The Daily Signal - Carrie Gress on How Feminist Movement Drew Ideology From the Occult

Episode Date: August 9, 2023

INTERVIEW: The English Romantic poet Percy Shelley, who died in 1822 at age 29, played a significant role in developing the ideas of the feminist movement, author Carrie Gress says.  Ideas of the ���the occult, smashing the patriarchy, and free love” played a significant role in Shelley’s writing and ideology, says Gress, author of the new book “The End of Woman: How Smashing the Patriarchy Has Destroyed Us.” Shelley was a “barbaric man” who was “involved in the occult,” Gress says. His wife was Mary Shelley, author of the 1818 novel “Frankenstein,” she notes, and Shelley drew on the ideas of her parents—a vision of a “women’s revolution where there’s no monogamy, there’s no marriage, all of these things are just erased, and people just live this bucolic life without any reference to their human nature.”  Shelley’s ideology contributed to the modern feminist movement, a movement that has led to what Gress calls “The End of Woman.” Gress, also a fellow at the Washington-based Ethics and Public Policy Center, joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss the history of feminism and explain how the feminist movement has harmed women and left women unfulfilled. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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We'd love to talk, business. Welcome back to the Daily Signal podcast. I'm Virginia Allen. Today is Wednesday, August 9th. The feminist movement misdiagnosed what ails women, and women are paying the price today. That's according to author Carrie Gress. Carrie is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the author of the new book, The End of Woman, How Smashing the Patriarchy, Has Destroyed Us. In the book, Carrie goes all. all the way back to the roots of the feminist movement in the 1700s and discusses the life of the woman who's considered to be the first feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft.

And she guides us through in her writing all the way through to present day to how the feminist movement is connected to what we're seeing in the transgender movement and so many of the issues that aLR society. Her book is out on August 15th. It's available for Pre-order Now, and she joins us on the show today to explain truly how the feminist movement led to the end of woman. But before we get to my conversation with Carrie Gress, I want to tell you all about one of our other podcasts from the Heritage Foundation Podcast Network.

We have to sometimes ask the question, how do you take America back? Well, it starts with ideas, ideas we take on offense to reclaim America. That's why I can't recommend the Kevin Roberts Show highly enough. It's a deep dive on how critical issues that plague our nation plus conversations with high-profile guests from across the movement. It's a roadmap on how we can protect our nation from bad ideas and get back on track. You can find the Kevin Roberts Show wherever you like to listen to podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, we're across all platforms. or you can visit heritage.org slash podcast. Now stay tuned for my conversation with Carrie Gress.

It is my pleasure today to be joined by author Carrie Gress. She is author of The New Book, The End of Woman, How Smashing the Patriarchy Has Destroyed Us. Carrie, thank you so much for being with us today to talk about your new book. My pleasure. It's great to be here. Well, you are a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. You've authored 10 books. You're a wife.

You're a mom to five kids. Talk a little bit about how you started researching and writing on the feminist movement. What sparked your interest? Yeah, you know, it's actually funny because when I was in graduate school, I swore I would never get involved in women's issues. I mean, I even said it out loud. And so I still kind of laugh and it's something that I'm interested in. But one of the reasons why I didn't like it was I felt like I'll, I, I, I, I said it. there was a lot of good content out there for women to sort of skirt around, you know, the radical feminist movement.

But so much of it was written very academically. And it was not anything that I could pass on to friends or family or to people that I knew that were really struggling with their lives and lifestyles. And so anyway, it just was one of those things that just sort of came about. I just started writing really about the very first, one of the first books that I wrote on women was about motherhood and just how much motherhood transforms us. I think, you know, going from that experience of thinking that, you know, next week it's going to get easier with my newborn. Next week will be easier. Next week will be easier. And then finally realizing like, wait a minute, it's just maybe it's not supposed to be easy.

Maybe this is helping me become a better person through these trials and all these things that are pulling me out of my own sort of narcissistic cocoon that I had created for myself. So anyway, it's just been very gradual. But yeah, feminism itself, I really didn't intend to take it on until, you know, in this huge way I do, with this book until I started looking into first wave feminism. And I'm sure you've heard so many people say, you know, feminism was hijacked in the second wave. And so I was just expecting to sort of dig into the first wave and thought, well, it's just going to be all these really nice, lovely things about women and, you know, much pure understanding of womanhood. And I was just shocked at what I found because it was so different. It was also so clear to me that what we're seeing in the second wave actually

had its roots in the first wave. So that's really kind of the arc of, you know, how we got to this point. And I think that's one of the most surprising things that I found as I began reading your book was we hear so often this differentiation between the waves of feminism and how different they are. And when you started talking about kind of this through line through all of them, it's like, wow, that's so fascinating. So I want to dive deeper into that in a moment. But before we get to that, I thought it would be helpful to just first define some terms and starting with, you know, feminism. When we talk about the feminist movement, when we say that word feminism for the purposes of our discussion, what do you mean by that? No, I think that's a fantastic question because it's used almost differently by every woman, I think.

