Has this been written about before and we've just missed it?

Well, yeah.

Janice Fiamengo has written about it extensively.

But most people – again, most people have just been very happy and content with the narrative.

They like the idea of feminism.

We know how to respond to it.

I'm glad my wife can vote.

Are you saying that those – what do you say to a woman who really hasn't thought deeply about the concept of feminism but just generally feels like, yes, I do think women are freer than they were 50 years ago or something like that? What's your response to that?

Mm

... it's, um, a, a, a loving sacrifice and gift.

W- anyway, but Wollstonecraft sort of means it more like it's just a life hack.

Um, you know, her mother was famous for saying, "Oh, a little patience and all this will be over." Um, and it, you know, this is a woman who was beat by her husband, who was a drunk, and, you know, it was just this awful life, and that was one of the last things that I think she said to Mary Wollstonecraft.

So it's, you know, it's no wonder that she's th- was this broken woman who hated men [laughs] um, when she had this awful father.

Um, but I, I think that's, you know, without getting too deep into the weeds of all this, I think that's an important thing to understand.

But the other important thing to understand too is just to see how broken most of these feminist women were.

Mm-hmm

So I'd love if you wouldn't mind introducing it for my friends here.

Yeah, no, it's not going to be out until August of 2023.

I'm really excited about it.

I wrote the book, The Anti-Mary Exposed, Rescuing the Culture from Toxic Femininity.

And that book only really went back to the 1960s.

It didn't go back to the first wave of feminism at all.

So a lot of people had asked me about it.

Oh gosh, really?

Can you please share with us the impact that has had on women across the world?

Yeah.

Well, I think the fundamental thing that we have to understand, particularly as Catholics, is that feminist anthropology is not built on the Gospels.

This is not Genesis 1.

What we are not talking about is this idea that male and female are made in the image and likeness of God, that we have equal dignity, although we're different and we're complementary.

This is not, you know, serve one another and be fruitful and multiply.

This is a very different anthropology that was introduced by feminism back in the 1790s by Mary Wollstonecraft.

I invite you to speak to that, the kind of damage that that's done to women across the world.

Well-

No, it's, uh, it, I mean, that's kind of the amazing thing is that, like, they can, can sow all of this awfulness, and then they're sort of surprised that awfulness has resulted from, [laughs] from it.

So, uh, yeah, it's, it's really a mess, but I, I think once you sort of start...

A- and actually, the amazing thing is that it's the older women who have kind of figured out what's going on, um, but they keep selling it and, and you see this.

There was an article in the New Statesman that was done back in April that was talking about some- something like, um, meet the new angry single women or, or something like that.

Like, it's the fullness of this idea of, you know, the feminism has been inculcating.

Um, you know, it's now called hetero pessimism, where women just don't think they'll get married.

in this fight, uh, in this fight for or in this, uh, manner or this, this part- particular discussion for quite some time.

do you explain that?

How do we deal with that? What feels like a stumbling block? I actually have a whole chapter on this.

I think it's a really important piece for people to understand.

The first thing is John Paul II used the word feminism three times in his pontificate.

that we know of and, you know, he was Pope for 26 years.

So that doesn't bode well for, you know, a robust endorsement of something.

But the other thing that's really important is to, you know, it goes back to the anthropological level.

but yeah and what some of them wanted was to get rid of marriage totally and

How did pro-life feminism fundamentally misunderstand feminism itself?

Hmm.

Well, I think that, uh, from the beginning, there was this effort to try to make pro-life feminism look like it was to be the work of John Paul II.

John Paul II wrote extensively about the role of women and, and wrote beautifully, and he used that language, we, we know, three times in his 26-year pontificate, so it wasn't something that he was deeply committed to, but he used it enough that that's really what spawned the idea, I think.

But the problem is, is that there was this deep confusion about what it is that feminism actually means, and I think, you know, if you distill feminism down to the, the origins, back to what Mary Wollstonecraft and, and the later feminists meant by it, you get stuck in this idea of men are contemptible and women need to become just like them, and I think that that's really where the, the gear grinding happens because that's not who man and woman are.

The, in con- [chuckles] especially in contrast to Genesis 1, where you have this understanding of male and female as made in the image and likeness of God, and they're meant to be complementary, and they're meant to be fruitful and to multiply and to serve one another.

So you can see very easily it's just too easy to fall off the tracks when you're trying to project a new idea-But so many people have absorbed the old idea, and I think this is really what, you know, what the problem has been.

A second error is that she lies about feminism having no scientific data to back up its movement." How do you respond?

So how can this be? How can this be that both sides of that equation would be having the same complaints that seems kind of odd to me

yeah no i think that that's a huge question one of the things that i think is really important is to just kind of define our terms like you said um in terms of what i actually mean by this so i'm looking at the movement from really the very beginning i started in the 1790s with mary wollstonecraft i go through The 1800s and then where you see this development, but most people think of it sort of just the suffrage movement.

There are actually some really very deeply negative things there that we can get into, but most people don't know what those are.

I think feminism has done an amazing job of kind of glossing over history and rewriting itself.

And making it look like feminism has just been about voting and education and jobs for women.

That was really just a movement that was focused on what was good for women.

But at the heart of it, you actually see there's some really deep issues with feminism.

yeah.

But I think most of us would say, well, it probably started with the suffragettes, right? And so are you saying that the suffragettes were bad? Was it a bad movement to get women to vote?

Yeah, no, I think that's a great place to start because that's exactly where I started when I was looking at this.

In 2018, I wrote the book, The Anti-Mary Exposed, and I only went back to the beginning of the first, or sorry, the second wave of feminism in that book.

And I actually even say in that book that I think the roots of the first wave were good, because I just didn't know.

I was just really relying on scholars and different people that have been asserting this for so long, and I just had no idea.

And then when I went to go write the follow-up book, which was The End of Woman, which came out in 2023, I wrote that book because there were so many people that said, can you write a book like The Anti-Mary Exposed, but one that is for Protestants or secular people that can absorb religion? the content in a different format.

So in that book, I, you know, I actually, I allotted myself two days to do research on the first wave.

You talk about feminism as a shadow church.

Is that not, is not possible to work?

Well, so John Paul II talked about, he used the word feminism three times that we know of in his 26-year pontificate.

So it was hardly, you know, this resounding endorsement of feminism.

He has this really beautiful encyclical called Mulieris Dignitatem, and he doesn't use the word feminism even once in that document.

Um, so I think that if you, and y- if you also look at his work, and you contrast it to what the feminists have done, it's, it's totally opposite, and it's actually a really beautiful and compelling blueprint that we could use for womanhood.

The problem is, though, that a lot of the Catholic feminists have now tried to fuse John Paul II's work with first-wave feminists, so women like Mary Wollstonecraft, Susan B. Anthony, um, some of the more colorful women that were clearly not Christian.

Um, in fact, many were deeply involved in the occult or spiritualism.

Today, Hawkins was talking about this pill, but that you ought to shift your kind of gun sights if you want to do something real, that you go after and take down feminism? Is that your point?