Toxic Feminism

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Feminism is supposed to make women safer, freer, and happier. So why does it so often leave behind loneliness, rivalry, collapsed families, and a constant need to prove we’re “enough”? I sit down with Dr. Carrie Gress, PhD, scholar at the Institute for Human Ecology at The Catholic University of America and author of “Something Wicked: Why Feminism Can’t Be Fused With Christianity,” to name the parts of the story we’re usually told to ignore. We go past slogans and into the worldview, because ideas don’t just change laws, they change what we think a woman is for. 

We trace feminism’s intellectual history from Mary Wollstonecraft through Simone de Beauvoir and into the second wave, asking whether the movement was “broken from the beginning” and whether women’s legitimate social gains could have happened without feminism at all. Along the way, Carrie shares a vivid metaphor from the book’s cover art, a Robert Duncanson painting that looks serene until you realize it may be encoded with a hidden map, a reminder that experts can misread what’s right in front of them. That’s exactly how toxic feminism can operate: compassionate language on top, corrosive assumptions underneath. 

We also talk about the real-world fallout: sexual autonomy as a supposed cure for vulnerability, abortion as the mechanism that keeps autonomy possible, and what happens to a civilization when monogamy and motherhood are treated as optional. Then we pivot to hope and rebuilding: John Paul II’s clarity about women and men, the difference between vulnerability and victimhood, why “local love” matters, and practical first steps for women who want something healthier than the girlboss script. 

If you’re wrestling with Christianity and feminism, Catholic teaching on womanhood, the sexual revolution, or what a pro-family future could look like, this conversation is for you. Subscribe, share this with a friend who will argue back, and leave a review with your biggest takeaway.

Check out Dr Carrie Gress.  https://theologyofhome.com/

Transcript

Welcome And Listener Challenge

Miichele McAloon 0:05

Hi, you're listening to Crossword where Cultural Clues Lead to the Truth of the Word. And my name is Michelle McAlloon, your host. We have a great conversation with Dr. Carrie Gress about feminism. And really, it's toxicity, it's poison. We have toxic masculinity, but let's talk about toxic feminism. I hope this engenders a lot of discussion and a lot of thought. Place in your comments to bookclues.com. And if you will, tell a friend about my podcast, even if it makes you mad. All right. Happy listening. God bless. Hey folks. Today we're going to have a conversation, and I hope it makes some people mad to tell you the truth. I because we're going to talk about the truth of feminism and its hollow promise. And we have none other than Professor Carrie Grass. She is a doctor. She is a PhD, a scholar at the Institute for Human Ecology at Catholic University of America. She is the founder and editor of the online women's magazine, Theology of Home.com. It's beautiful. You need to go look at it. I'll put a link on my show notes. She's the author of 10 books, including the Theology of Home series, The Anti-Mary Exposed, and The End of Woman. And today we are to talk about her book, Something Wicked of Why Feminism Can't Be Fused with Christianity, put out by the fabulous Sophia Institute Press. Welcome to the show, Dr. Cress. Thank you. It's great to be here. It's I tell you, it's a real honor to have you here, and especially a woman of your stature and of your honesty. So let's talk about this. One of the lines you write in your book, feminism is women's attempt to gain security apart from God. And I thought that was it really kind of sums up your book. I'm gonna ask you, why this book, why now? Mm-hmm.

Dr Carrie Gress 2:12

Yeah, no, great question. I started writing on this issue of feminism back in 2017, roughly thereabouts, and my book, The Anti-Marry Exposed, came out in 2028. I'm sorry, 2018, rather. So I've been talking about it for a long time, a fair, you know, almost 10 years. And when I initially wrote that book, I just started with the second wave, and I thought that the first wave was good. I even say that in in that book, I that the first wave had different intellectual principles because that's what I had been assured by all the experts across a wide range of thinkers. I think this is pretty much what everybody thought. And then that book did so well that I had people saying, you know, can you write another book that's that's more for Protestants, well, Protestant friendly, it doesn't have Our Lady in it, or for people who are secular, because everybody's got people in their family that need to understand the problems with feminism. So that's when I wrote my book called The End of Woman, and that came out in 2023. And that was very much for a secular Judeo-Christian-wide audience. But in that book, what I didn't do, I realized after the fact was I didn't really put the nail in the coffin of can Christianity and feminism actually coincide? Is there a way in which we can weave them together in a way that can be fruitful and helpful and beneficial to everybody? So I felt like there was this last remaining piece that I had to really grapple with. And that's really where that this book, Something Wicked, came from was that that realization that this last piece hadn't been addressed at all.

