Dr. Carrie Gress | The Dr. J Show
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse of the Ruth Institute sits down with Catholic philosopher and bestselling author Dr. Carrie Gress to discuss her powerful new book, Something Wicked: Why Feminism Can’t Be Fused with Christianity (Sophia Institute Press, 2026).
SPECIAL LINK: Ruth Institute – Recovering from Feminism (FREE Resource): https://ruthinstitute.org/recovering-from-feminism/
Dr. Gress and Dr. Morse explore how feminism functions as a “shadow church” — mimicking Christianity’s structure while replacing faith, hope, and love with contempt, rage, and envy.
They trace the movement’s occult roots, its Marxist DNA, its manipulation of women’s emotions going back to the 1890s, and why corporate America has always been its silent ally.
Topics covered:
— Why feminism and Christianity have fundamentally incompatible DNA
— The shadow church model: contempt, rage & envy vs. faith, hope & love
— The occult involvement of early suffragette leaders (Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Victoria Woodhull)
— Feminism’s Marxist roots and the “perpetual enemy” strategy
— Why corporate America loves feminism
— John Paul II and the “Catholic feminism” trap
— The Virgin Mary as the true model of womanhood
— Dr. Hannah Spier’s work on feminist psychology and self-destructive life scripts
LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
Ruth Institute – Recovering from Feminism (FREE Resource): https://ruthinstitute.org/recovering-from-feminism/
Theology of Home (blog & website): https://theologyofhome.com/
Theology of Home Substack: https://theologyofhome.substack.com/
Dr. Carrie Gress personal website: https://www.carriegress.com/
📚 Dr. Carrie Gress’s Books:
Something Wicked: Why Feminism Can’t Be Fused with Christianity (Sophia Institute Press, 2026)
The End of Woman (Regnery, 2023)
The Anti-Mary Exposed (TAN Books, 2018)
Theology of Home series (TAN Books)
🌐 Learn more about the Ruth Institute: https://ruthinstitute.org
00:00:00 – Teaser: The Feminist Diagnosis Is Wrong
00:01:05 – Welcome & Introducing Dr. Carrie Gress
00:01:50 – Why She Wrote “Something Wicked” — Her 11th Book
00:05:26 – Feminism as a Shadow Church
00:06:09 – Contempt, Rage & Envy: Feminism’s Counterfeit Virtues
00:08:08 – Why Dr. Morse Avoided the “Anti-Feminist” Label
00:11:52 – Introducing the Recovering from Feminism Resource
00:14:37 – Personal Confessions: Recovering from Feminist Conditioning
00:18:39 – Mary vs. the Feminist Icon: Humility vs. Pride
00:22:07 – Women as Peacemakers: The Neurological Case
00:28:59 – Feminism Needs an Enemy: The Patriarchy as Perpetual Scapegoat
00:29:50 – Feminism & Marxism: The Same Blueprint
00:34:43 – Corporate America’s Love Affair with Feminism
00:37:13 – The Occult Roots of Early Feminism
00:41:46 – Victoria Woodhull & the Corruption of 19th Century New York
00:44:11 – Rewriting Suffragette History
00:45:10 – The 1947 Book That Saw It All Coming
00:49:59 – Feminism Can’t Deliver the Goods
00:50:51 – What Is Feminism? The Definition Problem
00:53:10 – John Paul II & the “Catholic Feminism” Trap
01:01:58 – The Philosophers Who Abandoned Their Families
01:04:30 – How Enlightenment Philosophy Turned Women into Property
01:05:12 – Hannah More: The Better Alternative Nobody Talks About
01:09:19 – Dr. Hannah Speer & the Psychology of Self-Destruction
01:11:38 – The Andrew Tate Trap: A Feminist Ideological Trick
01:14:37 – The Crucial First Three Years: Erika Commissar’s Work
01:17:17 – The Biggest Lie of Feminism: Two Full-Time Jobs
01:19:28 – The Real Engine Behind Abortion
01:20:06 – Theology of Home & Carrie’s Other Work
01:22:20 – Where to Find Dr. Carrie Gress
RecoveringFromFeminism #CarrieGress #DrJShow #RuthInstitute #CatholicWomen #Feminism #ShadowChurch #SexualRevolution #ProLife #TraditionalWomen #CatholicFaith #WomensIssues #Womanhood #FeminismDebunked #MarxistFeminism #VirginMary #AntiMary #FeminismAndChristianity
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Transcript
(Please note the transcript is auto-generated and likely contains errors)
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (00:00.046)
And so what’s happening to us is because this diagnosis is incorrect and the solution is incorrect, we’re not getting better, we’re getting worse.
Carrie Gress (00:09.292)
Feminist movement is a movement that has essentially tried to turn women into a kind of male promising us happiness in terms of male lifestyle. That everybody says, well, you must be like Andrew Tate if somehow you don’t believe it.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (00:23.416)
Look at, Carrie, look at, this is a standard ideological trick. It doesn’t even matter what the ideology is. What they do is they want to put you in the same picture with the picture of Hitler or the KKK or something like that. I mean, that’s how, that’s how they operate.
Carrie Gress (00:36.066)
where women are being destroyed because they’re being told that all of their feminine gifts need to be replaced by masculine gifts. And just what a destruction this is going to have on the family and on the church and on faith. And so he saw all of these things very, very early.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (00:52.814)
The Marxist feminists who are all in favor of women having jobs in big corporations, it’s like that has always been a little…
Carrie Gress (01:00.95)
Yeah. Odd.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (01:02.35)
A little odd. Hi everyone. I’m Dr. Jennifer Robach-Morse for the Ruth Institute, and I just recorded a very fascinating interview with my friend, Keri Grasse, author of this book, Something Wicked, about feminism, why feminism can’t be fused with Christianity. I’m telling you, that conversation went all over the place. I can’t wait for you to see it and to hear what you have to say about our conversation. Thanks for watching. Welcome to the Dr. J Show.
Carrie Gress (01:31.042)
Thank you. It’s great to be here with you.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (01:33.58)
Yes, we’ve talked several times about different books of yours and your latest book is called Something Wicked Why Feminism Can’t Be Fused with Christianity. This book has generated a lot of conversation pro and con. I’ve seen you on interviews. I read reviews and commentary and so on. So why don’t you tell us what are the main points of this book? What do you think are the key takeaways for people in why you wrote an 11th book on top of the 10 books you’ve already written?
Carrie Gress (02:00.526)
Exactly. Why did we need this book? The reason I wrote this book was because I felt like there was still an open question about feminism. I think in my previous books, certainly in my book, The Anti-American Exposed, which came out in 2018, so very early in the conversation about feminism. And then my next book on feminism called The End of Women that came out in 2023, I still left the door open for there to be some way to allow feminism to be
restored or somehow improved upon in a way by fusing with Christianity. And I think that over time and certainly through a lot of research, I finally realized that these are two things that have very different DNA. They come from different places and they’re diametrically opposed to one another. And so that was one of the reasons why I just felt like that question needed to be answered because I’m seeing a lot of damage certainly being done.
in Christian communities, among Catholics, and people just being really confused about it. And we know that our Lord is not one who’s going to sow confusion, but that there really is truth and there’s something worth pursuing. And I think that the issue of womanhood and certainly as the way in which it’s been formed by feminism has led to a lot of confusion. And so this book was really just a way to, how do we finally say this in a way that people can really understand?
I’m happy to dive in deeper into the outline of the book, but really looking at it in terms of the way in which feminism has actually mimicked Christianity, which makes it very hard to sort of expunge from our lives because it has all these kind of tentacles that re-enact the way in which we think, we behave, we believe, we act. And I think that’s why it’s so damaging and dangerous because it does have this capacity like a religion to sort of infiltrate.
our lives and allow us to be led by it instead of obviously being led by God.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (03:57.582)
Do you know a number of things that I noticed in reading your book? Throughout the book and throughout just watching the conversation around your book, a phenomenon I’ve noticed over the years in dealing with the sexual revolution is that a lot of times people are using the same vocabulary, but they are not using the same dictionary. So they’re saying the same words, but people, but there’s an ambiguity in what each person means. One person means one thing, the other person means another thing.
And sometimes the ambiguity I think is purposeful. think there are cases where I’m confident I can point to, you know, where people are deliberately being unclear so that they can kind of steer something through. But I think the ambiguity overall, this problem of what does the word really mean permeates a whole lot of these different conversations. Would you comment on that?
