her a lot of followers. But she actually got kicked out of her own organization when there was this huge scandal that erupted with a woman named, Victoria Woodhull, dubbed, Mrs. Satan, because she was very much a medium in New York state. She actually ran for president, was a promoter of free love, and the occult. Elizabeth Stanton and Susan B. Anthony decided to have her speak at one of their events. Huge tactical error: alienated much of their audience, but there were other women's suffrage groups that got embroiled in it, because the scandal . . . brought them down and delayed suffrage for 30 years because there was so much in-fighting. The movement could have done better if Stanton weren't involved in all these esoteric things and the free-love movement, for sure, if you look at the span of their work it was really marked by those things. Although now all we hear is the polish, their work on suffrage. Quite the juxtaposition when you look at the details of what these woman were up to.
21:15 This spiritualism I was not aware of until I read your book, but all I could think of was, although he was much later, was Harry Houdini of the 1920s, spending so much of his time debunking these people. I understand, as you say, why people would want to communicate with the dead. They just lived through this period of unimaginable loss, and he lost his own mother. And he said, yeah, what they're actually doing is that they're taking advantage of people who've had a tremendous loss. But this Woman's Bible was also a surprise, I'd want to see what she was up to. But the sort of things that get brought up today when people want to cite Susan B. Anthony and Cady Stanton as exemplars of the real kind of feminism, authentic feminism, is that you can find statements they made expressing horror at abortion. As far as you know, was that sincere?
Yes, Cady Stanton loved being a mother, especially in the earlier years and then later she soured on it. They were sincere, partially because it was unconscionable. But there was a place to get abortions in New York City. Brothels were rampant. I think it was the era in which they lived
22:45 Everybody. I mean there was a societal consensus that doesn't exist today.
24:20 These were people who were interested in suffrage. Obviously you can understand someone who holds feminist views would favor extending the suffrage to women. But do they also think that women's suffrage would have social benefits as well would benefit society, and if so, how?
24:35 Yeah, I think so. If they were seeing a lot of women losing custody of their children, if there was a divorce, there were all kinds of issues that if they felt that women had a voice, they could rectify things and women's lives wouldn't be so hard. That was certainly behind . . . their best of intentions and certainly was a force for it. You can't fault that. In many sense that's what they really were pushing for and focused on. But it got ugly once they included the esoteric and the occult.
25:15 What is it exactly the role that the occult plays in all this? Is it simply that they're not Christianity? There's a lot of things that aren't Christianity. Why not Buddhism?
25:35 A lot of the ideas came from this woman, named Madame Blavatsky, who was a Russian noble woman who left Russia and traveled all over the world and picked up all these different religions and cobbled them together into Theosophy. And actually, Gloria Steinem's mother was a practioner of Theosophy. I don't even know how you practice it, but she was very much involved. The attraction to it was that you didn't need male clergy. It was women at home, at the table, who became these spiritual priestesses who are in charge of everything, who are calling the shots, who are focused on the direction in which the spiritual world is going and it doesn't have anything to do with the church and the church building. It's sort of inverting that order of what Christianity looked like at that stage. So that's one of the reasons why it was so important. It was also about power, too. And Victoria Woodhall, this Mrs. Satan, their family was always moving because her father was a complete snake oil salesman. He was wanted in all these different states. But he had been prostituting his daughters, both sexually and then using them mediums since they were young, young girls. The fact that these two girls never had an indoor bathroom; they talked about the family going to the bathroom out in the yard, nightmare scenarios of children growing up at that time. That Victoria had the wherewithal to run for president because she had this brokerage firm that one of the Rothchild's helped her with because she had done seances for him and told him which stocks to pick. So he was like, you and your sister need your own. So there was this element of power and control that was also incredibly attractive and this was where the platform came from was by speaking through the spirits and listening to what the spirits told them to gain power and prestige in the culture.
BETTY FRIEDAN: THE COPERNICAN TURN
27:33 I'd like to take what remaining time we have, and push forward into the 2nd Wave of feminism. I am quite sure that there are some manifestations of feminism today that Susan B Anthony would not recognize. But let's talk about Betty Friedan. I read The Feminist Mystique in college. Some of her biographical details shed further light into the what she was up to in that book. Can you share some of those with us?
