Overview

In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, author Rachel Wilson presents a sweeping revisionist history of feminism, arguing that the movement was never a grassroots uprising of ordinary women but rather a top-down project engineered by wealthy eugenicists, Marxist revolutionaries, and occultists—many of whom were openly hostile to motherhood, Christianity, and the traditional family. Wilson contends that feminism has made women less happy, less safe, and less free, while children have borne the heaviest cost. The conversation ranges from personal biography to dense historical excavation, with Rogan serving as an increasingly astonished interlocutor.

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0:01Personal Origins and the Seeds of Skepticism

Wilson opens by describing her unusual upbringing as the child of a Marxist feminist mother and a Rush Limbaugh–style Republican father, who divorced when she was nine. She recalls them fighting over the 1988 Bush-Dukakis election, threatening to lock each other in the house to cancel the other's vote. This bifurcated childhood forced her to adjudicate between two incompatible worldviews from an early age.

She explains that she never absorbed her mother's Marxism because she saw its flaws even as a child: in group projects, the smart kid (her) did all the work while everyone else got the same grade. "Those are the people that are really into socialism," she says, "the people that half-ass stuff." Her father, by contrast, modeled hustle and self-reliance—working 12–14 hour days after the divorce without complaint. Her mother, meanwhile, grew bitter and resentful, convinced she had been robbed of success because she wasn't attractive enough or because men had held her back.

Wilson turned down a full-ride scholarship to college, to universal horror, and had her first child at 20. She describes the pressure she felt to return to work two weeks postpartum and the realization that the system made no sense: she would pay half her income to a stranger to raise her child while she spent nine hours away. "Who came up with this?" she asks. Her grandmother—who had only an eighth-grade education but could pluck a chicken, can vegetables, and run a household—became her anchor. Wilson credits her grandmother with teaching her that domestic work is real, valuable labor.

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12:02The Two-Income Trap and the Economic Transformation

Wilson argues that the single most consequential economic shift of the last 50 years was the mass entry of women into the paid workforce. She notes that prior to the 1970s, only 5% of mothers with school-age children worked outside the home. By the 1980s, women were at parity with men in workforce participation. This effectively doubled the labor supply in two decades, and men's wages have never recovered.

She cites a friend, Aaron Clary, who wrote about the "female-based economy": women now drive 80% of consumer spending, and the economy has shifted from manufacturing and production toward HR, psychology, sociology, and other fields dominated by female graduates. Wilson points out that 80% of psychology degrees go to women, while women still earn only about 20% of STEM degrees. The result, she says, is that women now do for corporations the same work they used to do for their families—nursing, teaching, cooking, cleaning, clerical work—but now they pay taxes on it and are away from their children.

This was not accidental, Wilson insists. She traces the push for women's workforce participation to Marxist theorists like August Bebel and Alexandra Kollontai, who wrote explicitly that getting women out of the home and into factories would allow them to be politicized and radicalized. "Workers of the world unite," she summarizes their logic: double the workforce, fill the universities with propagandized young women, and create a permanent left-leaning voting bloc.

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29:54The Real History of Suffrage: Women Didn't Want It

Wilson's most striking claim is that the majority of women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries did not want the right to vote. She says anti-suffrage groups far outnumbered pro-suffrage groups, and that the historical record—newspapers, pamphlets, public debates—shows this clearly. She cites a referendum in Massachusetts where women were allowed to vote on whether they wanted suffrage: only 4% of those who showed up voted yes.

Why would women oppose their own enfranchisement? Wilson explains that under the existing legal framework, women had significant protections. In New York in the 1800s, a woman's inheritance was protected from her husband; only men could be held responsible for debt; and "breadwinner laws" meant men were legally obligated to support their families. Women could own property, and a married man could not sell property acquired after marriage without his wife's written consent. Anti-suffragists predicted that equal rights would mean losing these protections—and they were right, Wilson argues.

She also notes that women already wielded political influence without the vote. The Women's Christian Temperance Union, a Christian movement, successfully pushed through Prohibition without women having suffrage. Their argument was that they had moral authority precisely because they were not a voting bloc that could be bought with promises. The anti-suffragists predicted that giving women the vote would pit husbands against wives, increase divorce, and break up families—predictions Wilson says have been borne out.

After the Massachusetts referendum, Wilson reports, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony banned women from voting on whether they wanted the vote. "Isn't that crazy?" she asks.