Carrie Gress (04:48.408)
So part of the reason why I was very purposeful about trying to understand the definition of what feminism is, over almost three centuries, it goes back to the 1790s and what kind of pattern has been established and how do we really speak of it as an ideology and as a movement overall? And of course, different individuals are going to have different understandings of what they mean by it. Obviously, I don’t have to…
address what everyone means by feminism. also don’t have to address all of the different movements, but what I was trying to address was the bigger, broader arc of the movement. so in the book, I focus on this idea of understanding that feminism as a shadow church and each of the pieces that I was coming up with were part of the definition. So for example, one of the main pieces of feminism is this idea of female autonomy, that we don’t need our husbands, that we don’t
Our children are not essential to us, our fertility is not essential to us, even our body in a certain respect as female is not essential to us. So that was one of the starting place. And that’s really what I saw was this idol that feminism has really been promoting. And so from there it kind of goes on into even the theological virtues. Christianity has faith, hope and love. Feminism has contempt, rage and envy.
And this was one of the really the most surprising pieces that I discovered in my research because I saw very clearly starting back in the 1890s that you have this group of socialists that realized the women are a lot more politically active and engageable if they’re angry. And so that was their intention was to try to intentionally make women angry. And it started off this idea of consciousness raising that became really popular in the 1970s.
This goes all the way back to the 1890s, when it was this effort to upset women, not to heal them, not to bring them a resolution to their problems, but to make them angry and then also bring them together with other women so that then they would be angry about the problems other women had.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (06:58.882)
So this is an early version of the algorithm prompting people and rewarding people for rage, right? Before Facebook, this was going on already.
Carrie Gress (07:10.166)
already going on, very interesting. If you look at women today, this is part and parcel of it, is rage, contempt, and envy. So anyway, I think it’s very important to obviously to define your terms. just think that feminism has a very broad definition. It has all these kind of moving parts, and that’s why the idea of understanding the shadow church and how it mimics Christianity, especially Catholic Christianity, is a really
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (07:12.107)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Carrie Gress (07:39.956)
helpful way to sort of mentally structure it in our minds in terms of what the pieces are overall.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (07:46.414)
And I would like to say that over the years, I’ve taken kind of a different approach from what you’ve taken, okay? Because my concerns have been different. My concerns have been with children and the stability of marriage and therefore, you know, a sexual culture that respects the fact that sex makes babies and kids need their parents and therefore that places limitations on adult behavior. So I’m out there against the whole sexual revolution basically.
And early on, Carrie, I made a decision to not attack feminism directly. And here’s the reason why. Whenever I would do that, I would get pushback saying, you’re against women having jobs. You’re against women having credit cards and this type of stuff. And I realized I don’t want that. I’m not interested in that discussion. I’m interested in a different set of issues. And so I would just I didn’t position myself as an anti-feminist or a feminist. just OK, I make people mad already with.
a lot of things I talk about, right? I don’t need to stir up another horn, isn’t it? But I have been kind of hanging back from the conversation about feminism and what it means. But I do think that it’s an ideology and it has traits in common with all the other destructive ideologies that we see, know, with Marxism and so on. You can go through and kind of look at the different traits that have to do with ideology.
So anyway, I just wanted to put that on the table, that.
Carrie Gress (09:14.86)
like to build on that because I think that’s really a fascinating point. I didn’t start off in any way thinking that I was going to be an anti-feminist. In fact, I didn’t even know what the term was until after my book came out in 2023. I’d never thought about it. But and even in my book, The Anti-Ammunitary Exposed, I actually talked about what I thought was the first wave. I thought the first wave was good because this is what I had heard from other conservatives, that the first wave was
really good and a pure kind of feminism that we could go back to. So I think I make a remark in that book about it. So for me, this was not something that I thought I’d like to take on this fight. One of the things that’s fascinating to me, though, is exactly the point that you made is feminism has this set of guardrails that are intentionally set up just to keep it from being scrutinized with any kind of care. So exactly that point, like, you don’t want women to work or you don’t
want women to flourish. Feminism is really just about what’s good for women. I hear all the time that I shouldn’t be allowed to comment on it because I have a PhD and it’s because of feminism that I have it. So it’s very much mommy dearest approach to feminism. You cannot scrutinize it in any way, shape or form if somehow you’ve benefited from it. Even though the same people that say that would also not allow you to hold that position of you were talking about, say, the Catholic Church. You can’t.
that we have to be allowed to be able to question any kind of organization, but particularly one that is ideological, because we know that that’s a sign of unhealth, is if you can’t question something, you can’t ask. So I think this is one of the reasons, another reason that has come up recently where I’ve been paying attention to just the mechanics of feminism, how it keeps us really trapped in the arguments in such a way that it doesn’t have
my scrutiny and your point is a great exhibit A of exactly how it’s done. Nobody wants to really be in the fight with women. People don’t like fighting and arguing with women, and obviously there are certain people that have proclivities towards it to a certain degree. But when you get deep enough, there’s a kind of exhaustion that sets in. And so you’ve got to pick your battles and feminism doesn’t seem like it should be the biggest one. yet,
Carrie Gress (11:39.34)
I think because of the fact that we’ve allowed it to become overgrown because we haven’t kept it in check with questions and with scrutiny, that’s one of the reasons why it really is such a huge problem.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (11:52.014)
I would like to take this opportunity to tell the Ruth Institute followers that we’re creating a new resource that is free, that people can get from us just by going to the link below. Carrie, we’re calling it recovering from feminism. And basically it’s going to be a one sheet question and answer, almost like an examination of conscience for people to use for themselves. This is nothing political. This is for you to look at it go, have I really been nagging my husband about equality all day long?
You know, have I really been generous with people? Am I willing to give people praise? Am I picking fights unnecessarily? You know, there’s a whole list of stuff like that. There’s stuff about our sexual behavior because feminism has invited a lot of behavior that people turn out to regret. There are a lot of women who are not feminists. Okay, a lot of women who are not feminists. And the question is where are they going to end up? And I hope that they can.
use this resource that we’ve created, Recovering from Feminism, to choose a path of virtue and self-awareness and self-understanding. So I thank you for bringing these things up because people have done a lot of harm. There’s a lot of interior upset that the whole feminist genre, is genre the right word? The whole idiom, speaking in the feminist idiom has that tendency to be disturbed.
Carrie Gress (13:17.102)
I think to your point, even if those of us who don’t call ourselves feminists, the culture has been so saturated by it that I think every single one of us is recovering from it in one way or another because it has, the way I grew up, the way you grew up, it was just part and parcel of our education. was just expected that we were always going to be in this competition with the boys. that was really held up as a real goal. And I think that
trying to get a sense of, you know, what really is feminism? What really is us? What really is the Christian path? And, how do we navigate all of these things given? So I think it sounds like a fantastic idea. I’m really glad that you could.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (14:00.494)
Yeah, and you know, feminism offers us a vision of what it means to be a woman and what it means to be a good woman, what we should seek in a spouse, what we should seek in a husband, how we should treat each other, and you know, just a whole lot of other things. I’m going to go on the record here and announce to everybody how old I am, okay? All my critics, I am actually old. I was born in 1953. And Carrie, I’m telling you, it took me years.
I was probably in my 50s before I really let myself know it is a pleasure to feed people. Preparing food for people and seeing people enjoy their food is like, why did it take me so long to figure that out? You know, and how enjoyable that is. And more recently, I figured out that responding to my husband’s masculinity is really a turn on. OK, girls, it is a turn on.
to lean into your husband’s mail mess, right? I mean, I’m like, my husband’s one of these guys who fixes stuff, know? Other men borrow tools from him, you he’s that kind of guy. And he’s doing something on the refrigerator, he’s down on his hands and knees, and I’m looking at him like, I’m getting off on the back of his neck. I mean, this guy is so cool, and he’s my guy, whoa! know, it’s like, why did it take me till I’m 70 to figure this out?
Carrie Gress (15:24.234)
it’s spherical. I love it.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (15:26.19)
Sorry, sorry, sorry. Well, anyway, maybe you have experiences like that too, where you, the net result is a feeling a little bit cheated. You know, all those years I could have been enjoying flower arranging instead of being afraid of it somehow, you know?
