The Red Pill Heresies: Feminist Heresy Continued

Stuff nobody told you about the early feminists...

We left off last time with the famed (or perhaps infamous) Elizabeth Cady Stanton. If you missed any newsletters in this series, you can read them here in the order they were written:

1. The Red Pill Heresies: A Series

2. The Red Pill Heresies: The Feminist Heresy

When I wrote the last episode, I had intended to pick right back up with another prominent early feminist. But I have decided to take this in a slightly different direction for the following reason:

As I said before, I used to think that very early Feminism had to have been more wholesome than the absolute derangement we’re currently faced with. After all, I read Little Women, a more wholesome book you’ll never find full of good ethics, good life lessons, and good morals. Louisa May Alcott was a feminist after all.

I thought, “Well, not sure what went wrong and when, but it must have been good to begin with.”

A cursory search, and I find Alcott referring to white women who could not vote “as white slaves,” so there goes my illusion that Alcott was any less overly-dramatic than the other feminists in my study, but certainly not dripping with as much vitriol. (And no, I’m not going to go burn my copy of Little Women. It remains a very wholesome and sweet story, but it’s good to have that background knowledge about the author.)

At any rate, what shocked me about the early feminists was the fact that they attacked the institution of marriage from the very beginning, encouraged free love, were involved in the occult, were hesitant to condemn abortion, were involved in eugenics (which the Nazis continued to build upon), and taught that men were inferior and worse sinners than women. So, we’re going to spend some time fleshing all these things out today.

Denigration of Marriage With Free Love

Victoria Woodhull was one of the more outspoken free love proponents in the 1800s. She lived from 1838 to 1927. Based on her own words I can only assume she was proud of the sexual licentiousness of the roaring twenties. She gave a rousing speech in 1871 called, “And the Truth Shall Make You Free,” wherein she sprinkled throughout her own conjectures about what God would say to certain questions she would put to Him. His hypothetical answers, in her mind, were always very favorable to her ideas. Then, as now, progressive Christians used the same kinds of tactics to introduce heresy. “If you really understood Christianity you would know what I’m saying about free love is true, even though centuries of Christian teaching on the subject of sexual ethics categorically deny everything I’ve said, you Pharisee.” And like most progressive Christians, to bolster her opinion, she quotes little snippets of Scripture entirely out of context.

You can read the entire speech here: And the Truth Shall Make You Free. (The audacity of such a title.)

To summarize this speech, her main argument goes as follows: Love and freedom are the greatest goods. Love should be the basis of marriage and if love departs, the marriage should likewise end. (She never defines what love is, conveniently, unless you consider this phrase from her speech, “And I claim that love means an exhibition of the affections…” a definition. But that’s awfully vague for the use she’s making of the term.) Love should therefore be free, untethered from any restraints by a third party including the government. Buried is a small rabbit trail about how free love is not promiscuity at all. No, no, no. It’s much higher and nobler than that. How, she does not explain. Though she does assert that free love would perhaps look like promiscuity at first until everyone got accustomed to it and people’s higher spiritual nature took over because they’re now free, and then free love would be pure and wonderful and not at all like promiscuity.

This, of course, makes no sense whatsoever but it sounds pretty. Charlatans are good at polishing up a turd like that. Here are some quotes from this speech:

Two persons, a male and a female, meet, and are drawn together by a mutual attraction—a natural feeling unconsciously arising within their natures of which neither has any control—which is denominated love. This a matter that concerns these two, and no other living soul has any human right to say aye, yes or no, since it is a matter in which none except the two have any right to be involved, and from which it is the duty of these two to exclude every other person, since no one can love for another or determine why another loves…

They are sexually united, to be which is to be married by nature, and to be thus married is to be united by God. This marriage is performed without special mental volition upon the part of either, although the intellect may approve what the affections determine; thus is to say, they marry because they love, and they love because they can neither prevent nor assist it. Suppose after this marriage has continued an indefinite time, the unity between them departs, could they any more prevent it than they can prevent the love? It came without their bidding, may it not also go without their bidding? And if it go, does not the marriage cease, and should any third persons or parties, either as individuals or government, attempt to compel the continuance of a unity wherein none of the elements of the union remain…?