The Painting That Hides A Map

Miichele McAloon 3:39

Okay. So what you do, you do a really good job of anchoring what is feminism in its kind of its intellectual history. And you do a beautiful job. You start at the beginning with a painting by Robert Duncanson, and you really kind of frame it in that this by this very famous black American painter. Can you explain to our listeners a little bit about this? Because this is kind of key to your whole story.

Dr Carrie Gress 4:08

Yeah. No, I mean the cover is one of the Duncanson painting. I'm really glad you asked about this because a lot of times it it gets glossed over, and I think it's really critical in terms of understanding the whole story that I'm pulling together. But Duncanson was, as you mentioned, a black American painter, and he painted all of these images down in the South when there was still slavery. So before the Civil War happened, and some friends of mine did started doing this research. Like, why is this black man in the South? I mean, he's literally risking his everything. It was such so hostile for blacks at that stage. So what was he doing? They began to realize that there was this whole pattern of Duncanson actually painting images. They were all northward paintings. They usually were waterways. There was coded in them ways to help the slaves get out of the South, to help them get onto the Underground Railroad and eventually make their way to Cincinnati, to Ohio, where they where they could find freedom from slavery. So it's a fascinating thing because if you look at what's happened historically with Duncanson, you know, his one of his images was used, in fact, the image on the cover of my book for Biden's inaugural inauguration celebrated us for at that time. And you have all these experts saying, oh, you know, he's just painting this scene, this complacid scene. And it it wasn't that at all. There was all this coded images into it. And that's what I I think I compare it to feminism because I think we have we've been led to believe one thing about feminism that it's really good for women, that it's but that's all it was for, has all these dark corners, but that's just a part and parcel of any movement. But it's really at the heart of it is good. And I I think that, you know, Duncan Sun was uh this great foil for me to help people understand the experts can get this wrong all the time.

unknown 5:48

Right.

Dr Carrie Gress 5:49

Really know what you're looking at. You see uh see things much, much differently. And so that was one of the reasons why he was so important. And, you know, even my publisher was like, Why are you using this? Why do you want this image? And then the editor, she finally said, Oh, now I understand when she got to the last pages why it's so important. So anyway, it was it was a just a great way to sort of tell the story, but without all of the elements of feminism that I think kind of get so triggered by. And that was one of the things that I didn't mention is that when I started looking at the first wave of feminism when I wrote my book, The End of Woman, I saw the real problems with it. And many of those problems are happening and unfolding at the exact same time that Duncanson is writing. So there were all these different ways in which that those paintings and that artist came together for me in this book.

First Wave Roots And Hidden Faults

Miichele McAloon 6:32

Listener, you need to go get this book. You need to run to Amazon and get this book and get it for your daughters, for your wives, for your granddaughters, for your daughter-in-laws. There's so much knowledge in here. Okay, we hear this all the time. We heard first wave, second wave. I think we're on third and fourth wave feminism. First wave feminism, and you do a really good job of mapping it out, but you show how it was it was broke from the beginning, right? So yeah. So explain that to us, please.