Carrie Gress (15:42.998)
looking down on it too. think that’s the other piece, just sort of belittling it, like thinking, that’s just for women who aren’t smart enough to do anything else. And that was actually a talking point. I this is what came about in the early 1900s was that talking point that caring for children was just for women who didn’t have enough education to do anything else. So yeah, I think that’s the real tragedy is that all of that we know as women
that our relationships are so important and having deep relationships. But the path that feminism offers is not really a route to making them richer. It’s actually a very shallow place with very shallow roots. So you don’t learn how to understand other people, to look them in the eye, really care for them in a way that we need to care for others around us as we’re called to do. And instead it’s very self
focused and self-centered. so it’s obviously important to really learn how to balance that out and understand that we really are made to bring life to others, whether it’s biologically as children or in feeding people and nurturing them and listening to them, all of those kinds of elements that women have typically done in the past that we’ve kind of tossed aside because we just thought they were unimportant. Now we’re really seeing how important they are, especially the men.
illness issue, the loneliness issue, certainly the bristers, all of those those pieces are really
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (17:13.23)
And to be receiving to another, to be hospitable in this way that we’re talking about, it doesn’t make you a doormat. And your husband, normally constituted men, do not think you’re a doormat. They don’t think less of you. They’re not going to push you around because you’re being nice. Some guys, yeah, but on the whole, no.
No, no. Do you know, Carrie, I want to go back to your earlier books, though, because I remember I interviewed you on the anti-Mary. And I remember you said something in that book. I’m pretty sure it was anti-Mary. You’ve got a bunch of books out there. But at some point, you made the observation that everything that pre-modern, early and even early modern people had admired in women would be represented by the Virgin Mary.
and that the mother of God was the icon of womanhood. And every virtue attributed to Mary, feminism has stood on its head. So instead of humility, we have pride and self-aggrandizement. Instead of modesty, we have being sex positive, and so on down the line. I’d like you to comment on that, because that point changed my life, you know, to really think about that.
catastrophic consequences of ditching the Virgin Mary, you know, as an important icon, right? Go ahead.
Carrie Gress (18:41.302)
Yeah, no, they’re big. And I think this is one of the things that is hard, especially given the culture. Protestants obviously don’t look at the Our Lady in the same way that Catholics do. But I think that she’s obviously biblical. She’s obviously an important figure as Jesus’s mother. We also know that historically, even National Geographic has called her the most influential woman in all of history. There’s no more art, music.
poetry battles have been fought for her. It’s amazing the influence that she’s had on our culture, history, churches. Think of all the Gothic churches in Western Europe. So that was actually where the idea came from, was I was thinking about her as the most powerful woman in all of human history. And then I was contrasting her. was at the time when Hillary Clinton was running for president. And I realized if Clinton had won, she would have become the most powerful woman.
in the world at that point. And I just saw these dress in the opposite kinds of characteristics. And then I started looking broader, you know, the elite women in the culture. And it wasn’t just a one off, you know, there was recognizably a pattern that was established by elite women. And so that was really where I started to notice it. But I think, you know, one of the things that’s really
interesting, going beyond the political is just even looking at the gifts that women have. one place you can find them best articulated is in poetry and in song lyrics that men have written throughout the millennia about what it is that they love about women. And it’s never that you’re arguing with me, you’re nagging me about not doing something or…
Because you’re in a power suit, know, it’s always there’s something much more soulful about what it is that men love about women and I reason you might know more about this, but I recently heard that women actually on a neurological level have the capacity to sort of reset the nervous system of men that because a you woman who is grounded and ordered and soulful Because of her own peacefulness. She has the capacity to reset a male’s
Carrie Gress (20:59.052)
nervous system and apparently can’t be really done anywhere else as easily as having a good woman around them. And so it’s really interesting to think about like the damage that we see in the culture because if women are restless, then as a result, men are going to be restless as well, even if there’s not arguing going on. Right. Know that there’s issues with the pill and pheromones and all of those kinds of pieces that they roll.
But I think it’s one of those things that the things that we’ve been told are most life-giving, precious, and important about women by feminism are not really the same things that actually do that, that really transform. I think that this is where you can get back to the Virgin Mary instead of just thinking of her sort of some saccharine statue or something very removed. You really understand her as this model of
of Christianity, you know, do whatever he tells you, really understand, you know, having this incredible depth and awareness and understanding as the mother of God. You know, those things are not to be taken lightly. And so anyway, and this is why both men and women love her because of the depth of character that she has. you know, even the battles that have been fought in her name, even Christopher Columbus, when he did his search for
the Indy, what he thought was India. He named a number of islands after her. And at one point he and his crew were threatened by a storm. And they basically made an agreement with our lady that if they survived, they would do this pilgrimage to what is the Our Lady of Guadalupe in Spain. There’s another image, miraculous image there that was found during the Reconquista.
Sure enough, they land to this hero’s welcome and they walk straight to this pilgrimage site to venerate Our Lady because they survived this brutal storm in the middle of the Atlantic on the way back to Spain.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (23:05.224)
And he named his boat after her. The Santa Maria. The Santa Maria, please. That was the name of his boat, you know? He named the ship after her.
Yeah, I would like to steer this conversation to a different topic we haven’t covered. that is it’s germane, I think, to your some of your disputes with your critics. And that is something that has puzzled me for a long time is that there’s this idea that patriarchy is so strong and men have been oppressing all women at all times. You know, if that’s true, how is it that feminism became so powerful? How is it that we have a feminist, basically feminist outposts at every university?
in America and the women’s studies departments across America and the colleges all over the place, they are not some kind of Christian feminism. They are not Edith Stein. They are not the Virgin Mary. They are Kate Millett, radical feminism. Women did not have the power to do that. Men did that. Some men wanted to do that for some reason.
I have thought about this. I’ve asked a number of people. asked Kate Millett’s sister, Mallory, when I interviewed her, what do you think? Why did they do that? Who put your sister on the cover of Time magazine? Who thought that was a good idea? I would just like to open the discussion and get your thoughts about why you think this form of female advocacy took over. Because a lot of people advocating for women, there were other women who could have been selected.
to fill that role. What do you think about this, Carrie?
Carrie Gress (24:41.782)
Yeah, no, I think that’s a great question. I would love to hear what you think about it as well. One of the pieces that’s really fascinating to me is feminism has kind of these three tenets that started in the early 1800s. They were articulated first by Percy B. Shelley in one of his poems. He was the son-in-law of Mary Wollstonecraft, so he knew her work and called her work the female revolution. then he, so he took from her kind of this idea of contempt for men that
that was very evident in her work. He also took from his father-in-law, who was William Godwin, this idea of getting rid of marriage, of monogamy. So he wanted free love, he wanted contempt for men, and then he added his own little element to it, which was the occult. And this is all of these pieces he put together in this woman named Sithna, who was in one of his poems. And so this woman became kind of this icon in the early 1800s and then ended up
really influencing the Theosophy movement as well as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and was very influential. Because this is a woman without a husband, she didn’t subscribe to any kind of Christian mores and then she also had this kind of contempt for men. Now all that sounds
Carrie Gress (26:03.746)
Yeah, who was created by.
