Hey everyone. Before we dive into today's episode, I have a quick but really important update for you. So, as some of you may know, a couple of weeks ago I shared on the podcast that moving to Substack was actually impacting the business side of the podcast in some really financially tough ways for me this year. And thanks to those of you that have reached out, I have had just so much amazing support coming out of that episode. And a few of you that knew how to look into the data and the numbers, we have realized that part of what's most important is having those of you that are my diehard listeners move back to Apple and Spotify. So because of that, we've made the decision to not post episodes of the podcast over on Substack anymore. And instead, for those of you that want to support me and this show and helping it get back out and kind of get that momentum it had previously, the best things you can do for me right now is to switch over to listening on Apple or Spotify. To if you haven't already in either of those spaces, to hit the follow button and then to leave a quick review or a comment. On Spotify, you can actually leave comments. Over on Apple, you can leave a review. It takes two seconds, but it will make a massive difference for me over in the algorithms. And then for those of you that listen every Tuesday, keep listening over on those platforms. For my Substack babes, my subscribers over there, don't worry. Although this was the heart of what we were doing on Substack, there's gonna be even more for you now because we're putting the podcast back over on these platforms. But on Substack, this is gonna be my place where I'm gonna be dropping my extra goodies. When I've got an extra, you know, values worksheet or a tarot freebie, this is where I'll be sending it. So I'm very grateful for all of you backing me as we make this pivot and we shift back into hopefully what will be more growth. Now, let's get into the episode for today. Welcome to the Stay or Go podcast, where we're changing the dialogue around divorce so that no woman ever stays in her marriage out of fear. Get ready to dispel myths, learn life-changing tools, and build a solid foundation in yourself from which to make your decision. And now your host, me, Britta Joe. Hello, loves. Welcome back this week. This is a two-part series. Last week you got to dive in with me and Quinn into Gerda Lerner's first book. The create well, not her first book, but the first book in this. Yes. And the first book in this two-part series that she wrote, a book called The Creation of Patriarchy, which I'm sure Quinn, when we got on to record this one, she was like, Oh my God, I listened to our episode and I would want to be friends with us.
SPEAKER_00Right. Right. So everyone hearing this, come be friends with us. We are so much fun.
SPEAKER_04And it was so beautiful because she pointed out I um wrote an article on Substack before the episode was released, just mentioning what it was like meeting a woman who, in my opinion, had feminist consciousness back in Oakland, speaking her own mind. And it was a beautiful reflection point moment of Quinn basically helping me see, like, oh, that woman that spoke her mind back then, that's where you and I are at right now, Quinn. And it's really fucking fun.
SPEAKER_00It is. It is so much more fun to speak rather than to swallow your words, to have thoughts and share them without needing to measure and calibrate yourself based on what you think someone else will think.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_00We're here to educate, we're here to discuss. And we're okay if people agree or disagree, but we're here to be a full expression of ourselves. And that's what we really want for women is full expressions of themselves.
SPEAKER_04And in true uh stay or go community style, we are rocking our red lips. For those of you watching the video, there's a woman in the community that we just all adore and adore. She's a a definite role model. Anytime she gets on the calls, everybody's like, tell us, tell us your life. She's actually post-divorced. But we're sending out a little shout out to her with the red lips. Mm-hmm, we love you. Okay, she is. Plus, I love that red lips are uh historically a sign of feminism.
SPEAKER_00So yes, yes. I saw some real where this girl was saying, I'm a feminist, so I can wear dresses, and it's being stitched with very accomplished.
SPEAKER_04Well, she was she was saying, yeah, well, she was saying not a feminist. So I can wear dresses. And then yes, being stitched with which was the one you saw?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it was this woman who has changed laws, been an astronaut, like very accomplished woman, and she's like, I am a feminist, so I can wear whatever the hell I want, which includes dresses, which includes red lips, which includes being an astronaut, which includes being an icon, like full expression, not just the dress, not just the children, not just a wife. Yes. Full expression. Oh, I just it's so much better being fully ourselves. So much better.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. And the book that we're gonna talk about today is going to take us through this second part of the history that Gerda felt was so important for us as women to know in order to be full expressions of ourselves. As we learned in the creation of patriarchy, this is this is new and recent. Women being able to be an astronaut and an icon and wear whatever they want and provide for themselves. This is very recent in our history. And um, it didn't just come about. It came about through, as Gerda describes in this next book, 1500 years of women in our history having to fight for those rights, having to argue for their intelligence, having to push back on the roles that they had been placed into, and really saying, I have more to offer. I deserve to be treated as an equal and full human being.
SPEAKER_00I'm really excited for this conversation because I have not read this second book. And so, but you know, I have this intense curiosity. My my version of female history and women's history is like, I know about the suffragettes, and that's kind of the extent of what I know. I know these little blips through history, Joan of Arc. But she was listed. She was in the book. Yeah, so I'm excited to have this conversation, just like the people who are going to be listening to this in your communities who love you and your podcast. We all get to sit here and be curious. I'll be the one asking some questions as far as like clarification as you walk us through this. But I am so excited to be educated by an educated woman.
SPEAKER_04Yes, I'm so delighted to dive in with you. And because of that, because I read this one, Quinn Didn't, which is gonna kind of give us a fun flavor for this second episode. I am going to read a little bit more. I am gonna have some just juicy, really juicy quotes from Gerda that I'm gonna be sharing when we go through this section. Um, it kind of broke my heart too. I just have to say this. When Gerda originally wrote these books, the creation of feminist consciousness, this book, this was her, this was her dream. This was the book she wanted to write. But in starting to write it, she realized she needed to write the creation of patriarchy ahead of it to like set the scene. And what's so tragic, but really on brand with our with our world is that when you go look up these books, you know, when I was looking up the links to the post in the episode last week, you can find a PDF of the creation of patriarchy free online. So you can go read that book right now. But when you get to the creation of feminist consciousness, it you can't find it. It's like it's you you you have to buy it in print. It's not, there's not a PDF of it, even though it was published right after her other book. You tried to listen to it on Audible. There's no audio for it. No, nowhere. Yeah, that's I mean, that's the main reason you did not read this book. Quinn is a she listens, she's an audiobook listener, and there's no audiobook for it. So because of that, I wanted an opportunity to also be able to read some of her words. Cause boy, is this where she starts to really just lay it down. Lay it down, Gerda. Give it to us. Okay. So to dive us in, I think where we have to start off is just defining what feminist consciousness is.
SPEAKER_00Because Yeah, that's a really interesting idea because we throw around words like feminism, and people will say I'm not a feminist, but they will be voting, they'll be wearing pants, they'll be, you know, having a job, speaking their mind. And you're like, okay, what do you mean by you're not a feminist? So tell me, what does she, how does she define feminist consciousness?
SPEAKER_04Yeah. So she says feminist consciousness consists of the awareness of women that they belong to a subordinate group, that they have suffered wrongs as a group, that their condition of subordination is not natural, but is society determined, that they must join with other women to remedy these wrongs. And finally, that they must and can provide an alternate vision of societal organization in which women as well as men will enjoy autonomy and self-determination. So I think that's a huge I know, and that's a huge point to make of realizing, like, oh yeah, there are plenty of women out there wearing pants, receiving the benefits of what women that have developed feminist consciousness and fought for this alternate vision of societal organization and one right. There are plenty of women benefiting from that that do not actually have feminist consciousness.
SPEAKER_00Right. They don't see subordination as a natural. They see it as natural, or they don't see that they have suffered wrongs as a group. Yes. There are a lot of parts of this that I could see someone taking advantage of the rights that we have fought for and yet not consider themselves feminists when you look at this list, not having feminist consciousness. Okay.
