00:00:01.000Today, I'm actually so excited. I have a special guest, Rachel Wilson. She wrote the book Occult Feminism, The Secret History of Women's Liberation. This is her book right here. I started reading it and she's red pilling me even further about feminism. Like I started reading it and it's talking about how it came from like cult worship or something. Yeah. And I was like, what? So I'm really excited to dive into these topics. Rachel, welcome to the show.
00:00:27.820Well, thank you so much for having me. I'm very happy to be here. Everybody kept telling me, oh, you and Pearl have to get together. You guys would be great. So I'm very glad to be here.
00:00:37.920Yeah. Thank you for coming. And just before we start, tell the people, where can they follow you, find you, find your book?
00:00:43.060Yeah, you can find my book on Amazon. You can follow me on Twitter. It's Rach, the number four, patriarchy. Yes. I want to restore patriarchy and kind of rehabilitate the term because it has such a negative connotation that I don't think it deserves.
00:00:57.740So on Twitter at Rach for patriarchy. I also have a sub stack where I put a lot of my writing. If you are a reader, that's rwilson.substack.com. And I have a YouTube channel, a little baby brand new YouTube channel. It's just Rachel Wilson.
00:01:14.780I would love to get you on the show with some of these girls I talk to. Let me tell you, she's a superhero too. You have five kids?
00:01:23.580Five. You're like, that's beautiful. I grew up, I have nine siblings, but it's kind of a weird story. I grew up with six. So in the house I had six. And I will say five is like the perfect number because it's big and everyone fits in the car barely.
00:01:39.560Yeah. It's not too crazy. Six, you start having to like, I don't know, get the travel bus. Yeah. You had to switch to a bus. That's what happened. We had to go on the minivan to the bus.
00:01:59.220And I want you to red pill me even further. Okay. This is what I want. So from what I understand, feminism, did it start with women getting the right to vote or was it before that?
00:02:10.560It was before that. So in the book, I take three chapters to kind of explain the ancient origins of the ideas, philosophies, and the like religious underpinnings of feminist ideology.
00:02:23.740And then I kind of start with like the French Revolution, the revolutionary period is really when it started to kick off.
00:02:33.100Most people do think that feminism was like either during the 1920s with suffrage or in the 60s with the sexual revolution, but it goes back quite a lot further than that, actually.
00:02:44.520So I do take some time in the book to explain where it came from and how it got going prior to 1920s.
00:02:52.180Okay. So when, when did it start? 1800, 1850?
00:02:57.060I'd say like late 1700s is when you could really call it a political movement.
00:03:06.400Mary Wollstonecraft was probably the first like popular feminist and she was hanging out with American and French revolutionaries in like the 1760s, 1770s.
00:03:18.580So she was somebody who kind of forced her way.
00:03:23.000She kind of pushed her way into intellectual male circles because she was having some affairs with a lot of the prominent revolutionary writers of the time,
00:03:32.680like Thomas Paine and some of the French revolutionaries.
00:03:36.480And she, she wrote like the first tract or like a political tract about what she thought were like the natural rights of women.
00:03:45.600And this all came from the enlightenment and this egalitarian idea of like equality, humanitarianism.
00:03:53.740And so one of the first things you would think of if you're coming from that kind of a worldview is like gender equality.
00:04:00.060So this was a time where we were starting to see a shift towards more of a material and biological worldview where some of these women started making the argument that,
00:04:11.840hey, just because I'm a woman doesn't necessarily mean that I can't do things men can do intellectually.
00:04:18.220And, and we should be, you know, this is the birth of nation states and voting rights and things like that.
00:04:24.380So right off the gate, you had some women who wanted that, but they were definitely not popular with other women and they weren't even popular with other men except the other like really radical left-wing revolutionary types.
00:04:39.020Okay. So they started by like infiltrating these, these male academic circles and talking about, so what did she say were the natural like rights of women?
00:04:46.860It's, it was pretty much the same stuff we're hearing now where it's like, I should have a right to self-determination.
00:04:53.660I should be able to make my own money. I should be able to, um, there was always an emphasis on sexual freedom and reproductive freedom, even back then.
00:05:07.240Yeah. And I think the reason is because Wollstonecraft, so she tried to have a three-way, uh, with a prominent writer of her time, whose wife was not having it.
00:05:16.900And kind of got her booted out of proper English society for a while, and she had a child out of wedlock.
00:05:23.860Um, she was doing things during that time that, although you might think like when you would do your, um, man on the street interviews where you're asking people their opinion.
00:05:34.660I mean, most people's idea of feminism is okay. Women have been oppressed through all of history.
00:05:40.180They weren't allowed to do anything and they were beaten and raped legally.
00:05:44.260And life was just terrible for women. And they were chained to a stove and forced to give birth and cook meals.
00:05:49.620And that's all they could do. And, you know, this very grim, horrific idea of what life was like for women until a hundred years before now.
00:05:59.220And really that's not the case at all. And I take some time in the book also to outline that Wollstonecraft herself was making a writing, uh, living, writing, traveling, um, doing political protests, doing like, you know, revolutionary activities.
00:06:15.220She was actually able to make herself a living. She had a child out of wedlock. Nobody threw her in jail. Nobody stoned her to death.
00:06:22.220Um, she was doing a lot of things that you would probably think would, you know, get her destroyed by the patriarchy, but she only got some mild pushback really socially.
00:06:33.220Um, women weren't very interested in, you know, being political and, uh, participating in that part of life.
00:06:40.220They were pretty happy with where they were. And this is a common theme in these old feminist writings that they are continually disappointed that most women don't seem interested in feminism.
00:06:51.220Um, so they had to kind of find ways to mainstream it and make it more appealing.
00:06:56.220And so they would use a lot of the things they do now, like fashion and literature and, and, uh, you know, propaganda primarily. So really, so you're telling me in the 1700s, a girl was free to work and make a living. And she, there was no.
00:07:11.220No. Yeah. Common was it, you know, it wasn't super common, but not because it wasn't allowed. It wasn't common because most women did at that time want to get married and have families and have security.
00:07:25.220And this is just prior to the industrial revolution really kicking off. So, um, it wasn't super common, but certainly in, in the West, when we're going through the revolutionary period, there were a lot of women who participated in different, you know, revolutionary activities.
00:07:41.220And they tended to not get their heads cut off as often as men get thrown in prison as often as men.
00:07:47.220So I think they were also useful to the male left-wing revolutionaries because they could put a woman or two out there and, you know, you're not going to get the same brutality. They, they, you know, they might get slightly admonished or chastised socially, but they weren't going to get, you know, beheaded or thrown in prison as quickly as men.
00:08:06.220So I think it was kind of a sneaky way, like a male feminist trickery kind of way to get their political ideas to the forefront and not have to risk their own hides as much.
00:08:17.220So I think that was the other reason some of them thought, oh yeah, let's, let's get some women in here doing some of this stuff. Right.
00:08:24.220And you mentioned too, that it was tied into witchcraft.
00:08:29.220And ancient religions, religions, goddess, like what, what is that?
00:08:33.220Yeah. So if you think about what feminism is, feminists love to say that feminism is about equality and opportunity and choice for women, but it's not.
00:08:43.220I think you, you have figured that out.
00:08:45.220And a lot of people are figuring that out and it never was.
00:08:48.220It's always been, you had Christianity, which is a patriarchal religion and Christian society is patriarchal.
00:08:56.220Now that doesn't mean abuse and oppression of women by men.
00:09:00.220Patriarchy means the men kind of run things.
00:09:03.220They're in charge of governance and things like that.
00:09:06.220And that women are provided for and protected.