My husband and I like to fill stockings for each other at Christmas. Filling stockings is one of my favorite things about the season…wandering around the store looking for fun little things that my husband would enjoy which would also fit into a small space.
I was doing just that a couple weeks before last Christmas in TJ Maxx. (The best stocking stuffer store ever!) I ended up in the tiny men’s corner of the store. It was packed with people and the displays had been moved even closer together to accommodate all the extra merchandise that shows up that time of year. It was impossible to stay out of everyone’s way.
While I tried to squeeze myself into a corner to make room for an elderly woman and a younger one to pass through a narrow aisle, I jokingly remarked with a roll of my eye and shake of the head, “I guess men aren’t important enough to have more space.”
What I meant was that this was perhaps TJ Maxx’ rationale for cramming everything so closely together compared to the ladies’ rather vast and comparatively roomy quarters. But the elderly lady got the wrong picture entirely. A little glint of something flashed through her eyes and she said,
“That’s right, honey! They’re not that important!”
The way she said it kind of knocked me for a loop. I was so taken aback, I couldn’t think of anything to say in response. I kept picking stuff up and examining prices, but only to disguise my disquietude. My mind was whirling.
Why did she say that? Did she really mean it? How could she say that while she was right there, ostensibly shopping for either her husband or some other male loved one?
I finished my shopping, my cart piled high with goodies for Jonathon. My Jonathon, the man who is so important to me I couldn't ever put a price on his importance if asked. I went home, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the interaction.
It was almost like she begrudged men their own designated space in the store. It was the casual and sneering disregard for something so trivial among mens concerns as enough space to shop for socks and cologne that struck me.
I knew this mentality was out there in the world, and I knew exactly where it came from. It’s just that I don’t often see such blatant examples. I’m a stay-at-home wife and I go to church on Sundays. In my small sphere of personal, real-life (as in not social media) interactions, I rarely meet such ugliness.
It comes from feminism and the hatred of feminism’s bogeyman—the Patriarchy.
Once upon a time, I had a more charitable view of the first feminists. I assumed that abuses of women were much more rampant with little legal recourse. I thought the first feminists had done good work. But I believed feminism was no longer necessary, as all of women’s grievances are now addressed in law.
How wrong I was.
Feminism was, from its earliest moments, a hateful, irrational, selfish ideology with roots in the occult. From the beginning, its earliest mouthpieces were proponents of “free love” and abortion. Elizabeth Cady Stanton drafted her “Declaration of Sentiments” for the Seneca Falls Convention on a parlor table used to communicate with the spirit world via knocking sounds during seances she participated in. The much celebrated suffragettes in Great Britain were a bunch of terrorists in bloomers, setting fire to great homes in the countryside with the staff still inside and pouring chemical concoctions into mail boxes which caused the mail to spontaneously combust, often in the hands of mail carriers causing severe injury. These rather privileged women insisted on the vote for themselves before men of the lower classes had even been granted the vote. On the other side of the pond, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was so incensed that emancipated black men had been given the vote before white women, it caused a rupture in her friendship with the great orator Frederick Douglass.
These were not lovely people with glorious mission. They were self-centered, self-adoring, self-congratulatory shrews with victim complexes. To a one, all of the early feminist leaders of the first wave with their admiration of free love to the detriment of children and the family, led to the increasingly unhinged Marxist second wave feminists like Betty Friedan, which paved the way to whatever God-forsaken wave we’re currently drowning in.
I will attempt to provide an abbreviated timeline of feminist thought from the 1790s to the present. There is so much material to cover, that even abbreviated, I’ll be obliged to chop it up into two separate, possibly three, newsletters. For this letter, I will focus on Mary Wollstonecraft through Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792
Here is a link to the entire PDF: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Wollstonecraft’s main point in this treatise was that women were essentially silly and frivolous—always preening and trying to make themselves more and more attractive to men. They were this way, of course, because proper education had been denied to them by men. If women were properly educated, women would be less like themselves and more like men and then men and women would have more harmonious relationships.
From the beginning of feminist thought, then, you have the idea that there are no real differences between the sexes. And the obvious differences people see when looking at the sexes are not of nature but of external forces imposed upon women by men (patriarchy).
As Janice Fiamengo wryly points out, however, neither Wollstonecraft’s superior intellect and education, nor financial independence seemed to bear the sort of fruit she declared these things would.