SPEAKER_04And we'll we'll talk about that too later on. This, you know, when we get into women advocating for education, like equal rights of education, there are quite a few women who advocate for it, not so that women can think for themselves, but from the role of like, well, yes, women are subordinate to men, but for them to be good mothers, they need to be educated. And they actually, you know, here they're advocating for women to have equal rights of education, but they are very clear they do not believe that women should be equal with men. So it's it's a it's an important thing to notice that, yeah, there are women in the world that are benefiting from the rights that feminist consciousness has won for them, but they do not actually have feminist consciousness themselves. And it has taken, as I said before, 1,500 years for us to really reach this point of feminist consciousness being as widespread, in my opinion, as it is today. Now, going back, Gerda covers so many different areas, but I tried to go back and kind of do it as historically as we could. And one of the things that she mentioned straight out the gate that is the biggest problem when we look at women's rights, at women being able to move through the world as full and equal humans is the educational disadvantaging of women. And she makes this point where traditionalists, and by traditionalists, people who are like, men are definitely the higher sex, women are supposed to be subordinate, will say things like, well, if women are equal, why haven't they built the giant systems of Western civilization? Where is the female Kant? Where is the female Marx? Where's the female Freud? And she snaps back so beautifully by taking us into the very, very real historical reality that by the time Western civilization really started, as we know from the creation of patriarchy, women had already been placed in a subordinate role. It was just assumed because men looked around at society and the culture and went, oh, this must be natural. This is just the way things have always been. And then proceeded to place women in that position going forward onwards.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, this reminds me of a book I have read called Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner? And it's about Adam Smith, who was the philosopher father of capitalism, and how while he was coming up with this idea of personal property and human motivation and how things work in the world, he had a very short-lived marriage, as I recall. And then he lived with his mommy, who took care of him for the rest of his fucking life. And so, but he didn't consider the free labor of women. Like that, in no country is that considered as part of the gross domestic product, the GDP, the the wealth of a nation. All of these women doing free labor and free caretaking. And so, as we I mean, and you think of it from Adam Smith's position, I think he he was writing this in like the 1700s. I mean, why would he consider the pot or the rug or his mother? I mean, they're just pieces of property that are there to support him.
SPEAKER_04Yes.
SPEAKER_00And so, yeah, you grow up in this system where it's just taken for granted that there are these humanoid, um, what do my kids call it? NPCs, non-playable playable characters.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. Yes, yes, this is why women were not educated. Because it was like, oh, leave that to the men. Like that is that is our role with our big smart man brains. And yes, your job is to feed and take care of us. And so obviously, if you are actively not educating an entire half of the population, and that other half is getting hundreds upon hundreds of years of being educated and the men before them educating the men after them, you are going to see a gap in the amount of Marx's and Kant's and Freud's being men, and you're gonna go, where are the women? But Gerda made two huge points on this, where she is like, No, no, no, no, hold up. There absolutely have been such women, but we have not, first off, sufficiently respected them in the narrative of the past. And in the book, she talks about that. She's like, there were these women that the little vestiges they've written or the things they were able to record that's existed, we can show there were women that were brilliant, but we one didn't give them the credit they deserved. And two, because of the gender-based privilege of men receiving a formal education, women who might have been geniuses, who might have been the female Freud were actively and intentionally pushed back into the servitude of what women were expected to do. And at multiple points in the book, she talks about this: that the route for any woman that was an intellectual was excruciating. Women that spoke up were uh I think one of the words she said is like men would call them de-sexed. They were like, it was like this mean like they were like blue stocking old maids. Like as soon as you as a woman showed you had a brain, you were no longer desirable at all sexually. So it's the whole, which is just the history of women is you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. It is a double bind. Either way, you're not going to be able to have what men have. They will find a way for it to be uncomfortable for you.
SPEAKER_00Yes. And we see now as more and more women have created the um academic path of women's history, we're seeing more and more of our history uncovered. And the number of times that a man, whether it was Einstein taking the work of his wife or um Mozart's sister, was actually the true genius in the family. You know, these these women, but but it wasn't okay. It wasn't their place. And so they don't get the credit. And we have to kind of work for it. But there are incredible creators out there on social media and Substack and good books and women's anthologies, where we're starting to uncover the genius that has always been there. Yes, always just the last, you know, few decades that we've been able to go to university. Women have always been brilliant. It's who we are.
SPEAKER_03We're brilliant.
SPEAKER_04It's just that we were in a system where if you publish, and Gerda, there's a whole section where she talks about this that women writers, if you published under a female name, you were risking losing all your friends, losing your ability to move through the world. And so, yeah, a lot of women funneled their talents into publishing under a male pseudonym, or women who married men and then, you know, were translating. There was one woman, I think she translated the Bible like five times. And still it was a passing footnote that she had done that. While meanwhile, other men that are doing the same things are being recorded in history. Yeah, William Tyndale does it once, and they're like, oh my God. No, literally. That's that's what we're talking about. And that's what she does in this book is she's trying to once again pull back the poisonous falsehoods of a history written by men that tells us only half of the human race created all of this. And I loved you saying no, women have always been brilliant. So, big takeaway is understanding absolutely, there were female Kants and female Freuds, but they couldn't develop. Develop into their full potential because they were being actively suppressed and denied education. And then the ones that were there, their writings were destroyed. As we'll talk about later, they kind of had to reinvent the wheel each time. But before we move away from education, I want to emphasize this point that she said. Until 1837, women were unable to enroll in any college or university. And it was not until 1920, so over a hundred years later, when women were finally 47% of the college undergraduate, that women achieved equal access to college education with men.
SPEAKER_00And it wasn't, I mean, to say equal access is I think it's really pushing it. Because there are some colleges that remained male segregated and they they tended to be the upper echelon, the Ivy League. And so, you know, in order to placate the women, they would make, you know, the sister colleges that where you're across the street, you're not in Harvard, you're in Harvard Light, you're in Radcliffe, and you're there to marry the men that are going to be the power brokers. So even equal access is like it's the whole separate but equal thing.
SPEAKER_04It it it parallels slavery exactly. You know, just because the legislation says this does not mean that in practice we are not still experiencing massive discrimination in the everyday movements of going to a university. So not only though does she point out, so this was the other thing that blew my mind, is like, okay, so in the 1920s, like, okay, yay, we finally got equal access. But then as we go through the societal movements around that time, she said that actually the low point for women's enrollment in the 20th century came in 1960, when women were 35% of all students with a BA or first professional degree, and only 10% of doctorates. That is huge to understand because it shows us that here in 1920, we could have 47% of women in college undergraduates. By 1960, we fall into 35%. What's happening? The tragedy of heterosexuality, the book we did, go back and listen to those episodes, right? It's understanding that there have always been big movements within societies. This like three steps forward, two steps back for women. And we have to remember that in today's day and age, where I know, I know before I started reading a lot of this, before you and I really started waking up to movements in the world around women's rights. You go about your day thinking, yeah, I'm a woman, I'm free, I can do what I want. I can have a credit card, I can drive a car here in the US, right? Not in other countries for other women. Holy shit. Iran is the scariest story to me of how much women's freedom can be completely decimated by a regime change that has fanatical patriarchal religious underpinnings, foundational, not even underpinnings, you know? Um, so it's important to remember that this movement is ongoing. We have not reached like a, and now we're good. We as women are still actively watching our rights be considered, pushed around, considered being rolled back in today's day and age.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I'm actually reading a physical book right now that is excellent, and it's about um, it's in the 1960s as it begins. And so, yes, you have the right to get an education. Like there are certain places you could go, but you can still be fired for getting married, for getting pregnant, like you the access to use your knowledge, and this book, it's called The Exceptions. Excellent, excellent book. But it shows that even for these women that have the same education as their husband, their husband gets published. The husband can request grant money and they work for their husband if they are lucky enough to be able to marry someone who allows them to work, allows them. And but they are like research techs. They don't get to have the full expression, they don't even have the right to full expression. So it's like, yeah, you can go, you can go to class, but to actually work to to put your contribution in the world. No.
SPEAKER_04I'm so glad you brought this up because this takes us to the next point that Gerda underlines and drives home, which is not only are we as women suffering from educational disadvantagement for hundreds of years, um, we also, in a much deeper sense, because and here I'll caveat the caveat this by saying, you know, the differences for men and women in education, she makes the point of saying, like, really, until we started universities, there probably wasn't that big of a difference because education was really based on class. So until universities starting coming in and we really started actively educating men and intentionally not educating lower class women, that's where we started to see the divide. But there's something that goes far, farther back than educational disadvantaging, which is the concept of self-authorization. What is that? What do you mean by that? Let's dive into this, Quinn. So I think of self-authorization as the ability within yourself to believe I have a right to think my own ideas, and I also have a right to speak those.