Dr Carrie Gress 7:00

Yeah, so first wave feminism, it really gets dated back to 1792 when Mary Wollstonecraft wrote the the her work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. That's sort of the starting phase. It ends with the arrival of second wave feminism in 1963 with Betty Fridan's book, The Feminine Mystique. So you have this huge swath of time that's considered the f the first wave of feminism. And I think, you know, the bookends of that are Mary Wollstonecraft and Simone de Beauvoir. And you can see in dramatic ways, it just certainly there's going to be a huge difference between those women, but there's also a lot of commonality. And I think that was what I tried to do in this book was to show that Wallstonecraft sort of lit this match and then tragically passes away, giving birth to her daughter, who was married, became Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein. But you have these intervening years where all of these things develop in and with feminism to get you to this point where Simone de Beauvoir is sort of this, you know, she thinks the feminine is a social construct. She thinks that, you know, abortion needs to happen. We need to force women out of the home because they'll choose the home if they're given an option. I mean, she's really this radical woman that is remarkably, you know, she's trying to do things that are very avant-garde. And then I think that's the irony is that she ends up doing things very conventionally, unwittingly, that she and Jean-Parc Sartre Sartre had made this vow to one another, and they were these lifelong partners of sorts, even though they both cycled through various other people, um, contingent lovers, they called them. Anyway, so I don't want to get too deep into the Simone de Beauvoir, but I think that that I demonstrate in understanding the first wave is that it was really trying to create a new idea of womanhood that was following a much more masculine idea, that it was denigrating the home, it was denigrating our fertility and the family. These pieces kind of set the stage for then obviously what came next with the the the radicalness of the second wave and then third and fourth, you know, the subsequent waves. So it wasn't the case that the somehow the second wave was this great break or this corrupting factor. And in fact, it was actually just building on what had already been happening for a long time.

Could Reform Happen Without Feminism

Miichele McAloon 9:07

Professor Gross, do you think it it could have evolved differently? The ability for women to own property and to continue into advanced education was severely limited at one time. Do you think it could have evolved differently without feminism? That was a question that I, as I was reading through the book, uh in a way that would have been more healthy. At some point, could you think made that decision? I mean, I was trying to make decisions, I couldn't decide.

Dr Carrie Gress 9:33

Yeah, no, I I think that there absolutely was another way in which, and that's one of the reasons why I use the woman Hannah Moore's work initially, where I'm contrasting her with Mary Wallstonecraft, because Hannah Moore was a contemporary of Wallstone Crafts and actually refused to read Wallstonecraft's work because she could she saw the damage and the problems with it initially. So a hundred percent, I think that in terms of understanding women and the policy decisions and things like education, all of those things could have been shifted and changed through legislation and obviously changing Mores. I mean, you have some really significant shifts happening culturally. So, yeah, I think that those things very much could have happened and were actually happening already. The snapshot that we get of women during that period is a post-Reformation England where David Hume's ideas of property are really taking hold. You also have this sort of Unitarian American Protestant, but it's Unitarian, so it's not even Christian vision going on simultaneously. And this is these are places where there really was this sense of the distorted understanding of women. But simultaneously, you have places like Maryland, where you've got Elizabeth Ann Seaton founding schools for girls and starting the whole parochial system that was actually run in many respects by female religious. So I think that we kind of we look too narrowly in our understanding of what was happening. You also have obviously the Industrial Revolution is happening and people have discretionary income in the way that they didn't before. So daughters and and second, third, fourth sons can finally be sent to school. All of these things are, I think, go into it. So absolutely, I think that what feminism did was it tried to solve the problem of this discontent and the the in many respects the abuse of women by making women less like women, by trying to take away any what they perceived as vulnerabilities and making women more like men. And in that, that's really what what their solution was. And obviously human nature is much more static than they realized. And this is why we're seeing the backlash and why women are so unhappy, because it simply doesn't work.

Sexual Revolution And A New Slavery

Miichele McAloon 11:33

Yeah, and I tell you, you just boy, boy, you nail it on the head because I mean you still see that today is and it's what's so insidious about feminism is people don't even realize that they've bought into it. It's your Dugginson painting. They don't know what even what they're looking at. It's there, it's on in every background, it's it's pernicious, it's insidious. And I tell you, it I cannot help but look at the jer the Jeffrey Epstein thing. Think of that as I mean, that is the extreme, taking it to the extreme end. Because I was looking at it today. I said, I gotta lick the statistics. It was young women, they weren't even young women, they were girls, you know, young teenagers to mid-teenagers. Most of them came from broken homes. There was no father, they were picked because they were socially vulnerable by other women recruiting women recruiting them. Wow, that's that is a long, dangerous trail. It really is. But you can see it.