And, you know, the one thing that seems to be kind of common is this idea of that feminism is you're pro-woman. The problem is, of course, is that what I mean by pro-woman is going to be very different than what Gloria Steinem means by pro-woman. and that's where things break down. So I, the definition that I work with now is really focused on three elements that are, I think, run through first wave, second wave. There are obviously going to be variations of this, and I'll go into those three in a second, they're going to be variations of it. And I think it's really incumbent upon people that still call themselves feminists to define what they mean, because these three are so pernicious. But the first one is free love, which is, you know, the end of monogamy and really the breakdown of the family.

The second one is what started out being called restructuring society. It later was called Smashing the Patriarchy and actually Angles had something to do with that. It wasn't, this wasn't just some feminist identity. In fact, a lot of these ideas did come from men. So that's the other ones, smashing the Patriarch. And then the third one is just the involvement of the occult. So those are the three threads that I found running, you know, throughout the first and the second wave. And certainly we're seeing it now in the third and fourth waves of feminism. So that's what I mean by feminism when I'm using it in this context. Okay.

That's so helpful. Thank you. Okay. So let's go all the way back then to the beginning of the feminist movement. And I love that you take us all the way back in the book to the 1700s. And you talk about a woman named Mary Woolstonecraft. You say that she's, and by many, she's considered the first feminist. Who was she?

and why is she really considered the start of the feminist movement? So Mary Wallstonecraft was a woman that she was very much involved with a lot of the revolutionary ideas connected with the French Revolution. She and Thomas Payne actually was one of helped her out. Much of his help was quiet because he didn't want to detract from his other efforts. Certainly in the French Revolution and beyond, people think of him as sort of the first socialist, actually. He went from writing common sense, the United States, and then just kept going more and more deeper into what we would now call leftism. And actually, so she was very much influenced by him. And you can see that in her work.

I mean, he wrote a book called A Track to Defend the French Revolution called The Rights of Man, while she then wrote another piece in response to Edmund Burke, actually, who was writing against the French Revolution. But she was called The Vindication of the Rights of Man. So she's following up Thomas Payne. And then she writes her kind of magnumopus or what people know her for, the vindication of the rights of woman, which followed on that. So her work follows in many respects a lot of the intellectual threads of the French Revolution. She was very much, you know, Talley Rand was someone that she was involved with, had a relationship with, and actually I think she dedicated the book to him. So she's deep into that kind of thought.

But in the meantime, she was in Paris during the French Revolution. She had a relationship with an American man. She became pregnant. They never married, but he actually told the U.S. Embassy that she was his wife. And so she was actually spared from the guillotine because of her American affiliation. So she had this child, daughter out of wedlock and moved back to England. And then from there, she ended up meeting again, a man that she'd already met through Thomas Payne, a man named William Godwin, who was at the forefront of the anarchist movement and the end of monogamy, the free love movement.

He just thought marriage was this kind of slavery. and he was kind of known throughout England and France and, you know, in more radical circles and had kind of a celebrity because of it. So she marries him after they get pregnant also, and they have Mary Godwin later, Shelly, who wrote Frankenstein. So what she set forth was really kind of this French revolutionary, you know, crush everything, get rid of patriarchy, get what I guess you would call the hierarchy in the church and in the military and all those kinds of things. And she's trying to, you know, kind of create this equality among men and women. And so that's really the first spark, you could say, that set off the movement from there. So, yeah, she's a fascinating

character. She herself had horrible parents, really incredibly awful example of what men and women should be. And I think that that kind of comes through in her work as well. So yeah, she's a very colorful woman. She died in childbirth, actually, with when Mary Godwin was born. So that's really the end of her story at that point. And after that, of course, the story moves on of feminism with Mary Godwin Shelley and Mary Shelley's husband, Percy Bish Shelley, the poet, the well-known poet who integrated a lot of Mary's ideas. So how did her ideas then go and translate into these other things?