Yes, I am a Free Lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere. And I have the further right to demand a free and unrestricted exercise of that right, and it is your duty not only to accord it, but, as a community, to see that I am protected in it. I trust that I am fully understood, for I mean just that, and nothing less!

Once again, she uses smatterings of Scripture, copious and complimentary references to God, but she fails to address the reality that God instituted marriage to begin with and that He might have a few words to say about what it constitutes and what the ground rules for marriage might entail. The Scriptures are full of such ground rules. Incidentally, she did not quote a single one. Curious, init?

She also brushes over any concerns about the children born to these rather tempestuous and changeable unions with the airy notion that, of course children should be protected, but women shouldn’t be made to stay in unhappy marriages, and if free love reigns supreme, better ways of protecting children will magically materialize.

Nearly one hundred years later, with thousands of children in foster care, with the damning statistics on the impact of fatherlessness on children available, and the millions of babies killed before birth…I confess myself a true skeptic of her claims.

Not surprisingly, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was also an advocate of free love. One wonders what her husband thought about that. Given her verbosity, I suspect he rarely got a word in edgewise around that home, so maybe we’ll never know. At any rate, she wrote a speech which she gave to a private group and which she never published, delineating her views regarding the out-of-date institution of marriage and free love. It’s available for purchase at JSTOR.org, made available by The University of Chicago Press.

I spent 22.00 for the privilege of reading this rubbish. I did not want to spend 22.00 to read rubbish, but I had to be sure the quotes I had read from it were accurate.

Janice Fiamengo does a great job distilling Stanton’s arguments down to summary. She says, in her essay, Early Feminists Hoped to Destroy the Family:

In the main part of her argument, Stanton expressed a utopian view of human nature as tending towards virtue and natural order once freed of the man-made laws and social strictures that deform and repress it. The lecture implicitly accused anyone who thought negatively of free love as insufficient in their spiritual and moral fineness. We are to believe that once freed of the deforming chains of custom, human sexual love would flourish in a more perfect form. Stanton conceded that some people would make a bad use of their freedom, but she rejected the conclusion that such bad use would be widespread or damaging.

Notably, Stanton made no mention of the fate of the children of free unions or of partners abandoned by those they loved. She seems not to have considered whether children or the adults themselves would do well within the ever-shifting kaleidoscope of family formations that free unions would produce.

In her speech, Stanton praised Mary Wollstonecraft whom I discussed last newsletter in the series for her devotion to the idea of free love thusly:

“If I mistake not, the true free lovers are among the most virtuous of women and men. The true nobility and virtue of Mary Wollstonecraft compelled her admission with the most aristocratic and most moral circles in England despite her rejection and while she rejected all allegiance to the marriage institution and lived or had lived openly as the mistress of the man of her choice.”

Of course, she forgot to mention that Mary did finally marry a man in the end after realizing it’s pretty hard being a single mom, “noble and virtuous” free love principles notwithstanding.

Stanton portrayed herself in public as a reformer of marriage and divorce laws. In private, she was a little more forthcoming. She actually wanted marriage done away with. In the annotation of this speech by Ellen DeBois, I found that Stanton was careful to keep quiet about her free love ideas in public, afraid they would be a turn off to women interested in the suffrage cause. DeBois says:

Finally, unlike most other free-love advocates, Stanton was anchored to a social movement. She limited her exposition of free love to a few select audiences and continued to speak in public only on the reform of marriage and divorce law and the struggle of individual women for dignity within their marriages. The majority of nineteenth-century women had few options to marriage and were understandably defensive of the institution and hostile to free love. Whereas other advocates of free love felt compelled to voice their radical opinions in as many forums as possible, Stanton’s commitment to recruiting women into a feminist movement made her considerably more circumspect.”

In other words, she was a dang liar and a charlatan.

In addition to the voices of Woodhull and Stanton, several other early feminists voiced their support for free love. Among them, Mary Gove Nichols who published a book on the topic with her husband, ironically, titled Marriage: Its History, Character, and Results. She was a big fan of the Oneida community in New York where everybody was sexually free game to everyone else. Young men were introduced to sex by the older women. So, you know…yuck. The term, dirty old woman seems appropriate here. The founder, himself, eventually got in trouble for “sexually mentoring” girls as young as 12.