And so then what’s fascinating though is if you look at these three pieces, they didn’t go away. We still have them today and you just have to use different language. So the idea is that women have contempt for men still, of course, that were promiscuous. So free that free love idea. And then we’re involved in the occult. So if you look at sort of the college culture, those three elements are still there. Each one of them actually corresponds.
with a breaking of a kind of relationship with one of the members of the Trinity. So you have Father, Son, Holy Spirit. So if you have contempt for men, then you’re not going to have, it’s not going to be easy for you to have reverence for God the Father. If you have, if you’re promiscuous, it’s going to be very hard to honor your body as the temple of the Holy Spirit. And then if you’re involved in the occult, you’re definitely threatening the authority of Christ. Anyway, why do I bring all that up? Because I think
We need to understand, first of all, that this is not a Christian movement. And it’s very evident from the early 1800s that women like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were very much, they believed that Christianity was a tool used by men to enslave women. And they considered themselves in this incredibly audacious way to be slaves, just like the slaves were in the South and in England.
you know, shackled and whatnot. And, you know, it’s pretty amazing too when you realize that these are all very high class women who were not suffering financially or otherwise. But anyway, so this is the claim. And because of that, they need like the boogeyman. They need the man that they need something to really be against that’s gonna animate women. And of course you go back to this idea of…
Carrie Gress (27:54.488)
consciousness raising and making women angry. Well, who’s always there is men. And certainly we know that they’re bad men and bad actors in the world have obviously also been bad women. But it’s very easy to sort of always go back to that as the touchstone. The men are bad and so therefore we need X. We need feminism so that we can be free of that. But what’s fascinating is that that victimhood status became something really important.
under, you know, in the 1800s, 1900s. And that was what it did was it allowed women to be victims and men to be the victimizers just simply by existing, not because we they did anything wrong or we did anything. We were victimized. And I think that that’s a really important piece that was, you know, was added later. But this idea of the victimhood status, this is why there has to be the patriarchy. There has to be something, you know, if you’re thinking of Marxism and the Marx classes,
and you shift that from class warfare to then male-female warfare. There has to be the victim when you’re the victim. And this is why the patriarchy is sort of this perennial whipping boy, because of the fact that it needs to be there, because if you get rid of the whipping boy, really, women’s equality actually exists and the patriarchy doesn’t have any power anymore, then what are they fighting for? What’s left? And so it’s…
That’s what becomes, I think, really interesting is there always has to be kind of this engine to make women mad and angry and whatnot.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (29:29.484)
Yes. And this is where it really overlaps with another big ideology, which is Marxism. Because I’m sure you know Engels had made exactly the step that you’re talking about, where he just transformed class warfare into male versus female warfare. That the woman is the proletariat, the man is the capitalist. And he literally said that in this book in the late 19th century that he wrote about this. And what they’re doing is scapegoating.
And all ideologies have to have a scapegoat because they’re promising something that can never be. And so you have to have someone to blame when the Nirvana doesn’t come. So it’s got all the markers of an ideology. But what interests me, though, Carrie, that you haven’t mentioned yet, and maybe this is just my bugaboo and doesn’t interest you, but it seems to me that one of the ways that feminism succeeded is that it built on something that was already in the culture, namely individualism.
know, individualism has always been a part of post-enlightenment culture, I guess you’d say. And there is, and again, this is another word that people use and mean different things by. There is an individualism that is proper to Christianity, but the individualism that grew out of the Enlightenment is not the same kind of individualism, right? And so feminism, it found a fertile ground, I guess you
I would say, you when you’re saying that you personally need to be out there and be the autonomous self, well, the fellows are already aligned with that idea. That’s already a familiar idea within the culture. So I wonder if that is not a part of the story of why it had such staying power, why it was attractive and why it had such staying power. What do you think of that?
Carrie Gress (31:26.03)
You know, I think it’s interesting. I’d have to think about it sort of larger more largely in context, but I think you’re right. There had to be that that sort of element that came in there to even have the belief that you could be autonomous. You know, I think this is right. Right. Because it’s not did not exist before. People understood that they were they were nestled into a family and that it was that family that allowed them to flourish and to become.
that gave them life and it was the responsibility to then bring the next generation in. So I think you’re exactly right that there was that piece sort of slipped into it that allowed for that idea that we could be autonomous. even now it feels like very much a luxury belief that women could be that way, because especially if you look at the many different ways in which women are kept safe as individuals, I think now that we’re seeing sort of the decadence happen in the culture.
Like in Europe now they have female only train cars and women in Europe especially talk a lot more about how their life is being limited by the threat of, you know, a of the immigrants and a lot of violence.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (32:33.296)
yes, yes,
Carrie Gress (32:34.968)
how you’re seeing that those pieces come to light. And it makes you realize women have this sense of safety in these public places because of the fact that we could count on men being good men and not attacking us. So you realize that this is because of the, it is because the patriarchy was good and men had good intentions toward women, which came from Christianity in the first place, that women had this of protected sphere
such that then they could have this autonomous life. But of course, in the meantime, you also recognize that the infrastructure is maintained by men. The buildings are built by men. This is not to say that women aren’t involved, but I know when I watched an edition added to our own home, the only women that were here were women that brought their husbands lunch.
the painting. weren’t here doing the roofs. They weren’t going concrete. You know, this is definitely not an equal effort. So I think that that’s one of the things that’s interesting to think about, you know, how much goes into this idea of autonomy. That’s really not part and parcel of civilization. That’s, you know, is a luxury set of
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (33:54.766)
Yes, and you know, my brother used to have a painting contracting business and I worked for him when I was in college and I very quickly learned that I could not do that for a lifetime. I would be exhausted, you know, and that propelled me and motivated me to go back to school, you know, but I saw this, you know, you’d see the fellows just crawling over the buildings and, you know, the roofers and the shingle guys and the stucco people and stuff like, whoa, these guys, you know, they’re really making it happen.
And it was nothing to them. I should say nothing to them, but compared to what it would have been for me, it was ridiculous. I want to come back to another piece, though, which is the whole economic side of it, because people for information, Kerry’s doctorate is in philosophy, mine is in economics. So this is the way my mind works. It seems to me that corporate America had no problem with feminism.
In many ways, corporate America liked feminism and still likes feminism. Corporate America is all in for the sexual revolution for the most part. And I remember as a young economist and when I was learning econ in the 70s and I was undergraduate figuring out the free market and boy, these feminists are going to put a lot of restrictions and regulations on the labor market. And surely the businesses won’t like that. But it turns out the businesses didn’t really care. They adapted very quickly.
you know, to the whole bevy of regulations and whatnot. And in my mind, I thought it took me a while to figure this out. But I think what they like about it is it’s another source of labor. You know, it’s a huge opening into the labor market. And it’s a form of labor where the people are particularly eager to prove themselves and may be particularly vulnerable because they don’t have a husband to fall back on. You know, and so they
they really want to succeed. that corporate America is fine with that. And now you see the final extension of that, that the big progressive Silicon Valley employers who are so pro-feminine, they are offering egg freezing for their female workers as a benefit. And I’m like, OK, she’s sacrificing her fertile years for you. And your idea of a benefit is frozen eggs later. Thanks a lot.
Carrie Gress (36:15.808)
Or pre-transportation to another state for an abortion. that’s the other.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (36:20.142)
That’s right. Yeah, they like the steady flow of labor, you know, so that’s a whole lot.
Carrie Gress (36:25.868)
Meanwhile, the feminists don’t realize that corporate America is just another hierarchy. It’s a form of patriarchy. So they’re actually engaging in a way that they would never be comfortable if this was sort of a family or if this were a church organization. But because it’s corporate America, because they’re benefiting from it financially, allows them to feed into this myth of female autonomy. There’s no objections to that kind of hierarchy. it’s, yeah, it’s brittle.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (36:57.974)
Yeah, the Marxist feminists who are all in favor of women having jobs in big corporations, it’s like that has always been a little…
Carrie Gress (37:08.022)
Yeah. Odd.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (37:09.422)
A little odd. Now, you know what? You brought up the subject of the occult, and there’s something about that I want to ask you about, because I noticed this in your book, The End of Patriarchy. We talked about The End of Patriarchy when it came out, because isn’t that where you first brought that topic? What’s that?
Carrie Gress (37:25.422)
It’s anti-Marie exposed is where I talk about a little bit. It’s more on the anti-Marie exposed than in the end of women.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (37:33.71)
Okay, but some of the early feminists whom we are all supposed to admire and so on, they were actively involved in the occult. In one of your books, I forget now which one it was, but in one of them, you pointed out that this interest in the occult took place at the same time as the Great Awakening. It was like part of the Great Awakening almost in the 1890s or thereabouts. And that’s…
jumped out at me, Carrie, because a lot of my evangelical friends are so proud of their great awakening. They think it’s, we need another great awakening. And I always thought, yeah, well, sure, the stirring of the Holy Spirit, that’d be cool. But it’s like something else got stirred up at the same time. And you didn’t develop that something else, but perhaps you have more to add about that, because I found it quite creepy, to be honest.
Carrie Gress (38:32.778)
Yeah, well, I mean, it is creepy. It’s, you know, you’ve got someone like Elizabeth Cady Stanton sitting at her spirit table waiting for the spirits to knock and answer to, you know, her question. Like this is like a Ouija board, but on a table. It’s very odd. And that table is now in the Smithsonian here in Washington, D.C.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (38:51.342)
What? Wait a minute. Oh gosh. my gosh. Oh, wow. Yeah. All right.