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43:54The Figureheads: Stanton, Anthony, and the Rewriting of History

Wilson argues that the standard narrative of the suffrage movement was written by Stanton and Anthony themselves, in a multi-volume "History of Woman Suffrage" that deliberately made them the heroes and cut out inconvenient facts. Their colleague Lucy Stone objected, pointing out that the movement's main support came from progressive men, socialists, and polygamists—and that this was well known at the time. Stanton and Anthony reluctantly included some of it, but the framing they established—of oppressed women fighting an oppressive patriarchy—became the template.

Wilson describes the suffrage movement as having a serious PR problem: it was known as something "prostitutes, socialists, Marxists, polygamists, and revolutionaries" were into. She profiles Victoria Woodhull, a famous feminist who was also a con artist selling fake cancer cures, a prostitute ring operator, and a spiritualist who claimed to contact the dead. Woodhull's prostitute network provided insider trading information to Cornelius Vanderbilt, who used it to make the equivalent of $26 million on the first Black Friday. When the New York Times asked how he did it, Vanderbilt said, "Do as I do. Consult the spirits."

Wilson also discusses the occult and anti-Christian orientation of many early feminists. Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote "The Woman's Bible" (1895), rewriting the Bible from a feminist perspective and declaring she did not believe the Bible was divinely inspired. Many feminists were spiritualists, theosophists, or Luciferians. Wilson cites a Norwegian professor's book "Satanic Feminism," which documents how 19th-century feminists openly declared Lucifer their liberator. Margaret Fuller wrote about gender abolition and gender as a spectrum in the 1840s.

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52:59Margaret Sanger, Eugenics, and the Birth Control Pill

Wilson devotes significant attention to Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, whom she describes as "so evil" that researching her gave Wilson nightmares. She recounts Sanger's well-known eugenicist statements about "lower races" and her antinatalist views: "The most kind thing a large family can do to one of its young members is to kill it."

Wilson challenges the foundational myths of Sanger's career. Sanger claimed her mother died from "overbreeding" (too many pregnancies); Wilson says her mother actually died of tuberculosis. Sanger told a famous story about a woman named Sadie Sachs who didn't know how to prevent pregnancy because doctors refused to tell her; Wilson asked her own grandmother, who was alive during that period, and her grandmother said everyone knew how to prevent pregnancy—doctors often advised couples after a difficult birth.

Most damningly, Wilson says Sanger claimed to have received thousands of letters from desperate women begging for birth control information. Wilson contacted the Margaret Sanger Papers Project, which archives everything Sanger ever wrote. Out of the thousands of alleged letters, only three are preserved. When Wilson asked about this discrepancy, the archivists suggested the letters were "lost to time" or had been sent to abortion doctors. Wilson believes Sanger fabricated them.

She also notes that the birth control pill was developed with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Kaiser Wilhelm Foundation, and Nazi scientists. It was marketed as a way to eliminate abortion: if everyone had access to the pill, abortion would become unnecessary. Instead, Wilson points out, the U.S. still had about a million abortions per year before Roe v. Wade was overturned, despite universal access to contraception.

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1:03:09Gloria Steinem, the CIA, and the Cold War

Wilson reveals that Gloria Steinem was recruited out of Smith College by the CIA through a fabricated fellowship called the Chester Bowles Fellowship. She was sent to India to work for the Ford Foundation (the same organization that created gender studies departments), then to Eastern Europe to promote feminism behind the Iron Curtain, and then returned to the U.S. where she went undercover as a Playboy Bunny at the Hugh Hefner mansion.

Wilson frames this as part of a Cold War strategy: the CIA wanted to promote liberal democracy as superior to communism, and feminism was a useful vehicle. She says the CIA helped fund Ms. Magazine and granted scholarships to feminist activists. The goal was to mobilize women as a permanent Democratic voting bloc, similar to what was done with Black voters.

She connects this to contemporary politics, arguing that the same indoctrination explains why women are now confronting ICE agents and demanding the return of deported gang members who have committed multiple murders. She plays a clip of activists in Maine trying to collect signatures to bring back an MS-13 member who killed five people, and a schoolteacher who signs the petition, saying children are afraid to come to school because of ICE activity. Wilson sees this as the logical endpoint of a university system that teaches women that white men are evil oppressors and that any immigrant, regardless of crimes, is a victim.

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1:37:48The Occult Core and the Luciferian Paradigm

Wilson explains the title "Occult Feminism" has two meanings: first, that many feminist leaders were literally involved in the occult (spiritualism, theosophy, goddess worship, Satanism); second, that the true history of feminism has been intentionally hidden from women.