Read more about the Oneida cult here and here. As I read about it, I realized I had stumbled upon an old notion that mirrored the society I depict in my novel, 27. At the time I envisioned it, I was living in a progressive town. I had spent a number of years there quietly listening to what progressives said they wanted, and came up with my society based on that. Just goes to show you that bad ideas never quite go away, they just get recycled.

As mentioned in the last installment, the poet Percy Shelley was a big fan of free love, as was his deceased mother-in-law Wollstonecraft. Included in the ignominious free love lineup are Fanny Wright (founded her own Oneida-like community which failed), Emma Goldman, and Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood.

Occult

Once again, Victoria Woodhull leads the charge. Her father was a traveling medicine man who trotted two of his daughters out for the crowds as clairvoyants, prophets and supernatural healers. Victoria and her sister, Tennessee, claimed to be able to speak with the dead. Victoria claimed that three spirit guides appeared to her throughout her life, the spirts of Demosthenes, Napoleon Bonaparte and his wife Josephine. These three told Victoria she was destined for greatness. Read more about Woodhull’s spiritualism here: The Austin Seance.

I discovered an essay entitled Suffrage and Spiritualism by Lisa Ruth Elliott which traces the spiritualism movement born from the Quakers. She states, “One source says not all women's rights advocates were Spiritualists, but all Spiritualists were women's rights advocates - including men who were Spiritualists.” Among the names of prominent suffrage leaders also involved with the occult were, Laura de Force, Clara Shortridge Foltz, Mary McHenry Keith, Emily Pitts Stevens, Susan B Anthony (from other sources I’ve read, Susan only wished she could hear the spirits, but never experienced it), and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Stanton participated in many seances. An article by Pam Grossman published in Ms. Magazine states, “Some of the biggest names in equal rights reform brushed up against Spiritualism, if they weren’t adherents themselves. The parlor table where Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott drafted their Declaration of Sentiments for the Seneca Falls Convention had also reportedly received raps from the spirits. (It belonged to two radical Quakers and Spiritualists-to-be, Thomas and Mary Ann McClintock.)”

In a podcast episode called Ghosting the Patriarchy: Spiritualism and the Nineteenth Century Women’s Movement, one podcast host shared:

One way that the women’s rights movement and Spiritualism grew together was through lectures by trance mediums. These were human mediums where, different from the rappings and knockings of a private seance, trance mediums gave lectures guided by a spirit who spoke through the medium in a public setting. The trance lecturers were a very important development in American history because they were the first large group of American women to mount the podium and speak in public. There had been other instances of women who had done this, most of them under some kind of spirit guidance, whether that be the holy spirit or spiritual inspiration connected to the Bible. For example someone like Anne Hutchinson, a Puritan woman in New England who essentially spoke to God, did this but of course was run out of town for it.

As I study feminism further, it strikes me how closely various factions within Christianity hearken to spiritualism. I can see how popular these approaches to “continuing revelation” were at the time and why spiritualism arose from within it. Be careful of your theology, folks. It matters.

Abortion

I had always been told that many of the earliest feminists, particularly Susan B. Anthony, were staunchly against abortion. This assertion is based on the somewhat tenuous evidence of a pamphlet called Marriage and Maternity signed by one initial, the letter A. It’s been attributed to Anthony, but Anthony made a habit of signing her writing with all three initials: S.B.A.

In an article published in The Smithsonian called What Did the Suffragists Really Think About Abortion, Treva B. Lindsey writes:

Crucially for modern debates, the unknown author of the article spoke out against the criminalization of abortion—a measure contemporaneously proposed by a prominent medical journal. “I cannot believe such a law would have the desired effect,” the author wrote. “It seems to be only mowing off the top of the noxious weed, while the root remains.” After describing men’s legal control over women, “A” lamented that the “wife has … no right over her own body.”

Lindsey continues later:

[Elizabeth Cady] Stanton, for her part, firmly believed in a woman’s “sovereign right to her own person,” which included the decision to be a wife or mother. In an 1856 letter to the Seventh National Women’s Rights Convention, the suffragist wrote, “The woman is greater than the wife or the mother; and in consenting to take upon herself these relations, she should never sacrifice one iota of her individuality to any senseless conventionalisms, or false codes of feminine delicacy and refinement.”

While not a full-throated statement in support of abortion rights, Stanton’s words do condemn forced maternity—an issue inextricably linked to abortion access. She saw voluntary motherhood as a key element of women’s rights….