SPEAKER_00So okay. Yes. My brain is like, it's fracturing right now with my my Mormonism, because I think within within these certain um religions, men don't even have that right. And so the women within those religions that are lesser than men, because I mean, within within hind-aband religions, you're not really um securely attached to your parents, I think, as much as you are to the organization. And then in these patriarchal organizations, you know, only certain men get to think. But for women, if I had a problem as a woman and felt like I needed inspiration from God, I was required to go to the men to get a blessing or to go to man God and man God's son to tell me what to do. Like it was always directing me towards a man. This is this is kind of breaking my brain right now, just kind of thinking about it.
SPEAKER_04Well, yeah, I I love that your brain is breaking in real time around this because you have just identified exactly where Goethe traces it back to, which is the reason women struggle with self-authorization has its roots in the misogynistic explanatory systems that dominate church doctrine and that shaped the ideas of gender. These are the beliefs which we talked about in the creation of patriarchy, that there is a God-given inferiority of women. And since that antedated Christianity, and then Christianity took that and ran with it, in the world. Boy, did they run? Oh my God. And she emphasizes that. She's like, that was greatly elaborated in the centuries after that, where the church began to really consolidate into that strongly hierarchical institution dependent on the male clergy. So before women can even start to be writers to express their opinions, they had to remove three obstacles. So the first one was that they had to prove that they were indeed authors of their own work, because often women would write stuff and men would say, You didn't really write this. So if you want to write anything, you have to first prove that you did it, which you usually have to do by like having another dude that watched you do it vouch for you. Second, you have to prove that you have a right to even express your own thoughts. And I know it's circular. And third, you have to prove that your thought is rooted in a different experience and in a different type of knowledge from that of your patriarchal mentors and predecessors. It is a shit show. I and that's why I'm looking at Quinn's face. The amount of hoops that women have to jump through in the beginning when we track back through history, when they're trying to say, I have a different viewpoint or I have a different idea, it's like at literally every single step, not only do you have to prove that you actually wrote it, but you have to prove that you have a right to write it because God says you're the lesser sex. So technically you shouldn't be even doing this. And even with all of that, what is amazing, and this is what Goethe says, I'll quote this. She says, there is no stronger evidence available to show that there always were women who never accepted the patriarchal gender definitions, which defined them as inherently inferior and incapable of reasoning, than the many women that took up Bible criticism. As far back as the second century A.D., women were pushing back.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and I mean, you and I, we come from Christian backgrounds, but this is the same within, you see it in Islam, um, within the Hindu god hierarchies. I am not as familiar with the Jewish tradition, though, you know, I've read some memoirs, and it seems like anytime you decide that some idea is just unquestionable, no matter how stupid it sounds, and you're like, but God said it's probably not true. That's that's what I've come to. That's probably the shit you need to be questioning.
SPEAKER_04If that's your foundation, like, well, God's something, yeah, something that is is held as so sacred that nobody is allowed to question it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And I love you pointing out there have always been women who are like, um, no, fuck you. This is what I think.
SPEAKER_02Yes.
SPEAKER_00And I'm certain they paid a price for that. You know, whether it was shunning or maybe it was people of only a certain class who had certain protections. I don't know. What tell me, tell me? Let me tell you.
SPEAKER_04Yes, tell me. I'm like, yes, this is this is the question I want. So it actually ranges. Yes, there were women. There were actual abbesses. That's where a lot of the writing that we have preserved are women in convents.
SPEAKER_00Okay, okay. So women who were not being used for their reproductive capabilities, who had married Jesus so that they could take care of themselves and other women. Though, I mean, they did have some priests around doing priest stuff.
SPEAKER_04And and Gerda talks about that, where she's like, this is how smart women are. They find ways, even within the systems they have been trapped within. You cannot keep, you cannot keep these bitches down. Like, it's just not this whole we are the subordinate, lesser sex. You go back in history and you're like, no, that's not the case. So you do, you see, what women had to do in this, you know, thousand-year stretch of having to fight against the doctrines in the Bible and the way they had been interpreted. Women across all classes at different periods of time are writing. You see, abbesses who are having to go the mystic route, where they have these mystical visions. And so they use the idea of being a mystic, which I think they really genuinely believed. If you read their writings, they were having their own mystical experiences, but they use that as a way to validate their thoughts, the visions they're receiving.
SPEAKER_00I love this. I love this. If the dudes are gonna say God said, the girlies are gonna be like, yeah, God said.
SPEAKER_04And, you know, in the readings of those women, I really genuinely believe which makes sense. We we've seen throughout history humans have mystical experiences. You know, we have so many religions. Obviously, it's not a glitch, but more of a, you know, part of the way humans interact with the world, wanting to find meaning. So these women, I truly believe, were having their own mystical experiences and visions. But the point is that's what allowed them the credibility. So some of them found it through becoming mystics. Um, that worked well for women who were within the protected sanctity of convents. Other women that were having mystical experiences often ended up on the fringes. And then women, as we get further and further, especially when we get into the dark ages and burning women at the stake, these are the women who are called heretics. These are the women that are being wiped out. These are women that are part of the sex that are kind of breaking off and saying, hey, we don't like the way religion is right now. We think it should be this way. There were absolutely always women and often like huge women proponents that were a part of those movements that were often then tamped down and suppressed in varying waves. The main thing to understand is that women really had to wage what Goethe called an intellectual war in the arena of religion for over a millennium before they could even move to starting to conceive of more political solutions. So once again, like we did in the creation of patriarchy, emphasizing that religion is a massive and the ideas that are patriarchal in religion is a massive stronghold of what has made it so difficult for women to have equal rights. So Goethe talked about how, you know, she said specifically in the 11th century, so jumping back a little bit more, the average age for men and women was around 28 years. And demographers were saying that most women would have probably had five to seven successful pregnancies during 20 years of their childbearing age. So, what that means when we think back on the history of women is most women would spend their entire adult lifespan pregnant or nursing a child while working in the field, taking care of everything at home. And and that's a big key to emphasize too, because when I, you know, a a theme that I want running through this is the whole why are we still saying that women need to be in the roles that they were in back in the 11th century when that is what women's lives looked like?
SPEAKER_00Right, Quinn? Because I mean, you look at the the Bible and it was, you know, bronze age. And so are we gonna say, well, you know, we should still, I mean, matches weren't a thing then, electricity wasn't a thing then. Um indoor plumbing was definitely not a thing then. We should do that because in the Bible, people chat outside. We should go do the same. And yet we we cherry-pick these pieces, or even I I remember coaching a a Christian woman in my practice, and she was really struggling because she wanted this full expression of her life, but the Bible, the Bible, the Bible, and I'm like, but you know, in the Bible, rape is okay, and in the Bible, slavery is okay. Like to be a Christian and say the Bible is infallible, you must cherry pick because there's so many contradictions with our modern life and modern morals and modern sensibilities for most of us. But I think for many of us to look with clear eyes at a if you want to call it scripture, if you want to call that God's word, you've you have to cherry pick it. But why are you cherry picking those parts? Yeah why are you not cherry-picking the part where Deborah leads an army or where Tabitha is the greatest miracle worker? Why why aren't we why aren't we cherry-picking those parts where we're saying women are fucking unbelievable?