Like many feminists who came after, Wollstonecraft envisioned a fantastical redeemed world in which the passions of both sexes would be reformed, divorced from any bedrock in human nature—a nature that Wollstonecraft, in line with other Lockean philosophers of her time, saw as highly malleable. In her utopian realm, men would cease to be attracted by a woman’s physical beauty and women would cease to be pleased by male deference or attracted to male power; she even went so far as to allege that once possessing their own abilities in the educational and professional spheres, women would never exploit their sexuality or tryst with “rakish” men (p. 124). Wollstonecraft’s own self-destructive romantic choices—of the American adventurer Gilbert Imlay, and before him of the already-married Swiss artist Henry Fuseli—did not seem to have been lessened by her highly developed intellectuality or financial independence. But like most feminists, she could not or would not look squarely at how her wayward and passionate impulses contradicted her idealized imaginings of female rectitude. — Utopianism and Double Standards in Feminist Foremother Mary Wollstonecraft - Janice Fiamengo
Wollstonecraft conceived an illegitimate child with Imlay and another with William Godwin whom she later married. Ironic, as the man despised the institution of marriage. It was their daughter, Mary and author of Frankenstein, who was seduced by the rakish and already-married poet Percy Shelley. Shelley is our next feminist.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
In my reading and listening over the last two weeks, I became aware of an author, Carrie Gress, who has written a book called The End of Woman: How Smashing the Patriarchy Has Destroyed Us. I have listened to lots of podcasts where she is a featured guest and have preordered her book on Amazon, but haven’t yet received it. I can’t wait to read it! However, you’ll find her in interviews all over the place, discussing her book. Percy Shelley features quite heavily. In an interview she gave to the Daily Signal, she describes Shelley’s contribution to early feminism in this way:
In his poetry, he was trying to create what he called the women’s revolution. So he’s taking ideas from Godwin, he’s taking ideas from Wollstonecraft, putting them together, adding his own.
I mean, this was a barbaric man, actually. He was involved in the occult. There’s this whole string of suicides of women that he had seduced, including his wife, had committed suicide, his first wife….But what he saw was kind of the vision of Mary Shelley’s parents, which was this women’s revolution where there’s no monogamy, there’s no marriage, all of these things are just erased, and people just live this bucolic life without any reference to their human nature.
He concocts this, actually, interestingly, around the same time that his wife is writing “Frankenstein,” he develops this character named Cythna, who is basically the first independent woman in all of literature. She has no husband, she has no children. The one relationship she does have is to Satan. And this woman becomes the model in the minds of later feminists in the 1800s, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, as the movement is moving forward.
— How Feminist Movement Drew Ideology From the Occult by Virginia Allen
For further reading on Percy Shelley’s impact on the idea of “free love,” you can read the article at this link, The Invention of Free Love by Neil McArthur. Be advised that the cover art is somewhat risqué, so careful if you’ve got kids close by.
What I find is of great interest about Shelley was his link to the occult and how his ideas spread to some of the first American feminists, people like Elizabeth Cady Stanton. About this Gress says:
…I think very few people realize that feminism, these three pieces—the occult, smashing the patriarchy, and free love—all came together in the work of Percy Shelley. — How Feminist Movement Drew Ideology From the Occult by Virginia Allen
Gress derived much of her information from a book by Swedish author, Per Faxneld. You can buy a copy of his book, Satanic Feminism, on Amazon. About the book, Gress says:
…it’s one of those books that when I first read it, I thought that he was against satanic feminism. And of course, the deeper I get into the footnotes and references, I’m beginning to realize, no, he actually thinks this is a positive thing.
So it was really fascinating to read because he goes through this period of feminism, very first wave feminism, that most people don’t touch and is making all of these different connections. Incredibly well-researched book. — How Feminist Movement Drew Ideology From the Occult by Virginia Allen
As I read the book description on Amazon, Faxneld’s documenting of early feminists turning the Biblical account of the Fall on its head was of great interest to me. In the early feminist account, Satan is the hero for liberating Eve with knowledge and God is the male oppressor. This is exactly the ancient gnostic hermetic religion James Lindsay exposes in his work, which is behind every major communist uprising and consequent killing ground/mass grave throughout modern history. Discover more about this through his website New Discourses. He is an incredible researcher and he knows his stuff.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Declaration of Sentiments in 1848
Here is a link to the entire document: The Declaration of Sentiments. Once again, I am indebted to the research of Janice Fiamengo to address some of the outrageous lies and double standards in this declaration as well as Stanton’s approval of free love expressed elsewhere.
One of the first lies is thus, and I quote from her declaration, “He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education—all colleges being closed against her.”
It’s just stunning that she would have the gall to say this, as she was educated at the hoity-toity Troy Female Seminary. Janice Fiamengo writes of this institution:
The school was founded in 1821 “with the stated goal of offering young women the same educational opportunities in history, mathematics, and science” as were offered to college-educated men. — The Victimhood Craze in Early Feminism: The Case of Elizabeth Cady Stanton
In the same article I quoted above, Janice points out that most young men Stanton’s age didn’t have such educational opportunities available to them. It would have been much too expensive. Recall what Abraham Lincoln’s education looked like. The fact is, most people didn’t have the funds to pursue higher education at that time. But Stanton did.