Carrie Gress (38:59.586)
What’s fascinating though is just thinking about the time period. This is post-Civil War. You’ve got all of these men who have died. What is it? 700,000 men, a huge number of men. You also have all these children who die regularly in early childhood from diseases. And you also have the advent of electricity. So there are all these new things and people are just desperate to be in touch with their family members who they have died.
But they also see the spirit world as like electricity. it’s just sort of like we can be in touch through mediums. Like we turn on the light. It’s very odd how all these things sort of happen simultaneously. And so this is what was going on with a large number of those first so-called just suffragette first wave women. Was they’re very involved in the spirit. Susan B. Anthony talks about how she wished that spirit would just overcome her so she could get over her stage fright and just talk about whatever the spirit wanted her to talk about.
She didn’t mean the Holy Spirit. She was definitely talking about spiritualism. There was another woman, Victoria Woodhull, who is just, I mean, this is a woman that I, it’s amazing to me we don’t know more about her in popular culture. had a, her father was literally like a snake oil salesman and was run out of all of these things. He and the father basically sold his daughters in prostitution and had them be mediums at these
these tent revivals. And so, you know, that was going on at these big revivals. And so Victoria Woodhull ends up in New York City as she gets her first brokerage firm a woman ever had. And one of the Vanderbilts gave it to her because she had done such a great job of connecting with the spirits about where he ought to invest. And so he thought, well, I should use her to invest all the time. And so this is what she would do is, you know, go.
consult the spirits about investing and her sister was his mistress. anyway, I mean, it’s just amazing some of these stories that we don’t know and just how horrible they were. anyway, there ended up being this major scandal that involved her. it’s just that the details are really amazing when you look at it. She actually ran for president. She was the first woman to run for president in United States.
Carrie Gress (41:21.442)
So yeah, I think that these are the kinds of things that when you go back and look at what was really going on, you begin to realize very quickly, this is not sort of Victorian era prim and proper life going on, but this is very much kind of this undercurrent of these new ideas that also were keeping with New York City when New York City was just so corrupt. And you also have the…
Like gentlemen’s clubs, was just part and parcel to go visit a brothel. There were something like 20,000 prostitutes living in New York at that time. They did have clinics where you could get abortions. There was one, think, right near St. Patrick’s, maybe the old St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City. So it’s really wild. And you can see, I don’t know if you know much about Teddy Roosevelt, but when he comes in as the commissioner of New York City, he made a huge impression because he was actually firing.
police officers that were literally in bed with the brothels. you know, the police officers were paying to get jobs and, the corruption was just incredible. And so he shows up, he’s been, you know, out living in North Dakota in the wild west, you know, fighting bears and things like that. And so he comes back and so cleaning up New York City was, you know, easy for him because he already understood the corruption and what was going on there. anyway, it’s a fascinating period of time because you see just how
all of his mayhem was really leading to the corruption of womanhood at that era. And I found a number of comments from one from a Cardinal, another from a Bishop who spoke explicitly to this. One of them was Cardinal Gibbons who was writing in Ladies Home Journal in like 1902. And he says, you know, this is just this incredible movement where women are being destroyed because they’re being told that all of their feminine gifts are
need to be replaced by masculine gifts and just what a destruction this is going to have on the family and on the church and on faith. And so he saw all of these things very, very early and really condemned it and knew the damage that was being done. So it was not the case that at that point the church was like, the first wave is great. They didn’t call it that obviously, but they were very aware of these undercurrents that were happening throughout the culture that were not coming from.
Carrie Gress (43:44.696)
healthy Christian sources.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (43:47.02)
And you the other thing about the suffragette period is that this is also the period, if I’m not mistaken, that male suffrage was expanding, at least in the UK, right? So at one time, you had to have property in order to vote. And so that started to go away. so the female suffrage was an expansion of, it was part of this larger picture that you’re saying.
And the other thing is that some of the states, especially the Western states, did allow women to vote in state level elections well before this. That was much earlier on. There was one reference in your book, I can’t think of it right now, but it was earlier on. It was a book that was written in the 40s that cataloged various things about what life was really like for women. And it seemed to me that that looked like a really interesting reference because it seemed like they were saying,
You know, it’s not this the feminists are giving you this catalog of horrors and that’s not really the case. Will you talk a little bit about that? Give us some historical context on that, because I, you know, I’m a footnote person, right? I’m like, what? Who said that?
Carrie Gress (45:00.109)
This is one of those books that I found. was like, how did I never hear about this book before? It’s written, I want to say in 1947, was by a psychiatrist and a sociologist, maybe. And they, one of the things that first really struck me was this is first of all written in 47. So it’s still part of the first wave. The second wave didn’t start till 1963 with Betty Friedham. But they are critical of all kinds of things that we, I think, think.
didn’t work problematic until much later. But they point out very explicitly how much it’s an ideology and how much this is feminism is really based on this idea of envy from the very get go. They also have this really remarkable kind of articulation of what’s going on with the industrial revolution that I found incredibly helpful to really understand how the home went from being this real locus of family and activity and commerce and entertainment and education.
All of that happened at the home and then you switch gears to the industrial revolution and suddenly, children are no longer an asset, they’re liability. People have figured out what to do with their kids, women are going to work outside the home as well as husbands. So all of that really shifts. But what does not shift is women’s identity and their understanding of themselves. And so it’s a very glacial, slow, slow, slow kind of shift. And this is really where the opportunity I think of the feminists
you know, because of this gap. And they said, well, you’re going to be happy if you’re more like them. And so I think that’s what I found, you know, so insightful about this book. one of the third things that I really appreciated about it was it said very explicitly and it chronicled different authors. There was one woman who had written several books under several different pseudonyms in the early nineteen hundreds. And one of her points was.
All the things that Mary Wollstonecraft thought she was fighting for with feminism. She was fighting for her sister and for her best friend and for all the women who had been maltreated by men. She said, feminism hasn’t had the capacity to fix any of those. All it has done is sort of throw men out and make women by alone and isolated them, but it hasn’t actually fixed that problem, which is male bad behavior.
Carrie Gress (47:23.178)
And so that was something that I think really struck stuck with me because if you look at feminism today, well, what is it done? What feminism does is it it kind of bubble wraps us. It makes us impermeable. So to a degree, that’s the belief anyway, that we are not going to be wounded. We’re not going to be, you know, abused. We’re not nothing bad will happen to us because we’re in this isolation because we know that’s what happens in relationship and in love and giving of ourselves and sacrifices. There’s going to be wounds. Some of them will be
because people are bad, other than them are because of life and death happens and sickness and all kinds of misfortune. The feminism hasn’t had the capacity to heal those things. All it can do is sort of separate us out from them to protect us in some kind of way. So that was, I think, one of the another key insight that I got from that book was just the recognition that even as early as 1909 when this woman is writing, she’s seeing the feminism.
can’t deliver the goods. It doesn’t have what it needs to be able to heal culture, sustain culture, build culture. Those things are going to come from Christianity. Like they always have. mean, even the dignity of women has come from Christianity. So anytime we try to place that, we’re only just messing the system up more and getting to a worse situation than I think what we had before.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (48:44.974)
It didn’t know that’s a very interesting image that you created of wrapping us in bubble wrap so that we’re insulated from other people and therefore we won’t be hurt. But now the this process has gone on kind of unchecked, you could say, you know, that that we’ve gone down that path as far as we can go, I hope, you know, of isolating ourselves and and being more and more independent and so on. And one of the things that we now see is rising levels of.
of mental health challenges, mental health issues that are correlated to some extent with gender and are correlated with ideology. So liberal women seem to be having the most mental health challenges. I’ve seen those kind of numbers in a number of places and liberal women aren’t necessarily all feminists, but I would think there’d be a pretty high correlation if you’re going to compare people in those broad categories between conservative women or liberal women and men and so on and so forth.
And so what’s happening to us is because this diagnosis is incorrect and the solution is incorrect, we’re not getting better, we’re getting worse, right? Because what we really need is more bonding. What we really need is more solidarity. And we’ve wrapped ourselves in bubble wrap and we’re worse off mentally. Yeah. And so that’s why I want to say that’s why the Ruth Institute has created this recovering from feminism resource. And we really want everybody to check it.