SPEAKER_04Like Well, and this, I I part of us talking about religion so much through this is us realizing how much like, oh, patriarchy and the suppression of women are absolutely hand in hand with religion. And I definitely want to do an episode with Quinn in the future where we get to dive into like, I feel like that's what so many Christian religions that in the US right now, people in Christian religions are realizing. With, you know, I know people that consider themselves Christians that don't agree with all of what we would term the white Christian nationalism, which I would offer is more of the like strict Bible, women need to be in the home. This is how it should be. And it's really important for those listening that consider themselves Christians. You need to understand the history of all of this. And this is why I think a lot of people have seen it recently, you know, posting about like, well, Jesus, that's not what Jesus taught, right? In many ways, Jesus was a radical preaching against the established patriarchal norms of his time. In fact, in a lot of the repressed books that were taken out of the Bible, you find women have a bigger role. So it's it's just expanding our awareness of the systems, the history, especially if you came from Christianity, you've been taught a specific history through a specific lens. And being able to realize, like you said, oh, anybody who tells you this is the word and don't question it, you gotta check back on the history of where that word came from, which is what we dissected in the creation of patriarchy episode last week. Now, I want to take us to another section. So, as we're understanding of like how are women self-authorizing, how are they finding their ways to say, my voice matters? Another big area was motherhood. So, this is key too for understanding why it's been difficult for women as a group to come together, which is that as I think I said this in the creation of patriarchy, women were your competition. When the goal is a man, you're not really going to be able to unite in sisterhood. But what did unite women, especially if you think of women only living about 30 years and having seven plus pregnancies over that time period was the experience of motherhood and having to go through that together. You know, women were experiencing miscarriages, stillbirths, children that were dying. Who was comforting those women? Other women. Who was there at the births of those women? Other women. That was the network supporting. Women. And when we look back in the writing too, that's where women started to advocate for education, for receiving equal rights to being educated, was like, we are the ones raising the future leaders of the nation. This is where we get something she called Republican motherhood, which is when the US was formed, women advocated for let us also be educated because we're going to be the mothers of the future leaders.
SPEAKER_00Yes. There's a quote, I don't know who said this, but she who rocks the cradle rules the nation, something like that. And I think within our background, women were encouraged to be educated so we could be, you know, educate our children. Yes. And just in case, if your husband dies, you know, that you won't have to rely upon the government. You won't have to rely on other people. You can be self-sufficient, but it's not because of you deserve full expression or your ideas are valuable. It's like you'll be less of a burden.
SPEAKER_04When I saw this part, I was like, oh, this is so huge to understand for what we're experiencing right now with women in the white Christian nationalist movement or in that range, who are like, yes, women deserve equal rights so that they can be better mothers, so that they can be good wives. It's once you understand, oh, this is a historical growth piece around feminist consciousness, this idea that women deserve to be educated equally, but it stops. It does not reach that full level of seeing yourself as an equal. And that's why sometimes when I see women advocating for this, it can feel so frustrating and confusing for me watching them be like, we want to have an education, but just so we can pour it into our husbands and our sons.
SPEAKER_00It's male-centered. It's just at the core of it is I want to do better so I can do better for my man. Yes. My children who are, you know, the offspring of this man, rather than I want full expression and full life for myself. And it does go back to the Bible where there's that scripture about women's desire will be towards her husband or whatever. But that's that's a trained response. Yes. It's a trained response because you know, if you didn't give all of your desire to your husband and work towards keeping yourself safe, you you could die. And so like you had to operate. This is natural that we just had to operate.
SPEAKER_04Love it within the rules. Yes. And women learned how to do that. And women are still doing that today. That's very important to understand. And you and I both know that. Same. Raised as like, yeah, get an education because that's where you'll meet your husband is at college.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_04I love you bringing up this piece of, you know, pour it all into your husband. Because another important point that Gerda makes is that for women, as we emphasized earlier, there was the intellectual cost of needing to take care of their husbands at the same time as their own, you know, if they had any intellectual pursuits. It was expected that their husband and taking care of their home would come first. And if they had some extra free time for a little hobby jobby on the side of side hustle, sure, you go do that, boo.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, but don't let it interfere with the most important, most sacred work, which is fucking Jerry.
SPEAKER_04Yes, fucking Jerry. So good. So this is a perfect moment for this quote from Gerda, where she really breaks this down. She says, for many centuries, the talents of women were directed not toward self-development, but toward realizing themselves through the development of a man. Women, conditioned for millennia to accept the patriarchal definition of their role, have sexually and emotionally serviced men and nurtured them in a way that allowed men of talent a fuller development and a more intensive degree of specialization than women have ever had. The sexual division of labor, which has allotted to women the major responsibility for domestic services and the nurturance of children, has freed men from the cumbersome details of daily survival activities, while it disproportionately has burdened women with them. Women have had less spare time and above all, less uninterrupted time in which to reflect, to think, and to write. The psychological support from intimacy and love has been far more readily available to talented men than to talented women. Had there been a man behind each brilliant woman, there would have been women of achievement in history equal to the numbers of men of achievement.
SPEAKER_00Ooh, and that is still, I mean, even the women in your community that live in sexless marriages, they are still help trying to manage the emotional development of this other human being rather than pouring it into themselves. They pour so much into the emotional development.
SPEAKER_04And it's like a natural response for many of them. That's you know, one of the biggest things. Is it I w I want to question you? Natural? I'm so glad you caught me on that. I want to be clear that when I say natural, it feels natural to them. That's the mind fuck that we are trying to expose with both of these episodes. Is that for many of us as women, centering a man, taking care of him first, just feels like it's part of our DNA. Like we listen to the women who are like, I just feel so bad for him. I just don't want to hurt his feelings. He just looks so sad. And you realize when you look at the history, oh, this is why. It is because we as women are coming off of millennia of this being our sole focus. I mean, she says it so clearly. Our efforts had to be directed towards us being realized through the development of a man. It was not about our success. It was about he's successful. And because he's successful, I am also. Which you and I know acutely, that was Mormonism to a T.
SPEAKER_00To a T. To a T. I just really kept hoping the horse I had bet on was gonna be able to make it through the race. Um yes, it was such a reflection on me. And any at any time I would go to clergy for help um in managing our relationship or his illegal dealings in business. It was always, well, well, what are you doing? Maybe be more feminine so you can call out his masculine nature. And that was true, uh, whether it was clergy within my congregation or my father. It was all, but stay in your lane and support him.
SPEAKER_04It's like we as adult women never become anything more than mothers. We are mothers to, you know, we're daughters. And then when you get married, you become a mother to your husband, and then you become a mother to your children because you're still mothering him. You're still creating this environment of nurture and care and food and emotional caretaking, and now adds sexual caretaking. That was the standard and really the only option for women, you know, except for the women who escaped into convents for a very long time. Now, because so much of your energy is directed there, if we look back through the history, I love when she emphasizes they did not have uninterrupted lengths of time. Therefore, instead of you seeing women creating these big philosophical treaties and writing these masterworks, the writing that we have from them comes in personal letters and diaries because it's stolen in little moments where they kind of have a moment of peace to themselves. And so if you think over hundreds of years, if that's the only amount of time that women are being allowed to give space to their thoughts, there's a huge lack in the development of women reaching the status of geniuses. Goethe actually provides a perfect example of this in Emily Dickinson, where she goes into detail about her life and that the reason she was as prolific as she was is because she made the choice to not get married, to not have those connections that would distract her from her work. And this was a point that she drove home to that I thought was just so important in emphasizing it. Women consistently over and over and over. She provided multiple examples of women who were writing and then they get married and then they stop writing, or they get married and they start writing for their husband. Or it's not until they're widowed later that they finally can write again.