Legality aside, people during the Victorian era still sought abortions, and abortion seekers and providers continued to find one another. The archives show that abortions continued legally and illegally, with both the support and ire of those committed to women’s rights. Abortion rights only emerged as a primary issue in the space of public debate in the 1960s and ’70s, during the U.S. women’s liberation movement.

Eugenics

This piece of the feminist puzzle is the most confusing to me. Most of the early American feminists, at any rate, were heavily involved in the movement to abolish slavery. From there they went after the other perceived inequalities—the plight of women in the institution of marriage, their inability to vote, etc… How on earth did eugenics, which is straight up racism, emerge from that? But emerge, it did.

There’s a fascinating essay written by Stephanie Athey called Eugenic Feminisms in Late Nineteen-Century America: Reading Race in Victoria Woodhull, Frances Willard, Anna Julia Cooper, and Ida B. Wells published through the University of Colorado Boulder.

The fact that several of the early feminists were eugenicists is a real embarrassment to current feminists, and a good bit of ink has been spilled on the topic. This particular essay would be a great launching pad if you wish to investigate this further. For now, I’ll just share a few quotes to get you started:

The otherwise incompatible feminist agendas of Woodhull, Willard, Cooper and Wells develop common connections between eugenic science, imperialism and the female body. Working within a social Darwinian or evolutionary context, each devises or engages explicitly eugenic arguments to establish the white or black female as central to the progress of the nation and civilization. These arguments develop common features. Each initially asserts a strategic connection to the abolitionist movement, claiming the moral urgency and ameliorative racial politics of that effort as she (re)constructs a political role for women in the post-abolition era. In so doing, each marshals (what I will anachronistically call) a seemingly “anti-racist” discourse which then coexists with the racist social Darwinian, civilizationist, and eugenic elements of her arguments. Though each manipulates civilizationist discourse and eugenic thinking differently, and though Cooper and Wells effectively attack certain racist practices and dismantle specific racist ideologies, both black and white women develop feminisms conversant with and supportive of white supremacist agendas. Each manipulates racial categories and meanings as a tool to redefine gendered roles, and all ultimately embrace forms of racism and imperialism in order to bolster their own political claims.

A study of these figures suggests that the history of feminist participation in eugenics is longer and more concentrated than early histories had assumed, a fact which reframes our history of eugenics and our history of feminism in America. Moreover feminists themselves, black and white, played a crucial role in the development and articulation of eugenic principles and research. Women such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Margaret Sanger–towering figures whose association with eugenics has vexed feminist historians–now seem to be part of a much earlier engagement with eugenics by American women…

A look at eugenics and feminism in early feminist arguments touches on vexing problems for contemporary feminist theory, a few of which I highlight here. New scholarship argues that eugenics constituted a twentieth-century cultural dominant, shaping language and the norming power central to many aspects of contemporary life. In nineteenth-century feminist hands, eugenics was central to establishing a discourse of female bodily sovereignty, and it laid the groundwork for contemporary feminist definitions of self-determination of the body. Early and influential arguments for women’s sole control of sexual and reproductive activity subtly made women’s control contingent on the reproductive activity’s value to national and international agendas. The concept of female self-determination remains racially charged, and its eugenic freight is still with us.

Of course, these eugenics arguments were taken to their logical extreme in the 1920s, embodied in the forced sterilization campaigns in many states. About this, Athey writes:

A reading of Woodhull, Willard, Cooper and Wells suggests the history of eugenics is a root history of feminisms for American women black and white. The investigation of twentieth-century legacies poses several questions, among them the role of women’s organizations in the popularization of eugenic rationales across the past century. Larson, for instance, records the central involvement of white women’s clubs in instituting reproductive segregation and sterilization of the “feebleminded.” This legislation was a first step toward the welfare-recipient sterilization bills passed in several states throughout the 1920s and 1930s. So too, work on eugenics and feminism ought to reopen discussions of “euthenics” and sustained environmental approaches to shaping heredity in America. This includes investigating the euthenics of public and private “environments,” for example the connection of eugenic rationales to twentieth-century childhood sexual training and curricula on sex education; health and hygiene pedagogy; definitions of mental health; and the construction of “public health” agendas.