28:15. She was probably one of the more shocking people that I've researched after Susan B. Anthony and Cady Stanton. There was a book by a man by the name of Daniel Horowitz, who was a friend of Betty Friedan's, and he noticed at some point, I think she was a visiting professor at USC, and he noticed that she was using Saul Alinsky tactics with her students. And he thought, "Okay, this isn't just your average housewife; this is a woman who has been trained by Leftists, Marxist." So he did some digging into her life and he finally asked her, "I want to do this book on you and talk about your communist roots. I think it'll be a good thing because people will be able to see a how a communist was able to navigate around McCarthy and still be able to promote Marxist ideas." So he was really a proponent of, you know, like saying see you know all the stuff that she did was great. So, of course, Freidan said no way. I will never let you see my private papers, which, of course, are private I think until 2035. So he just used open source resources and other things he had access to and cobbled together this book that's just really remarkable but very much chronicling her communist path. She was very involved with Communism even as a college student and deeply interested in the question about women. Horowitz's book is titled Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminist Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism, 2000. I was able to come together some of the things that he wrote and some of the things that Betty wrote with this woman named Bella Dodd, who was also a communist that finally left the Communist Party. Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen helped her leave the Communist Party, and she later became a Catholic.
29:55. Yeah, Paul Kengor at Grove City College just wrote a book on her, called The Devil and Bella Dodd: One Woman's Struggle Against Communism and her Redemption, 2022.
Her big motivator was that she was an inherent of Stalin's, she hated Hitler. Her focus was really to get women out of the home. home. She has in her journal something, a quote from Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, 1884, about how women will only be free when they are doing productive work outside the home. So that's her goal. I don't think she realized it, but it's the same concept that Hitler had at Auschwitz, "Arbeit Macht Frei," or "Work Makes You Free." So she dug into this wholeheartedly but what's fascinating about her is that she doesn't come at it the typical way most philosophers would . She's coming out at it from a psychological perspective and she uses that perspective to manipulate women into believing it that is what would really set them free. I'm sure she believed it wholeheartedly. So she wasn't being disingenuous, but she was using psychology and especially that concept of victimhood that women are particularly susceptible to and fear of missing out, which we see even in Eve, to convince women to get out of the home. She uses this crazy language and I'm sure you remember the comfortable concentration camp to talk about home and it's pretty galling to see that she can get away with a term like that when she's basically talking to the most privileged women in almost all of human history as she's writing this because of technological advances, the financial windfalls that's happening in the 60s of the post-WWII effort as America's middle class is rising . . .
31:35. Not to mention that I think Alexander Solzhenitsyn might have something to what say about what life in a camp is actually like.
31:42. Amazing that she was so effective she sold 3 million copies in the first several years [published in 1963] so she's affected everybody. And I think that one of the things that she really did was to allow women to divorce themselves from children and husband and home in a way that I think was really brand new and that's what led much more easily to the abortion issue because these things were suddenly seen as obstacles too women's happiness instead of a means through which women can achieve happiness. So if you're going to talk about some Copernican turn in the movement that's really where where it took place.
That's a great Simone de Beauvoir quote you know if we give women the choice they will not leave the home so that's where for Dan enters in and is like okay let me take care of this and so she makes it appealing and attractive to leave the home and then of course things like Cosmopolitan magazine creating the Cosmo Girl which we now know is very fabricated woman. The Cosmo Girl could be anything but married and a mother. Oh, she could not be a mother or a virgin those were the two things that she could not be with their writers. There is a claim that if you can stay home, if you want, but the implication that is if you make that choice that you're not very bright, according to the feminist. Feminists have defined their position but I think they've also been hugely successful in defining what they think the opposition looks like, absolutely making us look like we are doormats, that we are uneducated, we are stupid, that we just don't know any better, and so that's why we are choosing not to be feminists. Their propaganda has just been remarkably effective, and I think that's a hard part most women think that they are either one or the other and don't know how to break out of those binary options.
34:30. The women in this book keep pushing for more amoral moves away from the Ten Commandments and really glorifying the masculine, idealizing the masculine, and that's the direction that we went.
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