Dr Carrie Gress 12:30

Well, and I think that what you just said hits on something very important because we, you know, one of the things that feminism compared itself early on was this idea of slavery, that women were enslaved the way that black slaves were in the in the South and in England and Europe. And this is the real problem is because of these distortions, we've just created a new kind of slavery. And they believed it was Christianity that was used by men to enslave women. And this is what we're seeing now is this, first of all, that the abuse hasn't stopped. It's only worsened and heightened, obviously, through things like sex trafficking and whatnot. The point is that we have now the slavery of use and degradation that absolutely came because of feminism and because of the way in which even sexuality has been so distorted, trying to get rid of monogamy as some kind of vital and an essential piece for a thriving civilization. When you get rid of that, and actually I talk about this in my book, The End of Woman, when you get rid of the concept that monogamy is important, a civilization usually has about three generations that it will last. And after that, it will crumble and has to be taken over by something else. And you know, if you look at 1960 as sort of that starting point where monogamy ended, we're not very, we're not very far from that. I think you can see very clearly why this disintegration is happening and it feels like very rapid. And and and the Epstein, I think, is, you know, sort of underscores everything because you just realize that content is just absolutely unbelievable. But you realize how bad things are and how much has been hidden in plain sight, what it is that we've really been dealing with with all of these years, with this true degradation and denigration of women.

Miichele McAloon 14:03

It's it would be one thing if we were victims, but we're not victims of it. We agreed. We went along with it happily. Take those birth control pills, hook up, tender time, all of that, put career ahead of family. We're not victims here, and women are not victims. Women have have absolutely they've volunteered for this, they've signed up for all of this, and it's it's not good.

Victim Language And Church Confusion

Dr Carrie Gress 14:26

Well, and that's the tragedy too, is that, you know, who did this come from? It came from our grandmothers and our mothers and those generations. Obviously, at a certain stage, you you know that there's sort of this invincible ignorance and and it passes through the different generations. But when we've gotten to this point where we can really see the negative fruit of it, it begs the question, why are we maintaining this? And I think this is one of the things that I see in the church so much an issue. Like, why are we hanging on to this language? When we know what it's doing is facilitating in the image, in in the minds of other Catholics, that somehow women really are these victims that need some sort of special status because men are victimizers. And that's an incredibly Marxist set of terms. John Paul II never used those terms and never would agree to that idea. And yet, this is one of the reasons why it's it continues in the church is the sense of, oh, we women have to have feminism. Well, why? We don't have masculinism, we don't have sort of childism. You know, what is it that is so important about that? And again, it comes back to this idea that women have some kind of victimhood status, which I would say is different than vulnerabilities. The vulnerabilities need to be recognized and cared for, but the way that you do that is through a strong church, strong men, and not by pushing away the very thing, which is masculinity and the gifts that men have to be able to protect and provide for women. You know, that's the real tragedy, is that in addition to destroying the womanhood, we've also destroyed men. And we're seeing certainly a lot of that backlash in the culture today as well.

Miichele McAloon 15:53

Absolutely. John Paul II was brilliant. I'm a canon lawyer because of him. I in 1989 he allowed all lay people to become canon lawyers. He didn't say lay women or lay men, he just allowed all lay people when people talk to me about why women can't be priests. I just the idea that women are not ontologically have the same relationship with power as men do, makes cartoon characters of women. That's saying you're less than human. Every human being has a problem with power, right? So why are we why are we going to think that we you give women power that that's gonna solve the problem? You really talk about and in John Paul II talks about the genius of gender and of the voices that we have, the unusual gifts that we have. Women can see things men cannot, men do things that men uh women cannot. And our voices, but we don't hear each other's voices anymore. We don't uh we don't respect each other's voices. Right.