The other things. And really those waves. First, obviously, starting with the first wave of feminism. Yeah. Well, this is where I think it's really interesting. because I think very few people realize that feminism, these three pieces, the occult, smashing the patriarchy, and free love, all came together in the work of Percy Shelley.

In his poetry, he was trying to create what he called the Women's Revolution. So he's taking ideas from Godwin, he's taking ideas from Wallstonecraft, putting him together, adding his own. He had this, I mean, this was a barbaric man, actually. He was involved in the occult. There's this whole string of suicides of women that he had seduced, including his wife, committed suicide, his first wife. wife. So he's really an awful man, but this, what, what he saw was kind of the vision of Mary Shelley's

parents, which was, you know, this women's revolution where there's no monogamy, there's no marriage, you know, all of these things are just erased and people just live this bucolic life, you know, without any of, any reference to their human nature. And he concocks this actually, interestingly, around the same time that his wife is writing Frankenstein, he's developed, he develops this character named Sithna, who is basically the first independent woman in all of literature. She has no husband. She has no children. The one relationship she does have is to Satan.

And this woman becomes kind of the model in the minds of later feminists in the 1800s, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, you know, as the movement is moving forward. So he's the one that kind of put his stamp on it and made it, you know, gave people some one, tangible to think about in these very new and radical terms. I'm just so fascinated by this because I have been in the journalism space for quite a few years, and I've interviewed so many people that write and talk about feminism. I co-host the Problematic Women podcast. I've never heard anyone bring up the occult roots within the feminist movement.

How did you discover this? And why don't people talk about this? Yeah. No, I mean, part of it is, is it feels old and unimportant. I think that's some of it. You know, it's 1800s. Who cares? You know, and I think we also have this sense of the 1800s as being a very pristine time, you know, sort of Victorian mores and whatnot.

And, you know, I can tell you, my research sort of blew all of that out of the water in terms of prostitution, abortion, you know, all this unfaithfulness. I mean, it just was everywhere. I looked. But, you know, I had already sort of started seeing. pieces of it. There's one book that brought a lot of the elements to light for me. And I discovered it several years ago, and it's called Satanic Feminism. And it's by a Swedish professor. It's published by Oxford University Press. It's in English. And it's one of those books that when I first read it, I thought that he was against satanic feminism. And of course, the deeper I get into the footnotes and

references, I'm beginning to realize, like, no, he actually thinks this is a positive thing. So it was really fascinating to read because he goes through this period of feminism, very first wave feminism, you know, that most people don't touch and is making all of these different connections, you know, incredibly well-researched book. So from there, that provided me with something of a guideline or, you know, kind of a backbone for my research. But then I was able to dig into primary sources and secondary sources and start, you know, really piecing together the bigger picture of what all this means and, you know, the incredible damage. connected with all of it. Yeah. So obviously in our conversation, we're even using those terms, first wave, second wave, third wave of feminism. Is that the right way or do you think the most accurate way to talk about feminism? Because I think mentally we all break it down into first wave feminism good. Second wave gets a little questionable. Third wave is super radical. Should we be thinking about it differently? Yeah. I think that is actually a really interesting question. I think that, you know, On my own mind, I don't actually separate them up that way anymore, partially because in the 1800s, you know, the Acolle is playing a very active role in the 1800s.

You've got the Great Awakening in the United States. You've got seances. You also really see this connection. People, you know, electricity is happening and the telegram. And, you know, all these ways people are connecting with people in long distance fashions. And so something like a seance doesn't feel so crazy anymore. You know, they're just like these telephone poles between this life and the next. This is what they thought mediums were and didn't think anything about, you know, having a seance and those kinds of things.

So that's a fascinating part. I think when you get to the 1900s, that the dynamic changes significantly because then you're venturing into communism. You're also venturing into the influence of Nietzsche and existentialism and, you know, all of these long names that I think blur people's eyes over. But I think that it's fundamentally changed because feminism started. pairing itself easily with communism. Communism was worried about restructuring society and ending monogamy and the nuclear family. And they were atheists. So there was really just one piece, this occult piece, this atheist and occult piece that were different between the two movements. And I think that was easily overcome by the two groups, the communists and the feminists, and they

realized that they had the same ends in mind and can work together. So I think that happens. And then And second way really is just this explosion of what we now know to be the woke movement. You know, it's these Frankfurt thinkers that really injected the idea of the new left and the Frankfurt School into the feminist movement. And you see a lot of overlap. Angela Davis is a name that comes up over and over again. In fact, I just read Christopher Rufo's new book, The American Cultural Revolution, I think it's called, which is excellent. But I was really interesting to see how much Angela Davis played in his trajectory. and, you know, there's overlap, of course, with feminism as well.