Early in her declaration she writes:
“The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.”
One might gather that Stanton had a tyrannical father and a worse husband. But by all accounts, her doting father paid for her expensive education and her husband was a pushover. So much so, that after being angered by something a friend of her husband said, she left her husband in France and ran off to London for ten days…during their honeymoon!
Stanton asserted in her declaration that men were held to a lower standard of morality than women and that the sexes should be held to equal standards. She emphasized this twice, once in the “resolved” portion of the text and the list of supposed “usurpations.”
This is quite interesting, given her response to a horrific crime committed by a young girl in domestic service. A young Hester Vaughan became pregnant out of wedlock, gave birth to her baby in her boarding house, then proceeded to bash it’s head in by hitting it repeatedly against her bed post. The infant’s body was later discovered under the girl’s bed. Given Stanton’s waxing eloquent about equal moral standards for men and women, you’d think she’d have supported equal justice for victims of murder whether the murderer was a man or a woman. But you’d think wrong. Instead, Stanton and many other prominent feminists of the time ran to Hester’s defense and blamed her crime on…men.
Janice elaborates again:
In her editorial for the Revolution on August 6, 1868, shortly after Vaughn’s sentencing, Stanton called her “a poor, ignorant, friendless and forlorn girl who had killed her new-born child because she knew not what else to do with it” (Stanton, “Infanticide,” The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, p. 158). — Woman Murders her Baby: Feminists Blame Men
Then later…
Just over three months later, on November 19, 1868, Stanton wrote another editorial about Vaughan, this time radically embellishing Vaughan’s story so that she was not only a victim of the male legal system but of a sexually exploitative employer. In Stanton’s new telling, Vaughan had sought employment from a “respectable-looking man” who had “proved her betrayer.” This man, whom Vaughan refused to identify out of a sense of honor towards his wife, had raped her and then turned her out into the street when her pregnancy became known (Stanton, “Hester Vaughan,” The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, p. 191).
In Stanton’s version, no one lifted a finger to help Vaughan in the boarding house as she gave birth, terrified and ill, in an entirely empty room. “In vain she had called for help, no one heard or heeded her cries, feverish with pain and thirst, she dragged herself to the door to beg some passerby for water, and when, at last, help came, she was found in a fainting condition, and the child dead by her side” (p. 191). The strong implication in Stanton’s representation was that the baby had died not through any deliberate act of Vaughan’s but because Vaughan had fainted on the baby, or possibly had been maddened by grief and pain.
Stanton assured readers that Vaughan had wanted to love her baby but was prevented from doing so because of “prejudice against unwed mothers,” such that “the deepest and holiest affections of a mother’s nature must, of necessity, be crushed in concealment” (“Hester Vaughan,” p. 192). — Woman Murders Her Baby: Feminists Blame Men
Stanton’s imagination positively brimmed over. There was, however, no evidence to support her fabrication of injured innocent naivety. There was no evidence that Hester was raped. She never made that claim. Fellow boarders had offered Hester assistance with the birth which she refused, and Hester never revealed the identity of the baby’s father even after her eventual pardon and release.
So much for equal standards of conduct for men and women.
Like Wollstonecraft and Shelley, Stanton also decried the institution of marriage as oppression making slaves of women, and spoke in favor of free love. The Pivot of the Marriage Relation by Tracy Thomas goes into all of this. You’ll need to purchase the article, but you can read the abstract at NYU Press Scholarship Online.
There are many more things I could discuss about Stanton, but time and space dictate that I end this newsletter and continue at a later date with our next early feminist. In the meanwhile, I heartily recommend, once more, Janice Flamingo’s excellent video series, The Fiamengo File 2.0 on the history of feminism where all of the figures mentioned in this installment, besides Shelley, are addressed in great detail along with her sources which you can look up and read for yourself. She quotes from their personal letters, pamphlets, and speeches—straight from their own mouths.
I hope that this has been illuminating to you. And to my fellow Christian ladies, please understand that for these reasons and many more, I refuse to refer to myself as a feminist. I believe feminism is heretical and a distortion of the Gospel, as it often implies and explicitly claims that men are more sinful than women. This is contrary to the Scriptures which teach that “in Adam’s fall, we sinned all.” I think you owe it to yourselves and your families and churches to understand the roots of these ideas, and to acknowledge that we have everything we need for life and godliness in the Scriptures. We do not need Christ and feminism to flourish. We need Christ alone.
That’s all for now. Until next time, folks…
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