SPEAKER_00And what would that be like to have uninterrupted time every day to just really work on what's in you to develop to create, especially as women, where we have this creative force like in us. And if if we had the support to develop in all the ways, go to the girls' club, get a drink and a cigar or whatever. Yes, and let the ideas flow and create together.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_04I'm so glad you're emphasizing and that you brought up connecting with other women, because that is the other point that Gerda, another point that Goethe drives home is what was so frustrating when you look back over women's history, is our history does not like men's, just, you know, build one on top of the other as it goes. No, the way women's history runs, there is women's history. But when you look back at it, it looks like reinventing the wheel over and over and over. You will find women who 300 years previously, a woman wrote, had these big ideas, opened up these ideas. Whatever she wrote is completely lost to history. 300 years later, another woman writes the same ideas, but she has had to fight so hard. And I think of this so much as you and me. I'm like, oh my God, I have lived this. I have lived coming out of the brainwashing of a patriarchal religion, not knowing my own history, having to fight for every bit of my feminist consciousness to then land here and be like, oh my God, other women have already done this. Like things that feel so big and eye-opening to me, I'm like, oh, other women have already done this. I just didn't know because my history was denied me. And so it's heartbreaking to see the levels of brilliance on the side of women lost because they are not allowed the ability. As Isaac Newton said, you know, his brilliance came from standing on the shoulders of the giants that came before him. We as women were denied those shoulders. That once again drives home what Goethe really was passionate about, which was women have to know their history. They have to know the shoulders. They have to know that there are women that have come before them. And when you mentioned about what it's like to not have uninterrupted time, I still think a majority of women experience this today, for sure.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_04They even if they are in a career and having a family, their career success is limited because so much of it may be taken up by a spouse or children. But I do feel hopeful in seeing that there are women in the world in today's age that because of some of the things that we have won, which we will talk about in a little bit, of the reproductive rights, freedoms, the ability to be economically self-sufficient, women are moving into a space where the ideal, what I want for my life, is to be able to have both. I want to, just like any fucking man out there who gets to have a loving, devoted partner and professional success. That is what women, that is the equal rights that I'm advocating for in today's world is I want to have both.
SPEAKER_00Such a radical idea as a woman. Yes, full expression. Full expression. I love being a mom. I don't mind having my kids around. They're really cool. I like them. And and they have learned to respect some boundaries. Like when mom goes to bed, you better not be waking her up unless there's some blood. And or like my reading time, or they'll very respectfully ask, you know, can you accommodate this? And there are days where I'm like, I've got this paper due, or I'm really into what I'm doing, we'll do it another day. But it wasn't always there. I used to be at the beck and call, especially of my husband, but then also of my children. And now, as they're seeing me center my needs, it gives them permission to center them. Like I'm okay disappointing them, they're okay disappointing me. And it makes for such healthy interpersonal relationships.
SPEAKER_04I love you giving that example. I think that is such a gorgeous example of you coming out of a patriarchal marriage where that was never going to be possible within your marriage.
SPEAKER_00No.
SPEAKER_04He had to have you in your role for him to function in his. You got divorced, stepped out of that. And even in the life that you have built now, even without a partner, you know, in that way that I was talking about it, you have managed to develop a life where you are getting to both have connection and relationships with your children, but you are also getting to pursue your professional life. Yes. Yes. That is the dream.
SPEAKER_00Yes. And my children are cheering me on. Like I have so much support. The WUSBEN never, never supported my full expression within any kind of professional development. But my children, super proud of mom.
SPEAKER_04So I want to take us up into the Enlightenment. Because you would think with the Enlightenment, we're going to see some progress, right? Right. It is celebrated as a massive leap forward for human liberty, but it was built fundamentally on the explicit exclusion of women from that liberty. So when we're reading John Locke creating the beautiful human rights inalienable, he completely separated women out of it by claiming that female subordination within the family was, quote, natural. And I'm so glad you like clarified me saying natural, because you're right. That's not how I was using that word. This is not the same way. John Locke is literally saying, no, this is just your nature. This is natural. So he didn't even feel the need to make space for women. And that has its roots in, as we said before, Western civilization being created after we've already slid into the world of patriarchy.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, but I think it's interesting when you say he didn't feel the need to make room for women, but he made room to make sure we know to cut women out. But let's be clear when I say human rights, I'm not talking about women.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, and that's as early as, you know, the Enlightenment. That is that is very, very recent in what we think of as history.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_04I also loved this one. There was a man, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Uh-huh. This quote, oh my God, I just, I was like, ugh, a like foremost thinker at this time. He said, woman's purpose in life was to tend him in manhood, to counsel and to console, to make his life pleasant and happy. These are the duties of woman. Therefore, the purpose of woman's education should be to learn to love her duties toward men and to carry them out intelligently and cheerfully. So this is where we get into, okay, women, women get to be educated, but what are they gonna what are they gonna be educated in?
SPEAKER_00Loving fucking Jerry.
SPEAKER_04Learn to love it, girls. Yes, she says here, quote, there was a remarkable spread of female academies between 1790 and 1820, but there was no intention to offer girls the same education as boys. Rather, they were to be educated as pleasing companions, helpers, and supporters of middle class men. The male-defined concept of women as mothers and educators of their children, influencing the destiny of their nation, neatly combined and accepted gender-defined roles for women without a recognition of their actual and potential impact on political society. And it did that in patriarchal terms, which was that women's impact was to be indirect. That word. It was to represent influence, not actual power. And it was to be exerted through others and for others. So even when women start getting universities, there is still a very clear mandate around what those educational opportunities should look like.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. Education and application or intelligence is power. No, I mean you can have the intelligence, but but you don't get to take action. You get influence, you get to support.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. You will be realized through the success of your husband and your children. There it is. This is why, as women, when we're so confused, of like, why am I so unhappy? Especially, you know, I'm speaking from my own personal experience. I have given my whole life over to supporting my husband and my kids. Why do I feel devoid of meaning and energy? It's because there was more in me than just that. But I have been told that will be enough for you to watch them succeed.
SPEAKER_00Not to cultivate yourself, your capital S self. Cultivate husband, cultivate children, build them up, support them, give them what they need. At the expense of cultivating self, full expression of self. I mean, when you're not actually human.
SPEAKER_04Oh, yeah, that idea is so, so recently radical in the in the history of women. Okay, so I do have to put a spotlight on. On African American women in the US. At this time period where we are seeing, especially when she talks about in the 20th century, remember I gave us that number in the 1960s where women getting doctorates and BAs was like the lowest it had ever been. Goethe says, quote, the single exception to this is the case of African American women who between 1890 and 1970 exceed males of their race in educational attainment. This is due to the vagaries of race discrimination, which offered little incentive for higher education for men, since even with advanced degrees, they were often confined to menial jobs. On the other hand, though, educated black women had a chance to escape domestic and menial service. Thus, families had an incentive to foster the education of their daughters rather than their sons. In this respect, African American families form an exception to the almost universal American pattern whereby families occasionally deprive daughters for the sake of sons.
SPEAKER_00So it's almost like what we've been told is natural is actually just incentive-based results. Because when the African-American families had incentive to rise up because of the work that they could do with their daughters, suddenly it wasn't just natural for the daughters to marry and have babies and end of sentence. So maybe, just maybe, hear me out. Maybe a lot of the things that we think are natural, just maybe we could question them a little bit. This is a really recent, beautiful example. Thank you. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04I what blew me away about this was that even in the creation of patriarchy, they talked about this. Just how over thousands and thousands of years, you would absolutely choose to send a son over a daughter hands down every single time. And to hear this, this is one of the only moments in any of her books where it was like, and it went a different way, just made me so like, oh yes, get it. Get it.
SPEAKER_00And I love how these so we have these populations, and going back to history of heterosexuality, where it was these, these black women and black families who are like, oh, our families have been torn apart for so long, where you could sell off a spouse or a child, and now we have the opportunity to make families. And that's really was a lot of the impetus for marriage improving for white women as well, and getting education and about how to create a more equitable family because of the work that the black women have been doing exactly.
SPEAKER_04That too, I love any moment we can also tie in because black history has been erased, and black women's history has absolutely been erased. And thankfully, like with women's history, we are having people who are going back and reclaiming that, who are bringing it to the forefront. I wanted to add to this was one of my favorite quotes from the book, talking about that African-American pioneer educators developed an ideology which exalted black mothers as the emancipators of the race for them. And there was a great black educator called Anna Julia Cooper, who wrote, So long as woman sat with bandaged eyes and manacled hands, fast bound in the clamps of ignorance and inaction, the world of thought moved in its orbit like the revolutions of the moon, with one face, the man's face, always out, so that the spectator could not distinguish whether it was a disk or a sphere. I claim that there is a feminine as well as a masculine side to truth, and that these are related not as inferior and superior, not as better or worse, not as weaker or stronger, but as compliments. Compliments in one necessary and symmetric whole.