So, and I think everything just spirates out of that. I don't think you have further waves from that. I think it's just all a big mess of, you know, and answering this question. I mean, maybe a better way to sort of bring all these pieces together is to say the question the early feminists were asking was, how do we make women more like men? And if we look at it through that lens, then all of a sudden sort of the last 200 years make sense. and we see, you know, they are trying to make us men. And we see that happening biologically now.

You know, we have the technology to turn our bodies into something that appears more masculine, even though it can never be done thoroughly. But, yeah, I think that kind of bridges these pieces and connects them together in ways that might be difficult to see sometimes. But that fundamental question, I think, is how you can sort of see the tweaking going on. And now even the infighting between those who are for trans and those who are against, trans. It's just the ideology is really turning against itself. Yeah. You write in the book The End of Woman that feminism, the feminist movement, their failure at its root is a misdiagnosis

of what actually ails women. How has the feminist movement misdiagnosed what is ailing women? Yeah, no, I think that's a great question. I mean, partially because we can see by the fruit of it. And I'll go back to giving you an answer in a second, but I want to just point out it hasn't made women happier. You know, we see women are more depressed. Suicides are higher. Suicide rates are higher divorce rates, even things like STDs. You know, all of these are sort of contributing to that. But the solution that feminism has offered is really one, again, back to that idea of making us more like men.

Early feminists looked at the struggles that women went through. And, you know, believe me, there were obviously enormous and awful things that women went through. most women were not that many steps away from destitution or prostitution or, you know, something horrible, starving, horrible things happening to them. So something had to be done. But their decision was to move in a way that didn't edify or didn't help women, certainly as mothers, didn't help them become better mothers, didn't help them with their relationships with men. And then, of course, over time, you gradually see this just turn into power, where feminism really becomes a question of, of,

power and control. And of course, you know, people can't live their lives that way in any kind of happy way when you're busy trying to be, you know, in control and in power over things that you're not meant to be in power of. Furthermore, being told that your husband is your enemy and that your children are your enemy. That's really what we've ended up with by asking that fundamental question. So rather than saying how do we help women, you know, bear their children or deal with difficult husbands. It's just to get rid of them. That's been really the solution is make us this independent woman that Percy Shelley drew out for us where we don't have any of these encumbering details and then we'll be really free. I think that's the message that they keep sending to us.

So then, Carrie, if the feminist movement was not the answer to the ails of women, how could women have overcome things like having limited options in their, career and the right to vote without the feminist movement. Was the feminist movement a necessary evil? Yeah. And that's another great question. I think especially in light of the fact that a lot of us feel like we can't question the feminist movement because you feel guilty. You know, I have an advanced degree and I work and, you know, all of those things that I obviously feel grateful for. But I think that the reality is, is that the feminist movement actually has taken more from us than it has given us because it has just so narrowed who we are. Moreover, I think a lot of the things that happened could have happened very

easily with like a natural law kind of reasoning. We didn't actually have to completely undo all of Western civilization in order to get these things. And, you know, look at what the cost has been. I think, you know, especially if we look at the abortion numbers, that, I think that piece alone is really the most startling because feminism is so at the heart of, you know, breaking that bond between mother and child and allowing abortion to be something that's that's conscionable. There are actually more abortions internationally than there are deaths, human deaths, or for any other cause together. So for like last year, I think there was somewhere around between 16 and 64 million deaths

internationally. The Kumacher Institute said there was something around 72 or 73 million abortions last year. So we're actually aborting more people than are actually dying from any other thing in the world, which is astronomical when you think about the ideologies of the past. You know, you think about Hitler. You think about Stalin. Mao, you know, these numbers just eviscerate anything that they had ever did on a human scale in terms of deaths. So, yeah, I think that it's another tactic and a way to sort of guilt women thinking that we need to be grateful. And so therefore, we can't really look behind the curtain and see what abortion has done to us

and what the movement has done to us. You obviously address the patriarchy in the book. Your subtitle is How Smashing the Patriarchy Has Destroyed Us. Now, most women, when they hear that term patriarchy, their mind sort of goes to the suppression of women. So how did getting rid or attempting to smash the patriarchy, how do you argue that that actually is a harm to women? Yeah.

Yeah, again, this is another hard thing. I've heard so many people define patriarchy in very, very different terms. I mean, there's a whole side story that goes with that. But I think that the reality is that what we've done is belittle men, and we have made men, you know, one of the stated goals, especially in the 70s of feminism, was to get rid of gender altogether. And a highly effective way of destroying the family and the authority of a father in the home was really by destroying the fabric of society. So Cape Millett was a big proponent of this.

