Ford Foundation

The modern understanding of feminism often paints it as a noble, linear progression toward basic civil rights, equality in the workplace, and the right to participate in democracy. However, Rachel Wilson, author of Occult Feminism: The Secret History of Women’s Liberation, suggests that this narrative is a carefully constructed PR campaign that hides a much darker, more complex reality. In a deep exploration of the movement's history, Wilson argues that the shift in the social order over the last century was not a organic grassroots movement but a top-down revolution funded by powerful interests and rooted in radical ideologies ranging from Marxism to the occult. The Engineering of a Social Revolution To understand why the world looks the way it does today, one must look at the 1970s as a pivotal turning point in human history. Before this era, the social order had remained largely consistent across cultures for thousands of years. Within a single century, and specifically during a twenty-year burst between 1970 and 1990, the entire structure of the Western family and workforce was inverted. This wasn't merely about women wanting to contribute; it was an economic and psychological restructuring designed to double the labor force and fundamentally change the relationship between the individual and the state. Wilson points out that prior to the 1970s, only about 5% of mothers with school-age children worked outside the home. The "breadwinner" model allowed a single income—even from a blue-collar job like janitorial work—to support a large family. When the labor force effectively doubled by pushing women into full-time employment, men’s wages stagnated. This created the "two-income trap," where families now require two salaries just to maintain a baseline standard of living that was once achievable with one. This economic shift served corporate interests by providing a surplus of labor, lowering the cost of workers, and increasing the tax base through payroll, gas, and consumer spending taxes. The Myth of the Oppressed Suffragette The standard historical textbook claims that women in the 19th century were essentially slaves to their husbands, denied education, and barred from owning property. Wilson challenges these axioms by highlighting the work of Joseph Miller, a professor who found that the history of women's suffrage was largely rewritten when gender studies departments were established in the late 1960s. The actual historical record shows that most women in the late 1800s were actually opposed to suffrage. Anti-suffrage groups, which far outnumbered pro-suffrage organizations, argued that women already enjoyed significant legal protections that they would lose if they were made "equal" to men under the law. These protections included being shielded from debtors' prisons, exemption from the military draft, and "breadwinner laws" that held men legally responsible for the financial provision of their wives and children. Furthermore, the claim that women were denied education is factually inaccurate; many early American universities were exclusively female seminaries, and women were often more educated than men, who were forced into hard labor in fields, mines, and wars. The 19th Amendment was eventually passed not because women demanded it, but because progressive and socialist men realized that politicizing women would provide the numbers needed to push for a broader revolutionary agenda. Marxist Roots and the Destruction of the Family The synthesis of feminism and Marxism is perhaps the most significant ideological pairing of the 20th century. Early Marxist writers like August Bebel and Alexandra Kollontai explicitly stated that the family unit was the primary obstacle to the socialist state. Because property rights and heritage are passed down through the father, the nuclear family acts as a private fortress that resists government intrusion. To break this fortress, the state needed to get women out of the home and into the workforce. Once women are employed by corporations, their children are moved into the compulsory education system. This allows the state to dictate values and worldviews to children from a very young age, effectively replacing the father and mother as the primary authorities. This "state-as-daddy" model is evident in modern policies where schools attempt to hide medical or social transitions from parents. By framing the home as a place of "unpaid labor" and oppression, feminists successfully convinced generations of women to trade service to their own families for service to a corporation—all while paying a significant portion of their earnings back to the state in taxes. The Occult Heart of Women’s Liberation One of the most jarring revelations in Wilson's research is the pervasive link between the feminist movement and occultism. The founders of the first wave, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, were deeply involved in spiritualism, seances, and anti-Christian polemics. Stanton even wrote The Woman's Bible to rewrite scripture from a perspective that stripped away what she viewed as patriarchal dogma. This wasn't just a personal quirk; it was a fundamental part of the movement's identity. This occult influence continued into the second wave. The first issue of Ms. Magazine in 1973 featured the Hindu goddess Kali on its cover—a deity associated with destruction, vengeance against men, and male sacrifice. The rise of "Luciferianism" within these circles is also notable. This ideology views Lucifer not as a symbol of evil, but as a "lightbringer" who represents human potential and rebellion against traditional moral authority. This framework of moral relativism and the rejection of objective truth (Standpoint Theory) has become the dominant epistemological framework in modern universities, allowing for the redefinition of gender as a fluid spectrum—a concept that was being written about by feminists like Margaret Fuller as early as the 1840s. Intelligence, Education, and the Birth Rate Crisis There is a direct correlation between the push for women’s higher education and the collapsing birth rates across the Western world. Wilson argues that the modern system gives women "backwards advice," telling them to spend their most fertile years—from 18 to 30—focusing on educational credentials and entry-level career building. By the time a woman is established and ready to start a family, she is often nearing the end of her reproductive window, leading to a reliance on expensive and often unsuccessful IVF treatments. This anti-natalist sentiment was championed by figures like Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood. While Sanger is often celebrated as a liberator, her private writings and public speeches reveal a commitment to eugenics and a deep-seated hatred for large families. She famously stated that the most merciful thing a large family could do for an infant was to kill it. Sanger’s work was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, which sought to use birth control and abortion as tools for "social hygiene" and population control. Today, the results of this century-long campaign are manifesting in countries like Japan and South Korea, which face catastrophic population collapse because they have lost the cultural value of the family unit. Modern Implications: The Search for Meaning After fifty years of the "Girl Boss" narrative, many women find themselves in a state of crisis. Despite being more "liberated" than any previous generation, statistics show that women are reporting lower levels of happiness and higher rates of antidepressant use than they did in the 1970s. The promise that women could "have it all" has, for many, resulted in a life of exhaustion, debt, and loneliness. The hyper-competitive nature of modern dating, driven by apps that emphasize a small percentage of hyper-successful men, has left many women without stable partners. Wilson’s message is not one of hatred toward women, but a call for a return to reality. She suggests that true fulfillment for most women—and men—comes from the self-sacrifice inherent in building a family and a community. The path forward requires a deconstruction of the false historical narratives that have pitted the sexes against one another. Only by recognizing the biological and social importance of the family unit can society begin to heal from the fragmentation and anxiety caused by a century of social engineering.