SPEAKER_00Isn't that not gorgeous? I want to rip this mic out and drop it. That is something to rewind and listen to again. That's the essence of what you're talking about with feminist consciousness, with matriarchy, that it's it's the complete abandonment of uh power over dynamic. It's meritocracy, it's complementarian, it's we all deserve support and full expression. And the way patriarchy has built it up is well, the only way for us to get it is if we make you support us. And what we're saying is that maybe it's not men over women, maybe it's not women over men, maybe there's a way that all of us can have more together, complementary, not a male side, a female side, like a human whole.
SPEAKER_04And her the most beautiful metaphor of the moon. You know, she's basically saying there is a dark side to the moon. The moon is not, what does she say? It's not a disc. It's not just a disk up in the sky, because we only see one face of it, the man's face. It is a sphere, and it has a a whole other side of it that makes it more whole and complete when we view it in that way. Okay, so we're coming close to the end of the book. Goethe actually doesn't do a lot of like the most recent history, but this quote here I just love because it really fills out and kind of goes back over some of the main key points. She says, the long and slow advance of women intellectuals toward group consciousness and toward a liberating analysis of their situation proceeded in a spasmodic, uneven, and often repetitious manner. Marginalized from the male tradition and largely deprived of knowledge of a female tradition, individual women had to think their way out of patriarchal gender definitions and their constraining impact as though each of them were a lonely Robinson Crusoe on a desert island reinventing civilization. Not for them, the systematic story of progress, the methodical building of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis by which succeeding generations of male thinkers grew taller by standing, quote, on the shoulders of giants, each making his small or larger contribution to building a common heritage. As we have seen, women's creations sank soundlessly into the sea, leaving barely a ripple, and succeeding generations of women were left to cover the same ground others had already covered before them. How many generations of women had to quote prove that they were capable of using a full and rigorous education as well as their brothers, only for the next generation of women to undertake that useless spiraling demonstration all over again? Yet, women thought their way out of patriarchy stubbornly and persistently, like drops of water wearing out solid rock. They challenged patriarchal definitions, prescriptions, and explanations. They insisted on their capacity for education. And when that argument seemed to have been won, they insisted on their right to education. But their arguments and mental constructs remained abstract and utopian as long as they were not rooted in transformative social action. Only women organizing on behalf of women could generate truly liberating thought. And this is where Gerda takes us into the final piece of understanding this kind of, you know, we've been building all these important points. But really, as she makes clear, for women, the only way that we have been able to get rights that stick around and stay is when we organize together as women for other women. Even women who may not appreciate it.
SPEAKER_00Even women who look down on you for speaking up. Yeah. But there is such power. I mean, we see it in your community for sure. Women showing up and in the beginning kind of apologizing for maybe um posting every day or I'm sorry if this is too much, because in their own life they're used to being, you know, too much while simultaneously being not enough, and coming to a place where it's like we are organizing for the purpose of supporting each other in making one of the most critical decisions a woman can make, which is through this awakening process to decide do I want to stay or do I want to go? Because I have a choice. And to really, I mean, for the first time in thousands of years, we have a choice. Like we can choose to stay or go. And so to make it from a place of support rather than deprivation or force and letting it take as long as it needs to take. You know, of course, women want to, you know, jump out and I want to know today. I want to be through this agony of making a decision. But it that's part of us having that full expression is wrestling with difficult thoughts and difficult emotions and difficult choices. And we become so much more of ourselves through the decision. And I'm not even talking about the end decision. You know, I love being divorced, but for some women, the choice has been I'm gonna stay. And I'm gonna stay because I want to stay, and I have my reasons and I like my reasons. And to have that freedom, because to stay from a place of freedom to choose that is so much more powerful than, oh, I have to stay. I have to stay for my kids. Because you know, that was me for a long time. I have to stay for my kids, and my marriage transformed the last six months before I chose to get divorced because I was choosing to stay for me. And when I when I chose to leave, it was my choice as well.
SPEAKER_04Yes, and in order to choose, you have to have self-authorization. Yes. You have to have some form of these levels of, you know, maybe not full-blown feminist consciousness, right? But you have to have varying levels of self-authorization. Did you not love in that quote where she talks about women like water dripping on solid rock, just wearing it away?
SPEAKER_00Just powerful, powerful. And having grown up in in Utah, and we have the beautiful canyon lands, and you see the impact of water in the Grand Canyon or the wind with just single pieces of sand that create those beautiful arches, like just natural forces that never end. It can wear away that which we view as immovable because we never fucking stop.
SPEAKER_04Which is so important for where we find ourselves today to realize that it has never been easy for women. And yet we still persevere. We still just, you know, being told we are the weaker sex, I'm like, oh, once you read women's history, you're like, yeah. Good try. Good try, boys. Now I want to make clear some of the material preconditions that were so important that we need to really be aware of as women and rally behind making sure that we keep as rights. Okay. There were four of them that were needed in order to have women's utopian thoughts about full expression actually be able to be backed by these real-world transformative social action. And the first is economic independence. Until you have sizable groups of single women that can actually survive completely outside of marriage with economic independence, the grand idea of full expression for women is going to fall flat. So we want to keep that at the forefront of our mind when we are looking at policies that may affect our ability as single women to be economically independent.
SPEAKER_00That's whether you're married or not, I think. Yes. Because when you economically know I can stay or I can go and I'm going to survive, it gives you much more choice. Yeah. To pretend we have a choice when our economic survival depends on staying.
SPEAKER_04Uh it's not for those of us that find ourselves in those situations. We see that with the women in the community, with women I've coached. They have to go on a journey to find that economic independence, to create it. Yes. Thank goodness we still live in the US in a world where it is possible to do that. I want us to continue and make sure that we keep that for future generations of women. Second is reproductive control. And this one has taken a hit, my loves. It has, with Roe v. Wade being repelled and women not having a right to say, I don't want to carry this pregnancy full term, that heavily impacts a woman's ability to freedom, to her ability to make choices in her life when the government says no. So it's understanding that until women were able to not spend their entire adult lifespans pregnant or nursing, there is no other space for women to have full expression. Third piece is women's access to equal education, which we've talked about extensively. And then fourth and final, and this piece just lit me up. You know, Quinn, when I started reading this section, I sent you pictures. I was like, oh my God. The fourth piece. So even if we have economic independence, reproductive control, and women's access to equal education, but we don't have this fourth piece, we will not reach feminist consciousness. The fourth piece is autonomous social spaces for women that are outside the family unit, where women can validate their thoughts without the male gaze judging and criticizing and putting them down.
SPEAKER_00That is fascinating. That is fascinating. And I don't know if it's menopause or if I'm just amazing, but I have noticed recently, because I was not always like this, what that when a man gives me his opinion, I will question him. I was at, you know, volunteering this last weekend, and this man kept saying stupid shit. And I used to just kind of go on, like, okay, whatever, Jerry. But this time I was like, oh, I disagree. Oh, contraire, monsieur. Like, just challenging it. And I think it's because I'm around more women and we think, well, we see each other's brilliance. We are validating each other's thoughts. So when men say stupid shit, can be like, uh no.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. Yes. Yes, this piece, the importance of having women around you that can be supportive, that are friendly towards your thoughts that are open and receiving, where historically, anytime a woman puts something out in print, she's immediately getting attacked. I mean, for so many of you in marriages, there are a lot of women I've met in marriages like this, where every idea you share turns into a battleground. I remember a woman I recently coached being like, I have to always bring receipts to every conversation with my husband. And what she meant was I have to be able to prove every single thing I think or say to him in a way that he understands. It can't be in a way that I understand. It has to be on his terms and in his way of thinking. I was like, God, that sounds exhausting.