Dr Carrie Gress 16:55

No, I I think that's exactly right. And you know, one of the things that I think is is is really important is getting back to this idea of understanding what it is that woman is called to. And I think we we are absolutely called to be life givers, to be mothers, to mother others, and to recognize that as a gift, given the fact that the church is called holy mother church, the church is called a bride. We know obviously our lady has she's both virgin and mother, to really understand that these are not social constructs, but these are deeply woven into creation by God Himself. And I I think when we start to step back and say, we've been talking about all this doing, you know, what it is that women ought to do and ought not to do. And but I think a lot of those questions really evaporate when you start to understand the importance that that great Idestein quote: women are needed not for what they do, but for who they are, because we're called to be mothers and not just biologically, but spiritually, emotionally, educationally, even healing in the healing arts, you know, we have these incredible gifts. And I think we've spent so much time being told that we have to compete with men and we've got to sort of achieve these different degrees and career, and while at the same time, that real core element that we see even met built into our bodies itself, that idea of being the first home for a child. That's that's what a womb is for. That has really been, I think, a mistaken piece. And that's a piece that we haven't heard for 50 years. We haven't, you know, I know I didn't grow up hearing anything good about becoming a mother. Really have our work cut out for us to be able to start restoring what it really means to be a mother and just the incredible gift that it is, and simultaneously the incredible gift that it is to be a man and to to father, to be a father, whether it's on a again, on a spiritual level, a biological level, that protecting and providing is really essential. I've had women say one woman in particular after a conference say, you know, I need to go home and apologize to my husband because I've tried to do all the things that he's supposed to do. And I realize that what a mistake that's been. He's been left like one of my adult children because I've never allowed him to be who it is that God created him to be. So yeah, I think there's a lot of work that needs to be done on all of this. But the great thing is is we're not reinventing the wheel. We've got this, the incredible models, we have all these saints, we have all the scholarship. And it's time to start digging into that and really seeing the richness of it instead of chasing after yet one other scheme to so-called liberate women.

Miichele McAloon 19:19

So Doris, what you're saying too, is like women can still be engineers, they can still be pilots, they can still be they can still do all of this. It really is where in our understanding of who we are and what we bring to the table, what we bring to the family, that that is privileged and it should be privileged. So you're not saying barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. I think I appreciate those things. She's talking something flexible and imaginative, really.

Practical Starts: Envy Emotions Local Love

Dr Carrie Gress 19:45

Well, and that's, I think, the exciting part about it too, is that you can imagine a woman who understands her capacity and gift to love others. What she's a very different woman in the workplace when she understands that. People, she's magnetic. People are dying to be around that kind of maternal goodness. Not a mommy dearest, not a devouring mother, not someone who's manipulating you, but a woman who's authentically giving herself to the very people around her. Instead of feeling like she's a gotta be in competition with people all the time, or she has to cut people down, or whatever it is that we know happens in the workplace all the time. If a woman comes to that workplace in a way where she understands she's meant to give this sincere gift of herself to others and be kind and help them see the best in themselves and remember birthdays and, you know, all of those small things, that is a huge change, not only in the workplace, but also in her own experiential life, because her relationships will deep, will be deeper and richer. You know, all of that makes her someone that people want to be around instead of what we see so much in in the work culture today, which is something that people are repulsed by, are afraid of. You know, that's never a good place to be when people are afraid of you in in work or home. But I think we, you know, when we sort this out and understand what it means to be providing life in the workspace, then that's going to look a lot different too, in much healthier ways. Where do we start?

Miichele McAloon 21:05

How does this start?

Dr Carrie Gress 21:07

Well, I I've asked myself that the question a lot. Obviously, you got people should read my book. I think women are, it's really incumbent upon women to make the first step. And this is why I continued to write about this. I think a lot of people say, oh, well, it's men's fault. Well, no, actually, women were the one that changed in the 60s and 70s, especially with sexual promiscuity. So I think that's the one of the key pieces is helping women understand the importance of monogamy and their fertility. That's huge. Second of all, the role of emotions. This is one of the reasons why we have such a disaster, is because we have done a great job of pointing out that, you know, men's fundamental sin other than pride is usually lust. We've talked about this as a church over and over again, but w do we ever talk about envy in women? And this is a really important piece. Women are sort of naturally wired to be competitive with others because of our weakness biologically, and so, and because the vulnerability that we have when raising children. So we need to start looking at that and really be critical of ourselves and see, you know, the ways in which envy is driving us and leading us to make decisions or to treat other people. That's another important piece. And then I think the third idea is really how do we get control of our emotions so that we're not being led by them, especially this idea of misplaced compassion where we have this sense like, as long as I feel compassionate about this, I can change the world.

unknown 22:24

Right.