Check the link in the show notes and drop us a note and we’ll send it to you. And it’s your own little checklist that you can start going through. And we want this to be an interactive process because I know for a fact we’re not going to get everything on the first pass. So I want to hear your feedback of other things we should be including in this checklist of self-examination and trying to recover from some of these ideas that really aren’t making us happy. That’s Ruth Institute’s recovering from feminism resource that you can get for free right here.
Carrie, let’s now talk philosophy talk. We’ve been talking economics and history and a little bit of philosophy, but I want to go into serious philosophy now. Let’s talk about definitions because you’ve got a section in your book that’s very serious on the question of definitions in some of your engagement with some of your critics. You’ve had to spell out what you think a definition actually is and is supposed to do.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (51:08.526)
Do you personally have a working definition of feminism and what would a working definition look like?
Carrie Gress (51:16.162)
Yeah. Well, I think feminist movement is a movement that has essentially tried to turn women into a kind of male promising us happiness in terms of male lifestyle, while also focused on this idea of female autonomy. I think there are other elements to it, like the ones I was talking about earlier, the promiscuity, the occult, and the contempt for men that are really part of it.
I have a long chain of elements that I think define the movement, but I think fundamentally it comes back to this idea of giving, of promoting female autonomy to look like a masculine, an idealized masculine life, I think, if I had to make a very concise definition of it.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (52:02.254)
And other people would give other definitions. And I want to put, for example, one on the table. When I had Leah Libresco Sargent on my show, I asked her this question. What’s your definition of feminism? And she said, it’s advocacy for women as women. And I said, well, OK, well, what does that mean? What does as women, what does that mean? And it seemed to me, and the dictionary definition talks about the advocacy of equality for women.
Okay. And that also, pushes the explanatory problem back a step because you have to know equality in what dimension. have to know what women as women, what do you mean women as women? What does that look like? So you haven’t those, you’ve listed some traits of the historical movement. They’re trying to come up with the definition and those definitions don’t work for me because of this, you know, the regress problem. And I think this is why we’re talking at cross purposes.
a lot of the time with people, you so your turn. Say something intelligent, Kerri. I don’t have this figured out.
I know it’s problem, but I don’t know how to solve it.
Carrie Gress (53:14.51)
I think the bigger problem is that there’s been an effort to try and make feminism something good and much of it is pinned on this idea of John Paul II. So I think we can get away from definitions for just one second because I want to sort of contextualize this. So John Paul II used the
the word new feminism wants. think there’s two other references to the word feminism in his 26 year pontificate. One of them was in a speech and then a third time was in a private conversation. And I think at one point historically there was this idea that came about that Catholics could win the culture war if we were really able to reclaim the word feminism. And that was just sort of the…
the backbone of how it is that we were gonna move forward. And you can really see that. I know I saw a lot of this when I was a graduate student and there just seemed to be a real emphasis on John Paul’s work, which is great. But even Mulyar’s Dignitatum, his encyclical, he never mentions the word feminists a minute. So one of the things that he’s doing, which I think was very different than what feminists do, is he’s focusing on the gifts of womanhood.
He’s focusing on motherhood. He’s focusing on us in relationship to husbands or to, you know, like religious life where we’re consecrated to God. So we’re in relationship to the man essentially in one format or another. And that complementarity is vital and crucial. And, you know, we’re not meant to be studied sort of in abstraction, but we’re meant to be in relationship, husbands, children, you know, community, et cetera. So I think that
in a certain respect, if that’s really what John Paul II’s feminism was meant to be and had Catholics been very disciplined and sort of focused on that, I think we could have probably, there was potential to shift the culture given those terms. The problem is that eventually the idea came that what if we just say first wave feminism was actually really what John Paul II meant and first wave feminism was kind of this bridge between Thomas Aquinas and John Paul II.
Carrie Gress (55:28.986)
that allowed John Paul II to sort of think these thoughts about women. Now, it’s completely anachronistic. It actually doesn’t work at all. And that’s all covered in my book. But this is where the issue of the definitions has become problematic is because of the fact that Mary Wollstonecraft has been kind of defined as this heroine, that somehow she was this pious Christian woman who really just wanted what was good for women.
And none of the context of who she actually is or what it is that she was doing were really included in that understanding of her sort of quah Catholic feminism. So I think that’s really where a lot of the confusion has come in because people desperately wanted Catholic feminism to be something good and be something under the umbrella of John Paul II. But then what was interjected were things that were not at all consistent with John Paul’s thoughts.
For example, very few people, first of all, most people don’t want to read Mary Wollstonecraft. So I’ve spent a lot of time doing it. And, you know, those are hours I will never get back, but it was certainly worth doing. But she was very much a liberal. She was very intent. She kind of had this like what we would consider now sort of this think tank of different scholars that she was associated with through her publisher.
And she was very deeply interested in the French Revolution. All of the men that she was associated with, including her future husband, William Godwin, were men that called themselves the Revolutionary Men because they wanted to see the French Revolution succeed. They wanted to see the world sort of turned into something very rational. She even said at one point in one of her private letters that she thought that the blood of the revolution, you know, which is 20,000 heads of the guillotine,
in Paris itself, not to mention all the broader conflict, that all of that was justified so that the Catholics who had been infantilized by Catholicism could finally grow up and mature into kind of rationality. So this is not a woman who had anything really to do with Catholicism and an understanding of hierarchy and church that we have. In fact, she was moving further and further away from what we would consider Christianity. She ended up becoming
Carrie Gress (57:55.15)
a Unitarian, which obviously doesn’t believe in the Trinity. It’s sort of like deism of Thomas Jefferson. But she wanted or she saw that any she believed that any kind of masculine mediator in the life of womanhood was an obstacle. including Jesus Christ, any kind of pastor or priest or Christ himself was going to be an obstacle to a woman’s relationship with God and that that the relationship is really built on reason.
You can see this is a very thorough going kind of enlightenment thinking woman. So anyway, this is and she uses language like virtue. Well, what does she mean by virtue? She doesn’t mean Thomas Aquinas is virtue. She means the virtue of David Hume. And even you know, and I was able to even kind of track that like she uses the word benevolence. Well, this is Hume’s ideal of virtue is benevolence. You know, these are not Thomistic or Aristotelian categories of virtues and vices.
These are very much enlightenment ideas. So I think that’s where the definition issue is really important in terms of trying, what is it that we’re so-called feminism on as Christians? And I think this is really where you see people are loggerheads because they just are not coming from the same place. Well, Stonecraft and her ilk became.
the cornerstone of what we know to be the left and communism and socialism and the people that she’s fighting against like Edmund Burke are the he’s considered the grandfather conservatism. So these are just not compatible ideas. And I think this is one of the reasons why it’s been a tough discussion because you know, you can’t just pick up Mary Wollstonecraft and read her and apply contemporary Catholic or contemporary
legal or any kinds of philosophical terms and just say, this is what she meant because this is what I mean by it. You have to actually go back and understand. that’s, think, been one of the issues is that a lot changes in 250 years in terms of how we define things. And that’s where a lot of the confusion has come from and stemmed from.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (01:00:08.398)
This is the exact problem that I mentioned at very beginning. We’re using the same vocabulary, but we’re not using the same dictionary. And obviously, Mary Wollstonecraft wasn’t trying to pull the wool over our eyes. She had no idea that we were coming down the pike or what we were going to do with it. I mean, think for us to look back on it, we need to be cautious about it. And your discussion of David Hume kind of struck me because in economics, David Hume is an important figure because we
Yeah, and it took me a while to figure this out because I don’t have any philosophical training. I’m not overstating my ability here. I’m just going to tell you in economics, we take the Hume view of things, okay, which is we take the person’s preferences as given and rationality to an economist means satisfying your preferences, getting what you want at the least cost. And so that means reason, your rational faculty, is at the service of
what the ancients would have called the passions, right? Your preferences, what you want, what you desire. You don’t inquire about the quality of those desires. You don’t inquire about whether this is a wholesome thing for me to want. I want it, therefore reason means get it at the least cost. And the whole economics paradigm is structured in that manner. So it’s taking the preferences as given and reason serves the passions rather than
reason ruling the passions, which is what the ancients thought. And so the whole concept of virtue kind of gets stood on its head. And I remember in one of my earlier books, talked about Hume. I had a reason to talk about Hume. He was so passive about his death. He played cards on his deathbed. He had no fear of death. He knew he was going to dissolve. He knew he was going to disappear. He didn’t care what happened to him. So he was playing cards on his deathbed.