SPEAKER_00That just hits, that hits so hard when I'm thinking about men I've dated or tried to educate on women's rights or reproductive rights or something. And and they'll take any bullshit from some dude and just take it as gospel. And then when I'm like, um, well, historically, this and this and this, and they're like, that doesn't sound right. And so it reminds me of of what you were talking about at the beginning of the episode, where it's like, you have to prove that you have a right to say this thing, and that it is based on something that a man has already said. Like there's so many hoops to jump through. Just to be heard. Yes. And so when you're with other women to strengthen yourself, because because these dudes, it's not like they're so smart, but they have the confidence that has been instilled in them because they're men and raised in this society where men's voices are elevated over women's. And so to be in a in a what did you call it, autonomous social space, yeah. Where you're around women and you're learning from other women, educating other women, being educated by other women, being appreciated, maybe for the first time in your life, for how brilliant you are, that you should be proud of yourself, that you have something unique to contribute.
SPEAKER_04We have seen this happen in the community. We have watched brilliant women who in their homes, in their marriages, were seen as overbearing or too much or too loud or you're so aggressive. So emotional. So emotional, and then come into the community and see their brilliance in for some of them for the first time. And it dramatically changes their life trajectory because it's like, oh, wait a second. I have things to say that actually do help other people, that actually do contribute to the collective to the world. It's it's massive. Now, this is where, shocker of all shockers, y'all, this is where we see the irreversible turning point in women's history. And I truly hope this is in my, you know, I love Gerda has a very clear feeling of that like once you kind of see this, you can't unsee it. I'll read her quote in a second. But that turning point came, y'all, in 1960. Let that just land. That up until this time, it really, in Gerda's viewpoint, it was up for grabs if we were gonna go back. But for the first time in human history in the 1960s, a dynamic grassroots women's movement coincided with highly trained female historians that were strategically placed inside universities and they started. To document women's history, women's voices. They started to trace back. This book is one of the things that emerged from that period. This is where we start to see women going, never again will our history be completely erased, which is why it makes me so sad that this second book, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness, is like not even really well known or out there, right? It's just such an example of like Gerda and these other women fought so hard to put down this. I see them as like driving a stake miles down into the earth of no, we will not forget again. We will not continue to reinvent the will. And Gerda says, this is kind of the triumphant tone she finished with when she wrote this book. She said, Once the basic fallacy of patriarchal thought, which is the assumption that a half of humankind can adequately represent the whole, once that has been exposed and explained, it can no more be undone than the insight that the earth is round but not flat. That was her belief. Her belief was that once we knew this, once we could see through the matrix that we've all been indoctrinated in of the patriarchy, the absolutely I hope by this point, after these two episod episodes, the absolutely asinine idea that men build all of this like now that we've gotten to this point, I'm like, it makes me want to die laughing that that I believed that, that it was like, yeah, sure, half of the human race definitely didn't contribute to any of this. They were just like a footnote, I'm sure. Once you see through that, you realize, you know, the moon is not a disk, it is a sphere. And from there, we build what we've been building since the 1960s. I look at the amount of women's voices that are now in the world, the amount of women's history that is being preserved. I realized while reading this book, I was like, oh my God, my podcast is preserving women's history. Like having women come on and share their stories is an act of feminist consciousness, of saying women's voices have been underserved and now get to have space on equal footing in this arena.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And I think the more we listen to women, the more we crave women's voices, at least for me, like women's memoirs, uh, women's lived experiences, I find them so fascinating. I don't want to hear from a dude on how to parent or, you know, have a business. Like their lived experience is so removed from my own. Whereas back in the day, I look at my bookshelves and it was so many books of what do men think? What was the male experience? I want to hear about the founding fathers. And then a little book about the founding mothers who weren't listened to. And so to I just find myself hungry for more women, more voices. I like to surround myself with art by women, art of women. Everything through the female gaze is so much deeper and richer, in my opinion. Like there's so much for us to experience.
SPEAKER_04Mine too. I've mentioned this multiple times on the podcast. You and I have talked about it. It's not something we covered in these two episodes, but the offshoot of this is to understand the patriarchy was always built for the upper classes. It was always built for men at the very top. And so that example of men's voices not being as rich, I see that as a direct result of the way patriarchy has influenced and hurt men as well. You know, when we look at our sons and their emotional ranges, which I've tried my darndest, but I'm also very aware of how much the culture and the world they have to grow up in absolutely requires the sacrifice of those things in order to succeed as a man in their world. I feel for them. I feel for all of us that are in this world that has been created from the false premise that one half of the moon is enough, that the world is flat instead of round. And for that to change, it will, I believe, it will absolutely take going back to the very first quote of talking about what feminist consciousness is at the very end, where she says, you know, through all these pieces, women then present a different societal organization, a different possibility. Who can think us, help us get out of what patriarchy has created, it's gonna be women with feminist consciousness. It's gonna be women who know their history, who embrace all the sides of themselves, the dark, the light, that look for full human expression. Yes. So we do have a few tidbits here at the end. We've gotten through the big, oh, through the big historical. I just love, I'm so in love with both of these episodes. They are like some of my absolute favorites. But we definitely wanted to leave you guys with some of the more recent, just a little list of some fun, what would you say?
SPEAKER_00Resources, books, yeah, additional resources. Yeah, because seeing it in a different way, seeing it through fiction can really help bring some things home that you're like, oh, I hadn't considered that when someone is able to take the world and kind of go, eh, like record scratch or left turn, like, oh, I wasn't expecting that. I hadn't seen it in that way. So yeah, let's talk about some fun resources to kind of expand.
SPEAKER_04Dive into, yes. I mean, that's part of the joy of living in the day and age we do, is there are so many opportunities now to expose yourself to women's viewpoints, to different ideas. One of the ones that kind of kicked us off on all this was watching Ladies First on Netflix. So it is getting terrible reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. I think I already said that on the podcast. And I find that just such an example of the world we still live in, but I could not get enough of it watching it. The premise of the story is a woman who works for a man who's very, very misogynistic, treats women terribly, he hits his head and the roles get reversed. And he is put into a world where instead of it being, you know, men that run everything, women are the ones that run everything. And it is such a blast. It is just such a good workout for your brain to watch women playing what we typically absolutely culturally expect as men's roles.
SPEAKER_00I think it's definitely one that when men think of what a matriarchy would be, and that, oh, women would do to men what men have done to women. So the men are being objectified, w men have the beauty standards, men are shamed for dressing certain ways, like it is that power over dynamic. But I think it's fascinating the things that we take on ourselves as, oh, that's natural to see it played out, where you know, his father is the nurturing one, or his the career advice he's given in this woman's world is you know, you need to take care of yourself better. You need to get all of your hair removed, you need to go spend hundreds and thousands of dollars getting your skin done and your hair to get done.
SPEAKER_04You need to get ball implants.
SPEAKER_00Yes, all of the things, all of the things, an uncomfortable bra for your testicles. Yes. So I think it's a really fun, just kind of romp. I didn't love the ending.
SPEAKER_04I'm not gonna spoil it for you, but um I know they turn it into like a romantic comedy at the end. It's more so just to have your brain get a taste of oh, this world we live in is absolutely artificially created. Yeah, things we think are natural could in an alternate universe look like this. And I do think it's very important for both when men and women. Yeah, I tell you, if I was in a if I was in a partnership with not my amazing partner Joe, right? Somebody who I was like, hey, you don't get this, or if I had a a brother or a best friend who is male, I'd be like, you need to watch this because you need to understand what it actually feels like to live in a world where you don't have the privilege. That's the big piece that so many men are missing when we talk about patriarchy, when we talk about privilege, they can't see it because it's the water they've always swam in. This movie does a good job of being like, here, this is what it looks like when women do it to you. Loved it for that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I have some books I want to recommend for my fiction girlies. Okay, so the book The Power, this interesting idea where adolescent girls, this um additional organ is awakened within them that is like electrical so that they are powerful. They are they become the aggressors in the world, and it's by they can awaken it in other women, and then men suddenly start getting afraid. It's just this power switch, and you get to follow like a religious woman, a political woman, a young girl, and seeing how this power dynamic of changing this balance that has been there for millennia um really alters reality. I think it's an excellent book. Another series, if you're into fantasy, a series called Women's War, excellent. It's about this world that is this spell that is cast on the in the first book, allows women to control their reproduction and what that does to society and the power of men and women who still love their children and and still love their husbands, and you know, and how that impacts them when women get the power to control their reproduction. Um, another great book I'd mentioned earlier, The Exceptions. It's a true story of the women at MIT who by the early 90s they had collected enough evidence as scientists that MIT actually came out and admitted, yes, they had been discriminated against and hadn't been given tenure, hadn't had their papers published, their intellectual property stolen. And so it's this true story over the course of decades, but it's just so beautiful and powerful and the that idea of those drops of water against stone and what can happen when you just keep going. So if you like memoir or you know, journalistic expose, I would recommend that. There's a play on PBS right now. It's it's a Broadway play called SUFS, S-U-F-F-S. It's about the suffragette movement. Excellent. Um, so those are my recommendations off the top of my head.