Dr Carrie Gress 22:25

There's nothing more toxic because this is sort of what leads to the girl that works for PETA, but she's aborting her own child. It's a complete inversion of the order of creation. And God meant for women their love to be very local. When you have children, you experience this all the time. You know, this your hip is always being used and your hands and your breasts and all of that body is being used. But also your face and just the way your children respond to your voice and your scent. All of those things are very, very important. But you can also see that in the richness of relationships and the way people are drawn to others through through the local. And I think this is one of the reasons why the loneliness issue is so acute right now, because women have been the fabric to see, oh goodness, that person that, you know, they just someone just died in the family, or that woman's about ready to have a child and she needs help. We intuit that very, very easily. And then we want to respond to it. So that's really where we need to start channeling our energies is back to something local. And of course, we know that God, when we we can be trusted in the small things, He gives us bigger things. So that's not to say that we can't ever do big things or that women are incapable of doing big things, but just to recognize the importance of these virtues in our life and the importance of the local. And then that's not a small thing, you know, that's not something to look down upon. And I love the quote from Mother Teresa where she says, if you want to change the world, go home and love your family. Because that's really where it has to start. And we know that when women don't love their family, we're, you know, we're seeing the fruit of that. We've got all of this mental illness, particularly the cluster B syndromes that are attached to a deficit of affection from the zero the ages of zero to three. Those are things like narcissism and histrionics and and borderline personality. Those are are absolutely connected with children who haven't had a a primary caregiver that affirmed them properly. So this is, you know, these are not small issues, but I think the way in which we change them doesn't have to be huge. We don't have to, again, reinvent the wheel. We just need to go back to what we know worked and then back to the order that God has given us because it's beautiful and it's compelling when it's actually understood properly and used properly.

Gen Z Pushback Tradwives And Hope

Miichele McAloon 24:29

Toxic, I call toxic empathy because women are empathetic, they're going to put their empathy somewhere. And if they have it, if they're not in a structure where they put their empathy, they're gonna put it to some and it to some bad things. You see, I like masculinity too. If masculinity is not channeled right, it can go into bad things. We're human beings and we have to have it channeled. I do have to tell you, one of my nieces just went to a Erica Kirk, and she came back and she told me her friends have decided they want to marry early because they don't want to waste their fertility. And I thought that's amazing. Wow, that is a heck of a heck of an admission. And I don't I have comments about Erica Kirk. Don't know her, don't know what her thing is, but I thought that was really, really influential. Is this the new, maybe these are the new influencers in our society because they've seen the wreckage of what has happened?

Dr Carrie Gress 25:25

Well, and that's what I'm seeing a lot as well. If you're talking to Gen X or boomer women, you're gonna usually hit a lot of concrete. Obviously, they there's exceptions. I'm a Gen X. So I I think that there are there people are changing their minds. But among younger women, there seems to be this openness to it. They don't have the baggage of feminism the way that so many of us were raised with it, and they have seen the wreckage and they don't, they don't want that. But they've also been offered a different model, I think, that we didn't have growing up. And and those are really important. This is one of the reasons why I've done my work with theology of home, is to try to help women understand that the models on offer, whether it's the girl boss or the doormat of a woman with no will, that's not normal. And that's not what healthy woman, neither one of those is what healthy woman looks like. So I think one of the things that we're seeing that's fascinating is that the trad wife element, which obviously it's got its own problems and can be over-commercialized and whatnot. But the just the fact that you have a a different option than the what I grew up with, I think makes a huge difference in terms of women thinking outside the box and thinking about, well, what is it that I really want and how do I move forward with this and asking the right questions. So I'm really heartened by the the younger generation of women. And I think that it's just a matter of of time because of the fact that they have experience it. They were put in daycare very, very early and didn't they don't want that for their children. And so I think that it's really beautiful. They really see the importance, you know, they don't want to be early divorced or several divorces. Those kinds of things have had a lasting effect and have not been glamorized in their life. They've they've really felt them intensely. So I think there's a lot of hope with the upcoming generations, especially young men too. Obviously, we've got some issues with this, the a more radical bent where young men are are really looking at women with a kind of contempt. And I think that's one of the height at all. And I'm not endorsing that. And I think it's actually a reaction to the kind of contempt that they've experienced from radical feminists. So it's just a mere image of that. But by and large, it seems like there's there's a lot of really great young men that have their heads on straight and are are really seeking for something deeper and a better truth. And this is why we're seeing so many come into the church and really convert to Christianity and take it seriously in the way that other generations haven't.

Miichele McAloon 27:38

How did you get started in this? How did you get started? I mean, what was the trigger that made you go down this road? So what what started this for you?