Men’s Sin Nature as Worse Than Women

Frances Willard, yes the same Frances Willard mentioned up above under eugenics, was the founder of The Christian Woman’s Temperance Union in 1826. Drunkeness and social decay as a result were real and pressing problems at the time. So much so, that prominent men had already taken steps to address it. But it just wasn’t doing enough fast enough for the ladies, and they decided to take charge.

(Once again, being a Christian will not protect you from bad theology—in the case of Willard, the racist underpinnings of eugenics and what we’re about to discuss. Only a single-minded devotion to the truth of God’s Word and a teachable and humble spirit when under the preaching of God’s Word will do that.)

Willard wrote a book called Woman and Temperance which is available on Amazon. I have not had a chance to get my hands on the book and read it yet, but Janice Fiamengo quotes from it in her essay, The Infantilization of Men by the Prohibition Movement. Janice describes the women’s movement as follows:

Though temperance women never expressed hatred for men, they did repeatedly portray them as weak, and frequently indecisive, venal, and lacking in courage. They depicted late nineteenth century America as possessing a moral vacuum at its heart, as symbolized by the saloon, into which young men were lured to their doom (“All the way toward manhood that dram shop, so social, so seductive, has been just across the street,” Woman and Temperance, 241).

Essentially, these Christian women viewed themselves as purer than men, and consequently, able to pull men out of the degradation of the demon liquor when men were too weak to pull themselves out. Janice quotes from Willard’s book again:

“The churches had done all they could to stem the ever increasing tide of evil, but seemed powerless beyond a certain point. Temperance societies of men alone made noble efforts, but the evil remained unchecked.

At last the women were roused. The future of their brothers, their husbands, their sons, and of their daughters also, from whom they longed to avert the suffering many of them had borne, was all at stake. Enthusiastically, yet wisely and prudently, they used their influence for the abolition of the seductive snares spread for those they loved. They talked, they prayed, they worked, and gradually public sentiment changed.” (Willard, Woman and Temperance, 173)…”

Janice continues with her own remarks:

The message is clear: women bring health, morality and order where the men, including the church pastors, have failed. No particular reason is given for the women’s success outside of the implication that they cared more, worked more effectively, and brought greater sincerity and passion to the cause. Women in these scenarios are themselves never tempted by alcohol or any other stimulant; they are never neglectful, weak, or self-centered…

The stories establish the activists as mothers of the nation, with even adult men depicted as their erring and ultimately penitent children, coming to them with sobs, begging for forgiveness, willing to be guided by them. Though the forgiveness is ultimately that of God, the intercessors are clearly female, and the power reversal effected—in which women are the authorities, women the source of law, righteousness, and peace—is as decisively emasculating as anything later feminists could envision or declare.

“Put men by themselves in camp and wilderness, and how long is law their arbiter rather than the matched strength of arm with arm and blow for blow?” Willard wrote dismissively, asserting that “It is pure, ennobled Christian womanhood, with her teachings and example, that has made law possible to the Anglo-Saxon race” (Woman and Temperance, 394).

Christian womanhood, with her teachings and example? This is a subtle turn of language which downplays the commands of God, Himself, suggesting that Christianity’s teachings originate in women and not the Scriptures breathed out by the Holy Spirit, himself. Beyond that, the Christian women’s temperance movement undermined the Gospel by denying its foundational truth—that all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. All means all. Men and women. Men’s nature is not more sinful than women, women’s nature is not more sinful than men’s. While there may be sex-based differences in regards to our particular temptations, the Scriptures are very clear. We stand on a level playing field as equally sinful before a righteous and holy God in desperate need of His redemption. As the old New England Primer puts it, “In Adam’s fall, we sinned all.”

Bad theology, Mrs. Willard. Very bad, indeed.

And thus ends this installment of The Red Pill Heresies.

I will keep working on these installments with diligence. They are quite involved—lots of reading and linking to the appropriate sources and whatnot—and I’m still a housewife who has to fold the laundry and make meals! So, I’m not sure how quickly I’ll be able to churn out the next installment. Nevertheless, I will continue.

I hope this information has been helpful to you. Once again, I appeal to my fellow Christian ladies who don’t call themselves feminists to consider the ways feminism has infiltrated your own heart and mind…and tear it out by the roots.

For my fellow Christian ladies who do call themselves feminists, I have a simple question. Why?

That’s all for now. Until next time, folks…

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