And my comment was, look, this man had no children. This man was not married. it’s surprising how many of these thinkers either had no children or abandoned their children. And so if he played cards on his dying daughter’s deathbed, you would certainly think differently of him. You would not think, that’s a cool guy. He’s so at peace. He was never connected with anybody in that kind of way.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (01:02:30.228)
Adam Smith, same thing, never married, lifelong bachelor, know. Rousseau gave away his kids to the family hospital. They all died, you know. What the heck is wrong with these people? Well, anyway.
Carrie Gress (01:02:44.222)
Yeah, no, and I think that’s, you know, the other thing about Hume that’s really interesting is because of the fact that he’s at this era where they’re trying to get rid of anything that smells remotely like Catholicism. Right. Right. What would sort of create this new universe where everything was dependent upon property? So, you know, I think this example of like, you know, in sense and sensibility.
The daughter is talking about how she can’t even earn her own fortune, that it all has to be inherited. Everything goes to the first son. And the primogeniture happens because it’s all property based. That’s where all the virtues are sort of poured into that. The firstborn son has everything, and then everybody else sort of gets scraps from the table. But this is also where the idea of women as property comes from. And in fact, chastity under Hume is basically just to prove who
you know, to try and figure out who the father is of something like this is why you need a woman to be chased just so that you can make sure that, you know, the father is who she says it is. It’s not doesn’t have anything to do with God. doesn’t have anything to do with a bigger structure of purity. And, you know, all of those elements are are completely washed away. But this is really what creates the problem in the first place and why you don’t see that a lot of the problems that Wallstonecraft is addressing aren’t you don’t see them in Spain.
or, you know, France for that matter until later there’s elements of it. But it’s because women are seen as a kind of property because everything property is sort of the biggest priority in the culture. And so everything sort of follows.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (01:04:16.942)
that’s so interesting. Carrie, Carrie, this is so interesting because it’s like he’s the father of the free market people who see everything as a species of contract or see everything as a transaction of some kind. That’s my first book, Love and Economics, was trying to deal with that. You the fact that the family cannot be treated as a special case of a contract. That just doesn’t work, you know. And my economics buddies had no desire to read that book whatsoever. You know, they were not even the slightest bit interested.
you know, in the problems that you create for yourself. And that book was an extended reflection on that. But that’s very interesting that that era, it does grow out of the structures, the mental structures that were being created in that era.
Carrie Gress (01:05:01.974)
Last point I want to make. I think that that’s the interesting thing is to see, you know, there’s another woman named Hannah Moore that I mentioned in the book. She was very good friends. She’s very big into what’s it called? Abolition, of course. And she was good friends with Wilberforce, who eventually ended up getting rid of slavery in England.
She was very involved in that very well much better known than Mary Wellstonecraft was she lived much longer. She published extensively She’s really a remarkable woman, but she had a much different she was Anglican and a believer and she had a much different approach to this and she she said to have Refused to even read Wellstonecraft’s work because she said why would I want to be an imitation of a man when I can be an original woman?
So it’s interesting to see that these two women who are contemporaries are seeing the same issue of women as property and yet their responses to it are quite different. And so I think that’s also one of the problems that we have is just believing that, know, Wellstonecraft was sort of this, like she was bound to happen or it was bound to happen or that that was the proper response to it instead of sort of seeing Hannah Moore’s response.
as a believer, really appreciating her femininity and womanhood and not wanting that to be erased or equalized or, you know, changed in some way. anyway, I just thought there was a fascinating thing to sort of run across was that it feels like feminism wasn’t this foregone conclusion that we had to eventually get to, but that it was actually really something unhealthy that was was voiced upon us at a time when we were looking for answers, but it clearly hasn’t had.
the answers that we expected it to have.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (01:06:48.11)
Right, right. Do you know, mean, the larger question from my perspective, though, Carrie, that, you know, I find yourself so interesting because of this, that feminism has framed the questions in a certain set of ways that drive, tend to drive your mind down a certain track and down a certain path. Right. And so oftentimes, and I think this is true throughout the sexual revolution, kind of in all of the different topics that I end up talking about. If you take the framing, the
that we’ve been handed about these questions. If you take that as given, you’ll never get to a better answer. It’s the framing that’s the problem. so that’s why I’ve always been resistant to calling myself an anti-feminist, because even when you’re an anti-feminist, you’re accepting the framing in some way, right? And what really needs to happen is to say, it’s man for woman, woman for man.
It’s the, you know, and I think that is what John Paul was doing in the theology of the body and all of the other work that he was doing. And so once you have Catholic, I don’t know why you need feminism. mean, Catholic feminism, we don’t need those two words together. In my opinion, you know, based on what I know now, if you’ve got Catholic, feminism doesn’t add anything to it.
Carrie Gress (01:08:02.19)
And I think that’s a fantastic point. And this is a point I make repeatedly throughout the book, is that it’s so much easier to move forward if we drop the word feminism. I don’t mean self-feminist. I just would rather move on from it. I think the category is higher. And I think it’s threadbare. It’s outlived. It’s usefulness. And it’s really time to start getting back to real language and real terms that we can understand. And I think Catholicism.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (01:08:13.098)
Yes, just
Carrie Gress (01:08:30.062)
does that. Our Savior isn’t in feminism, it’s in Christ. And that’s the real problem with feminism is it somehow gives us this impression that somehow if we behave in a certain way, that’s really where our salvation is. it’s not. It’s all contained in the church itself. It doesn’t need this additional app added to the faith.
But we just didn’t have it before now we have the app and now we you know, we’re gonna society through
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (01:09:01.698)
Right, right. Do you know, I want to bring up a person we haven’t mentioned before, and that’s our mutual friend Hannah Speer. She bills herself as the anti-feminist psychiatrist, and she has done some extremely interesting work, very interesting work, very important work. My mind tends not to work the way her mind works, right? So I’m not thinking in terms of disorders and behaviors and that kind of thing. But a lot of what’s interesting to me about her work is that she
she looks at behavioral traits that are being incentivized. And so now, OK, my economist brain turns on. We’re rewarding certain behaviors, and so we’re getting those behaviors. And the feminist paradigm, according to Hannah, is rewarding behaviors that are self-destructive and destructive of relationship. And when she was on my show, she went through multiple scripts, basically life scripts that don’t work.
So I’d like to just open the conversation briefly to that framing around the psychological impact of what would the view of ourselves that we’re trying to enact using the feminist script, it seems to be not working. Yeah, I’d like to hear you just comment on that whole set of thoughts.
Carrie Gress (01:10:21.986)
Hannah is fantastic. I think this is one of the exciting things is that people from all kinds of different disciplines are beginning to sort of notice the issue. know, just over the last 10 years, the change in the conversation is incredibly dramatic. Janice Fiamingo is another woman who’s done an incredible work on the history, whom I respect deeply. She’s a retired professor in Canada.
So I think that that’s been the exciting element is it’s not just philosophers or theologians or economists out, you it’s getting to be a much bigger conversation. And, I think one of the biggest signs of health is that men are now feeling more comfortable to publicly say things. I’ve seen more articles in the last few weeks that have been written by men at conservative websites that I’m just amazed that they wrote because you wouldn’t have seen them a couple of years ago. I think that
the watershed moment has passed and people are at the stage where they want to get back to something real and rich and compelling and stop the infighting and the argumentation and all that. And I think that’s one of the things that Hannah does such a great job is showing us that we are working against ourselves and feminism does make us work against ourselves.
I’ve been really interested, I’ve been thinking a lot about lately about one of the tactics that’s being used by feminists is just this idea that if you disagree with feminism, then somehow you must be like Andrew Tate. I’ve been accused in print and I’m really fascinated by the idea because on the one hand, you know,
Andertate is a bad man whom I’m not in any way endorsing or think is worthy of following. So on the one hand, he’s hated by feminists because he doesn’t like feminism. But nobody on conservative doesn’t like him because he has no moral character. But the feminists don’t have a problem with his moral character because there’s plenty of leftist men that have terrible characters.
Carrie Gress (01:12:33.516)
What is unique about him is the fact that he has this anti-feminist approach. I talk about this in the book. think what he’s actually a creation of feminism because feminists have had all this contempt towards men for so long and men are finally returning the favor. It’s this mirror image of this. I think that’s what’s going on. But one of the things that’s interesting to me is the fact that
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (01:12:51.95)
Yes.
