#2460 - Rachel Wilson

What It Covers

Rachel Wilson, author of *Occult Feminism: The Secret History of Women's Liberation*, joins Joe Rogan to trace feminism's origins from 19th-century suffrage movements through Cold War CIA funding of Ms. Magazine, examining how figures like Margaret Sanger, Gloria Steinem, and Susan B. Anthony shaped a movement Wilson argues was never driven by grassroots women's demand but by socialist, eugenicist, and intelligence-agency agendas.

Key Questions Answered

• •Women opposed suffrage in majority numbers: Historical records show anti-suffrage groups in the US and England far outnumbered pro-suffrage groups among women. In Massachusetts, the largest referendum allowing women to vote on whether they wanted suffrage, only 4% of participating women supported it. Pro-suffrage leaders Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony subsequently banned women from voting on the question altogether — a fact omitted from the 12 most widely used Western university women's history textbooks, according to professor Joseph Miller's analysis.
• •CIA funding shaped second-wave feminism: Gloria Steinem was recruited from Smith College via a fabricated fellowship called the Chester Bowles Fellowship, which did not exist prior to her recruitment. The CIA sent her to India, Eastern Europe, and across the US to promote feminist ideology as part of Cold War liberal democracy promotion strategy. Ms. Magazine was subsequently launched with CIA funding. The agency's calculation was that mobilizing women as a political bloc would counter Soviet communism by expanding Democrat-aligned voter bases.
• •Doubling the labor force suppressed male wages permanently: Prior to the 1970s, roughly 5% of mothers with school-aged children worked outside the home. Within approximately 20 years of pushing women into universities and workplaces, female workforce participation reached near parity with men, effectively doubling the labor supply. Men's wages never recovered relative to inflation, creating the modern two-income trap where even families preferring a single-income household cannot sustain one — a structural economic shift Wilson attributes directly to feminist workforce policy.
• •Women's higher education is the single strongest predictor of falling birth rates: Regardless of race, economics, culture, or national status, women's access to higher education correlates more strongly with declining birth rates than any other measured variable worldwide. Wilson argues this is not coincidental but by design, citing 19th-century Marxist writers August Bebel and Alexandra Kollontai, who explicitly wrote that pulling women into the workforce and universities would politicize them into revolutionaries and reduce family formation — a stated strategic goal, not a side effect.
• •Margaret Sanger fabricated the foundational case for birth control and abortion access: Sanger claimed her mother died from overbreeding and constructed a story about a woman named Sadie Sachs dying because doctors withheld contraceptive knowledge. Both stories are documented fabrications — her mother died of tuberculosis. The Margaret Sanger Papers Project, which archives virtually everything she produced, holds only three letters from the thousands she claimed to have received from overburdened mothers. Sanger was simultaneously funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and connected to Nazi-era scientists who synthesized early hormonal birth control as a eugenics tool.
• •Feminist history was institutionally rewritten through Ford and Rockefeller-funded gender studies departments: Gender studies and women's studies departments were created in the late 1960s with direct funding from the Ford Foundation, with additional support from Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations. Their function, Wilson argues, was to serve as university-based PR infrastructure for Marxist and feminist ideology. These departments systematically omitted the movement's documented connections to prostitution rings, socialist men, polygamists, occultists, and con artists — associations that were publicly known and debated at the time of the original suffrage campaigns.
• •The economic cost of maternal workforce participation is largely invisible in standard accounting: When a mother returns to work two weeks postpartum, the net financial calculation frequently includes: childcare costs consuming roughly half of take-home pay, a second vehicle plus insurance, work wardrobe expenses, commute-related fuel taxes, and payroll taxes — while delivering approximately two hours of daily contact with the child. Wilson frames this not as personal choice analysis but as a structural outcome of feminist economic policy that simultaneously transferred domestic labor to corporations, expanded the tax base, and removed children from parental influence into state-run educational institutions.