She describes Jack Parsons, the NASA rocket scientist and avowed Satanist, and his girlfriend Marjorie Cameron, who became a feminist icon in the California counterculture. Parsons and Cameron engaged in extended "sex magic" rituals based on Aleister Crowley's teachings, which hold that orgasm channels energy that makes spells more powerful. After Parsons blew himself up in a rocket accident, Cameron moved to the desert, started a cult, and tried to conceive "moon children" who would bring about the Antichrist. Her art and archetype of the "Scarlet Woman"—the rebellious, sexually liberated, undomesticated woman—became mainstream, Wilson argues.

She connects this to the broader Luciferian paradigm: the idea that there is no objective morality, that each person is their own god, and that life is about self-fulfillment rather than self-sacrifice. Wilson contrasts this with the traditional Christian model of motherhood and family, which she describes as a "greater purpose that goes into the future long after you're gone." She argues that feminism has sold women a hedonistic, selfish vision that leaves them unhappy and unfulfilled.

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1:54:04The Outcomes: Less Happy, Less Safe, Fewer Children

Wilson marshals statistics to argue that feminism has failed on its own terms. She cites the "Paradox of Female Happiness" studies, which found that women in the 2000s reported being less happy and less fulfilled than women in the 1970s, before the full force of the feminist revolution. A follow-up study across multiple countries found that "women everywhere and always are less happy than men," which the authors attributed partly to biology (hormonal fluctuations) but also to the gap between feminist promises and reality.

She notes that 26% of American women are on at least one psychiatric prescription drug, that female alcoholism and fetal alcohol syndrome rates are at historic highs, and that women have higher rates of substance abuse than ever recorded. Meanwhile, birth rates are collapsing globally, and Wilson says women's access to higher education is the number one correlate of falling birth rates, regardless of economics, race, or culture.

On safety, Wilson argues that feminism has made women and children more vulnerable. She cites data showing that children living with married biological parents are 12 times safer on every metric (physical abuse, sexual abuse, neglect) than children in any other living situation. Cohabitating couples have a 35% higher domestic violence rate than married couples. Fatherless homes produce 70–85% of children in juvenile facilities, homeless populations, and addiction treatment programs. "What we've done over the last 50 years," she says, "is take dads and husbands out of the home and replace them with the government."

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2:24:22Conclusion: A Scam and a Warning

Wilson concludes by stating plainly that she believes feminism is "bad for women" and that she is "no longer willing to sacrifice the welfare of children on the altar of feminism." She describes the personal cost of publishing her book—slander, rumors, attacks—but says she receives hundreds of messages from women who feel they were misled. One 60-year-old woman wrote that she had no husband, no children, a job she hated, and was going to die alone. Wilson's grandmother, now nearly 100, remains her model of a fulfilled life: practical, grounded, community-oriented, and family-centered.

The episode ends with Wilson urging women to examine the actual history and decide for themselves, but making clear that she believes the feminist project has been a catastrophe for women, children, families, and society.

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Key takeaways

• Rachel Wilson argues that feminism was not a grassroots movement of ordinary women but a top-down project engineered by Marxist revolutionaries, wealthy eugenicists, and occultists who were often hostile to motherhood and Christianity.
• Most women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries did not want the right to vote; anti-suffrage groups far outnumbered pro-suffrage groups, and a Massachusetts referendum found only 4% of women supported suffrage.
• Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, fabricated stories about desperate women begging for birth control, lied about her mother's cause of death, and was an avowed eugenicist who believed "lower races" should stop breeding.
• Gloria Steinem was recruited by the CIA out of Smith College through a fabricated fellowship, sent to India and Eastern Europe to promote feminism as Cold War propaganda, and went undercover as a Playboy Bunny.
• The mass entry of women into the workforce doubled the labor supply in 20 years, suppressed men's wages, and created a two-income trap that makes it difficult for families to survive on one income.
• Women today report being less happy and less fulfilled than women in the 1970s, before the full force of the feminist revolution, according to the "Paradox of Female Happiness" studies.
• Children living with married biological parents are 12 times safer from abuse and neglect than children in any other living situation, and fatherless homes produce the majority of juvenile offenders, homeless youth, and addiction cases.
• Many early feminist leaders were involved in spiritualism, theosophy, goddess worship, or Luciferianism, and explicitly sought to abolish gender distinctions and the traditional family.