You know, we need to promote homosexuality, prostitution, promiscuity, you know, all these things that were not, you know, key issues back in the 60s. And now, of course, they're very mainstream. But along with that has come the silencing of men through feminism. So again, we see this power play. But men have a natural set of gifts that are different than men. And I think that that's what has what's really happened when you set half of a population against the other half of the population.

Again, this is where marks come in because men are the, you know, by default, they're male. They are the oppressors. And by default, females are the oppressed. I mean, that's just the terms that they've been working with. The most of us are sort of getting in the ether and sort of have an expectation. That's how it works. By default, you know, they've done nothing wrong objectively, but that's, they are just wrong because they're men.

So that's, I think, the fundamental crux is when you pit the same. sex is against each other. What's really going to happen is, again, further breaking of the family, further control over society because broken people are much harder control than intact families are. So there's a whole underpinning of, you know, communist ideology, woke ideology, critical theory that's running through this that I think a lot of us, you know, we're not familiar with. It feels very foreign. And, you know, we've also been told that, you know, masculinity is toxic. So it's hard to sort of parse these things out, and I try to make a lot of that clear in the book to just help women realize, like, now, this is intentional. And this battle of the sexes has not helped us because, you know, it's creating all these women who, and maybe this is one of the saddest things, is just the women that I meet who have really followed through on the feminist ideology.

And they, you know, they get to their 40s, 50s, 60s, and they think, well, I have a lot of money and I have a good career. but I'm lonely. I, you know, my parents have died. I don't have children. You know, there's this deep desire to love and be loved and, you know, it's too late for them to have children. And what do we do at this point when we've realized, like, maybe this wasn't what I really wanted. Maybe this was not the path I wanted. So those, I think, are the really sad stories. You know, obviously God has a plan for their lives, but it's just harder to figure that out when you get to a point where you've sort of been painted into a corner by an ideology that you didn't realize was going to leave you in the situation. Well, you really do such a beautiful job, and I so appreciate that you parse out so much of this

so thoroughly in the book, The End of Woman. And you alluded to it just a woman ago, but I appreciate, and I find it really fascinating, how you do explain how the feminist movement has led to so much as far as what we're seeing now with the push of transgenderism. and that it's not a coincidence maybe that we are or where we are. And I really just thought that that was fascinating, that you explain, no, this is how we got here. And it's been a long time coming. Yeah, no, it's definitely been a long time coming.

And I think, you know, one of the trends that I've been following just as an aside over the years, too, is just even what we're seeing with the pet craze in our country. We spend $700 million on pet costumes each year. I mean, that's just an astounding amount of money. And, you know, I think what it points to in many respects is that women have this desire to mother someone or something. We even are seeing, you know, pet or plant parents now. And I think, you know, in a certain respect, it's very hopeful because it means it hasn't

been crushed out of us, you know, and not, we're not meant to mother just biologically. We're also meant to mother others psychologically and spiritually, which means we nourish them. We provide us a place of shelter. alter and protection for people to grow into the people that they're meant to be. If you're looking for a more specific definition of motherhood. But that's one of the byproducts is if you, you know, you take children and grandchildren away from women, then this is not going away. This is something that's sort of part of the core of who we are.

And that's where we're seeing it. So, yeah, between pets and the trans issue and, you know, all of this incapacity to really even define what a woman is, all of these things have been kind of on a slow burn for a long time and we're just they finally you know we're seeing the real fruits of them. The book is the end of woman, how smashing the patriarchy has destroyed us. It is out and available on August 15th, but it's available for pre-order. Now you can get it wherever books are sold.

But Carrie, thank you so much for your time. We could talk for like three hours because there's just so much that you have articulated so well in this book. So I just encourage our listeners to pick up a copy. This is a fascinating read for men and women. So for anyone in your life who's interested by this topic, this is a must read. Carrie, thank you for your time and for being with us today. Thanks so much.

It's been great to be with you. And with that, that's going to do it for today's episode. Again, if you want to pick up a copy of the end of woman, how smashing the patriarchy has destroyed us, you can find the book wherever books are sold. is out officially on August 15th, but available for pre-order now. Thanks so much for being with us today. If you've never had the chance, be sure to check out our evening show. It's right here in this same podcast feed where we bring you interviews with experts, lawmakers, and leading conservative voices. Also, take a moment to subscribe to the Daily Sittle podcast wherever you like

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