SPEAKER_04Oh, I also want you, you mentioned a book. It was like a medical book.
SPEAKER_00Oh, Invisible Woman. Yes. How our world has been created for men in all the ways. How I mean, and just last week, I heard that three months ago they mapped the dorsal nerve of the clitoris. And we've had the knowledge and ability to do that since 1985, which is when the penis, the nerves of the penis got mapped. Just 2026 is when we did it for women because women's sexuality and the nerves of the clitoris just not considered. So that's part of it, but like the dorsal nerve of a clitoris that innervates, you know, the the pelvic floor, the like, oh anyway, so you can look that up. It's really exciting to find out all the ways that the clitoris is connected to parts of our body. But this book, Invisible Women, um, it talks about how like everything from seat belts, um, cars were made safe for men, not women. Um, all of the studies up until like 19, early 1990s, were done on men, not women. And so much of the information we have about human bodies are actually about men, not women. And the fact that now women are living long enough to be able to go through menopause, because I mean, if you die at 30, you never have to deal with menopause. And so that's why so much conversation is happening around menopause now more than ever before, because it's just recently that women have lived long enough, you know, in the last, you know, 100 years that we're actually going through and living significantly long post-menopause. So much of our life, the best parts of our life are happening post-menopause. Yeah. So getting educated on that because it's and it's women, of course, leading the charge. Women who have been educated and they're recognizing they did not receive sufficient education, even OB, GYNs, who are like, I learned nothing about the clitoris. I learned nothing about sexual health. I learned nothing about menopause. And here I am going through it now and seeing how inadequate my education is, and this stops now. So there's so much going on around um seeing how this world wasn't built for us and we're changing it. There are a lot of us pulling together and changing it.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. And that's that is the way Goethe emphasized that. That is the only way women's rights move forward is women organizing together with other women to make those advances happen. It's just helpful when you can watch these dynamics when you can see through the lens of other people, either through reading or through movies or TV shows. It just helps your brain to start catching the matrix around you. You start realizing and seeing, oh, that is not just quote, natural. That is society. That is what we have been taught to believe is how it must be, and that can change. I have so much hope for this next generation of women. I just see in them. I was talking with a good friend last night. She's talking about her niece, got married to a guy that she'd known for three months, really excited about it, thought it was the next step. And like seven months later, told her parents he is not who I thought he was, and I want a divorce. And her parents completely backed her. And she, and I was like, wow, that's incredible for women to understand. Just because I said I wanted this, if you turn out to be somebody different, which he did, it's a no-go for me. I'm not gonna sink the rest of my life into making this work because I'm embarrassed to admit this wasn't what I thought it was. They're like, okay, no, no, I'm gonna get my eggs out of the basket. Thank you.
SPEAKER_00I'm gonna make an omelette for brunch with my girlfriends.
SPEAKER_04And my girlfriends. Yeah. Y'all, thank you for listening to these two episodes. You know, it is such a tremendous gift, you know, on our end to get to share all of this, to get to talk about these things, knowing that it is going out to other fabulous women like us. You know, at the beginning of the episode where you said, I'd want to be my friend, what we find is in the women we meet who listen to the podcast, they are absolutely women we want to be friends with. You, you as a listener are a woman that we want to be friends with, women that are lit up by this, that get excited around these ideas, that see potentials and possibilities on the horizon they've never even considered. You are our kind of women. We love you. We're so grateful to get to have some of your time and space every time you listen to the podcast. And very grateful to you, Quinn, for taking so much time to come explore these two books with me.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, my honor, my honor. Yeah, I love the women that you speak to. And as much as I think we are so brilliant and so funny and so cool, I know that there are thousands of women that I would love to also meet and learn from and tell them how brilliant they are because they fucking are. Yes, the brilliance of women. Ugh. So yummy.
SPEAKER_04Non-nom.
SPEAKER_00So yummy.
SPEAKER_04All right, loves. As always, remember that if you're looking to take this deeper, you can go super easy text 90 M I N to 33777. That's where my 90 minutes can be found. Especially if you're going, okay, I have not had this autonomous social space. I want to be held by another woman who can really see these parts of me. You know, Quinn, that's what I am so good at. I watch that on my 90 minutes. That is what I realize now, that is what I am doing. I am taking women, they share their story with me, and I'm able to walk them through their history and help them see who they really are from a feminist consciousness lens.
SPEAKER_00That is what's happening on those 90 minutes. And and it's not just 90 minutes. Like you give them the 90 minutes and then you give them a roadmap. Afterwards. Yeah. Yeah. You spend hours on those roadmaps for each individual woman. So it's not just 90 minutes.
SPEAKER_04It's not. It's like 90 minutes of intense, energetic, like in the moment processing. But then I take everything that I take all of my notes from that. I craft out their roadmap, and then I also leave them an audio message that walks them through it that they can listen to whenever they need in the future, as that like clarion call of like, hey, babe, remember this is what we're doing. So yeah, it's an incredible value. I've recently thought, wow, my 90 minutes, and I've seen it from the women's responses. If you go on my website, there's tons of testimonials of women who are like, this 90 minutes did for me what five years of therapy hasn't been able to do. So it's incredibly powerful, easy to find, 90 min to 3377. And then that work really gets expanded in the community. The community is where, I mean, I am now so proud to say, like, oh, yeah, the community is where feminist consciousness is nurtured. It's where women start to see themselves more clearly through the eyes of other women. Um, that's where they really start to prioritize themselves, see themselves as having autonomy and the ability to self-authorize their actions. And it's where we get to fall in love with them because you and I are both in the community.
SPEAKER_03Yes.
SPEAKER_00It's that autonomous social space. It's like as Mormons, we had women's groups that were overseen by men. By men. But to have just like w a women's group that is like unapologetically for you. Yes. Like it's a good one. I love hanging out in there. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. That one can be found by texting stay or go community to 33777. And if you're looking to work with me one-on-one, that can be found in the links below. That is my deep dive work where I really get to just take you through the entire process. We set it for three months, but a lot of my women, we end up like extending, moving those out. It's really me going through the process of all of it step by step with you, week by week. So if you're one of my women that has big goals, big dreams, maybe you feel really successful in your professional career, but your marriage is the thing that feels like it is holding you back and you just cannot get traction there. Come work with me one-on-one. Those are my babes for that section.
SPEAKER_00What I love about the one-on-one work is that you're in no hurry. Like you can hold this space. Like your client, I know that when I came to you to be coached one-on-one, it was like, I have been struggling with this for literally decades. Can we just be done with this? And you are just able to hold that space so gently. Like, let's just be here. Let's excavate. Because getting divorced doesn't change as much. I mean, you bring your brain with you. You bring yourself with you. So to be able to make that decision from a clear confidence space and you not being in a hurry with, come on, make up your mind. It's it's just such a beautiful container. It's invaluable.
SPEAKER_04Gerda talked about that real quick. In that social spaces, that's where you find role models. And when you have a powerful role model that walks side by side with you through that journey, you come out the other side in a totally different space than you would without that support. That's just the gift of giving yourself deep, deep support going through something as big as deciding whether you're gonna stay married or not. So very proud and excited that I get to do this work. Holy shit, I love it. This is just my favorite. All right, my loves. That's what we've got for you this week. Hope to see you soon on the podcast. Till then, loves. Bye bye.