Carrie Gress (01:13:00.674)
How is it that you can take this man, know, and the fact that like I look at my life and I have absolutely nothing in common with ender date. And yet somehow some people think that you could actually pair us in some way. And that’s one of the, again, another one of these feminist tactics that’s being used mentally. And I don’t think Hannah goes into this necessarily, but I do want to talk to her about it. Is this fear that we have of being canceled or of being associated with something morally bad?
So our reaction is because he’s morally bad, but the feminist reaction is because he’s not a feminist and he’s not buying into their shtick anymore. And so that’s the bad thing is that, you like I was saying earlier, there’s all these efforts and ways to protect feminism. He’s the outlier that’s busted out of the barn. And we have these various reactions of why it is that we can’t be associated with him. Again, I’m not trying to say that we ought to be, but I’m finding it fascinating that he’s the one.
that everybody says, well, you must be like Andrew Tate if somehow you don’t believe it.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (01:14:00.974)
Carrie, look at this. This is a standard ideological trick. It doesn’t even matter what the ideology is. What they do is they want to put you in the same picture with the picture of Hitler or the KKK or something like that. I mean, that’s how they operate. they do it because it works. But people are calling BS on it. People are calling BS. And so it’s working us as well.
Carrie Gress (01:14:24.502)
I think and I think that is that no, I think that’s the key point is first of all indicates. Yes, absolutely. It is an ideology. And second of all, the people are really beginning to wake up and say like, this is not okay anymore. We have to get back to something right here. that and I think that’s what Hannah is really calling people to as well. And and Erica Commissar’s work on childhood development is also really fascinating because the fact that that feeds into, you know, those
disorders that disorders many of what Hannah talks about are because of that the lack of emotional attachment that happens in those, you know, zero three.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (01:15:04.044)
You know what? You know what? People have known that for a long time, that children need to be attached to their mommies, that those first two years are really crucial. this was the thing that got me interested.
Carrie Gress (01:15:14.542)
living, living, living with the fruits of it, the results of it, we’re fine. It’s finally around us, you know, or it’s one thing to say this is going to happen, or this is happening. It’s another thing to be facing it, you know, in your everyday life, as you’re seeing just this audible destruction of the human psyche of, you know, our mental health. And that’s why I think we’re open to talking about it too.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (01:15:40.664)
Yeah, do you know, in my first book, Love and Economics, it was all about attachment disorder. That was the whole point of it, you know, that children need their mothers. And so one of the one and that was because of my adopted child, you know, that we had this child from Romania who, you know, who really had a rough start. there was no way I could outsource his care. I mean, that would have been mad to outsource his care, right? And so I ended up staying home and all of that. I completely changed my life. But in the study for writing that book, I was worried about
broken homes, divorce, single motherhood, and too much daycare. And there was a bunch of research going on. This would have been in the 90s. Yeah, this would have been in the 90s, people researching daycare. And they were researching on the subject of attachment. And there was one guy who was willing to say, you know what, too much daycare is a problem, especially for the little boys. And that guy got pilloried from post to post because most of the people writing these studies were women, were women PhDs.
who didn’t want there to be anything wrong. And now we’re seeing that, look, have to put yourself into a position. Let me say it negatively. You don’t want to put yourself in a position where you have to be working all the time because you don’t know what your kid’s gonna need. You can’t have a mortgage that depends on both people working all the time. You’ll make yourself crazy if you do that.
Carrie Gress (01:17:04.96)
Yeah, no, and I think that’s kind of the biggest lie of feminism is just this idea that women can have two full-time jobs and do both of them well, raising their kids and having a full-time job. think that’s what we’ve been sold. And now we’re really seeing the fruit of it in ways that I don’t think would be problematic because we expected children to be more resilient and not realizing this is really going to be paying the price.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (01:17:35.084)
And, know, going back to Mary Wollstonecraft, I hope our listeners are not bored with Mary Wollstonecraft. Anyway, she was part of this free, there was this whole free love deal among that group of people. And then in the 19th century in the US, free love guys, you know, and down to the feminists. There’ve always been these people who have wanted to say, we don’t need marriage. We don’t need chastity.
You know that these are outmoded rules. We don’t need them. But none of them have ever had a decent plan for what are you going to do when a baby comes? You know, they don’t have a plan. OK, don’t get married. But now now here’s a baby. So what happened to what happened to Mary is her husband married her. mean, William Godwin did what the gentleman is supposed to do, which is to marry the girl that he gets pregnant and then took care of the baby. You know that.
That is the plan, you know, is for mom and dad to work together for the good of the child. That’s the plan.
Carrie Gress (01:18:31.948)
Yeah, no, and that child ended up writing Frankenstein. So no, we all know who she is.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (01:18:37.642)
Yeah, right.
Carrie Gress (01:18:39.886)
I had one other thought I was going to say connected with that. But yeah, think that’s the, actually it is connected. This idea of abortion though, this is, you what are you going to do with the child? this is, you have to have abortion. And I think this is what we haven’t knit together sufficiently as pro-lifers and conservatives is the fact that feminism is
this engine that is feeding abortion. It’s because of all of this, this technology and this autonomy and this individualism and all the things we’ve talked about that that’s what’s driving it. But that’s obviously not bringing healing. It’s not, you know, it’s not strengthening the family. It’s not, it’s not doing any of the things that it’s supposed to be doing. It’s just creating more devastation and defamation of individuals and mental health and whatnot. So that that’s the real tragedy is that we’ve, we’ve found a solution.
But it’s now, is it 72 million abortions worldwide?
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (01:19:40.462)
It’s an unjust solution. It’s an unjust solution. I mean, your solution is you kill people. You know, no, that can’t be the right answer. Carrie, we’re coming to the end of our time. Is there anything that you would like to say that we haven’t covered yet? Any other topic to bring up? By the way, let me hold up the book again. The book is called Something Wicked. And Carrie has a number of other things that she’s involved in. You’re involved. Are you still doing the theology, the home?
on that website and all those different things. Tell people a little bit about that before we close.
Carrie Gress (01:20:15.822)
Yeah, so Theology of Home is a book series and then it’s also a blog that goes out. It’s sort of aggregate of content that I think women are generally interested in. So it’s everything from theology to travel advice to recipes and some of it’s my content, some of it is another woman named Emily Malloy, who’s just this amazing, she’s a florist and writer and a photographer and a bait.
while she’s a cook as well, she does amazing recipes for us. So in any event, that’s been, but part of the reason why I’ve done that is because I’ve really seen that women have been decimated through popular culture. think that the left doesn’t great arguments, so they have to make things look very attractive and they’ve done a very good job of it. And this is, you know, through things like Cosmopolitan and Glamour and Elle and Miz and, you know, all these different ways in which their ideas have sort of been
saturated by this content or the content sort of absorbs their ideas. This is what theology of home idea was. What would it look like if we made content that women really love, but it actually had really life-giving ideas to it. that I’m definitely still working on and it’s been a fun endeavor and it’s always amazing to hear the way something that you do at home goes out into the world and changes lives.
And that’s really the story of all of this work has been incredibly heartening to hear people recovering from feminism, people restoring relationships. I’ve had all kinds of individuals reach out to me, lesbians reach out to me and tell me that their lives have been changed because they finally heard the truth about feminism, who it is that they were made to be. And it’s those kinds of things that obviously keep you going when you really are giving people freedom to be.
who it is that God made them to be instead of being tethered endlessly to an ideology.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (01:22:14.894)
So give out the website, the various websites where people can find you and your work.
Carrie Gress (01:22:20.33)
The best place is theologyofhome.com or theologyofhome.substack.com for the blog. And then I have a personal website, caragress.com as well.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (01:22:29.858)
Very good. Well, Keri Griss, I want to thank you so much for being my guest today. This has been a very fascinating, free-willing conversation. And I’m so pleased that we’ve been in such close communication over the years because these ideas are very important and have really developed. I just want to thank you so much for being my guest on today’s episode of the Dr. J Show.
Carrie Gress (01:22:52.238)
Thanks so much for having me. It’s been so fun chatting with you and certainly getting your perspective on things.
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Jennifer Roback Morse has a Ph.D. in economics and has taught at Yale and George Mason University. She is the author of The Sexual State and Love and Economics – It Takes a Family to Raise a Village.
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