Dr Carrie Gress 27:47

Yeah, well, I mean, I I think part of it was my own desire to see the women in my life happy, to see them r love the church. Certainly that was part of it. And I actually said when I was in graduate school that I would never work on women's issues. I think I said it out loud to God one day in my kitchen. And um, God has a sense of humor. But part of it what I didn't like about it was that I thought it was overly intellectual. And I thought this is, you know, these books on womanhood are are absolutely not anything I could ever give to my sisters, to my mother, to my friends. This is just incredibly frustrating. And so I think that was one of the things once I finished my PhD was just the realization, first of all, that I could write books when you write a dissertation. It's sort of not always the same thing, but I was really drawn to more popular kind of writing. And that was the desire was to sort of start looking at the culture and seeing, you know, why is it and especially the pro-life issue. I mean, this has been something that's been really formed in me from a very young age was this idea of why is it that we live in this culture where it's socially acceptable to kill your own child. If you look at the numbers, especially dwarfs anything that any other ideology has done. And it's done by parents of their own children. Like it's not soldiers that are foreign soldiers that are unrelated bloodlines to own generation. So uh I think it's those kinds of things that not only led me to it, but have kept me at it and helped me realize, you know, this is the engine behind feminism, is the engine because women are need to be autonomous. And therefore, you have to be able to have access to abortion in order to main remain autonomous and be have that work opportunities or financial opportunities. So I think until we figure that out as a culture and as pro-lifers, I think we're gonna just keep chasing our tail in in terms of the abortion debate. But it seems like people are open to hearing this at this stage in in history right now. And so it's very, it's, you know, it's been one of those things that I didn't expect to get into, but the more I keep realizing just how wrong what it is, everything that we've been told about feminism in general, and then more specifically about Catholicism and feminism, driven me for deeper and deeper into really looking at what's there and what it is that the church really stands for and teaches and and why it is so deeply incompatible with the ideology of feminism.

Miichele McAloon 30:02

It really is. Autonomy and independence are not human. Interdependence is human. Right. It's just we need each other, we live in communion, we I mean, this is the human experience, folks, and interdependence. We depend on each other and we have to, and being an independent woman and being an autonomous woman is deadly and lonely, you know.

Dr Carrie Gress 30:24

It just is.

Miichele McAloon 30:52

Absolutely. That is just, I mean, the Pew Trust came out and said that women are getting more and more radical. And it just it all links together that younger women tend to be a lot of younger women tend to be more and more radical. Well, Dr. Grass, you are this book, I it truly is amazing. You're such a great observer of what is happening now. And you give the history of what is happening now and also some hope for the future. And folks, whether you like it or not, it probably is through the church. It can be Catholic or Protestant, but a church that upholds traditional values, traditional family values. This isn't old-fashioned, this is just traditional where you're going to be able to flourish, grow, and have a bright and beautiful future because of the roles that we play, the proper roles, the roles of creation order. So while it is your book is a little dire, but it's also very full of hope. And like I said, I'm planning on spreading it among my female relatives. I'm thank you. Well, I appreciate that. And it'll be a good book for men to read too, so they understand.

Dr Carrie Gress 31:59

I have a lot of male readers. I would say actually actually equal. It's really amazing how interested men are in this because I think feminism has really silenced men. My books have been a way for them to see like what's happened and why there's so much misery and and really, you know, have a sense of hope as well.

Miichele McAloon 32:16

Right. And I'm really interested in to see what happened. So we had the DEI and all of that disaster, and then we have the manosphere. I want to see what comes next. And maybe the thing that comes next is maturity.

Final Takeaways And Buy The Book

Dr Carrie Gress 32:28

Well, one can hope, but but that's the idea is that if we get back to these basic understanding and roles of masculine and feminine, it's not going to matter what the trends are. They're able to withstand that and be sustained. Trends change. There's something, there's kind of a baseline underneath that. And I think that's what's happened historically. So we need to recover the baseline or the foundation. And then on top of that, then the trends can can happen and come and go. So I think that's an important piece is just how do we build this foundation again? Because you're not going to get to maturity until you have that real foundation. So yeah, we've definitely got our work cut out for us.

Miichele McAloon 33:02

All right, guys, by the book, it's the instructions. Dr. Grafts, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy academic schedule. Mother of five children. This is a busy woman to to talk to us today. My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.