By Carrie Gress
The hottest flashpoint in the culture today is the trans movement, with the mob coming after anyone, like J.K. Rowling, who dares to oppose the idea that men can become women and women men. Few are aware that the seeds for this effort were planted decades ago by a small group of women who gathered regularly to promote the creed of Marxism. We live under their triumphant umbrella daily.
The Supreme Court confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson is just the latest feather in their cap, as a justice who claims she can’t define a what a is woman because she lacks a biology degree. (Ironically, the new “women” she is trying to include aren’t biologically women, so a biology degree wouldn’t actually help her.)
This group of women was led by Kate Millett (1934-2017), one of the early grandmothers of feminism’s second wave. She was the author of the “Sexual Politics,” the academic justification for feminism that became the backbone of women’s studies programs nationally and was featured on Time Magazine’s cover twice.
Mallory Millett, Kate’s sister, has been telling the story of the 12 women Kate brought together in New York City in the late 1960s and early ‘70s. These are the women who laid the groundwork for second-wave feminism, which gave way to the world of woke.
“It was 1969 and she took me to a meeting at her friend, Lila Karp’s place in Greenwich Village,” Mallory explained to me for my book, “The Anti-Mary Exposed.” “At a consciousness-raising [an idea imported from Mao’s China] twelve women gathered at a large table. They opened with a type of Litany from the Catholic Church …but, this time it was Marxism, the church of the Left.”
The “litany” went like this:
“Why are we here today?” the chairwoman asked.
“To make revolution,” they answered.
“What kind of revolution?” she replied.
“The Cultural Revolution,” they chanted.
“And how do we make Cultural Revolution?” she demanded.
“By destroying the American family!” they answered.
“How do we destroy the family?” she came back.
“By destroying the American patriarch,” they cried exuberantly.
“And how do we destroy the American patriarch?” she probed.
“By taking away his power!”
“How do we do that?”
“By destroying monogamy!” they shouted.
“How can we destroy monogamy?”
“By promoting promiscuity, eroticism, prostitution, abortion, and homosexuality!” they resounded. (Gress, 73-74)
Read the last line again. These were not things that were a part of American culture, although burgeoning then with the sexual revolution, but all of them have been achieved, probably beyond the wildest dreams of those present, by this very specific targeting.
Phyllis Chesler confirmed much of Mallory’s account in her 2018 book, “Politically Incorrect Feminist: Creating a Movement with Bitches, Lunatics, Dykes, Prodigies, Warriors, and Wonder Women.” Chesler, while trying to tell the honest truth of the good, bad, and ugly of the feminist movement, reveals much of the story that has been jealously guarded by feminists for decades: that most of the women in the movement were incredibly broken by mental illness and drug abuse. Chesler calls them “the lost girls.”
Their brokenness wasn’t considered a weakness, but the glue that held them together. “We – who only yesterday had been viewed as cunts, whores, dykes, bitches, witches, and madwomen; we who had been second- and third-class citizens – had suddenly become players in history. The world would never be the same, and neither would we,” writes Chesler in her introduction.
Speaking specifically of Kate Millett, Chesler wrote:
Kate had a s–tload of charm and, in the beginning, a commanding presence, but she also had periods in which she didn’t sleep, raged at others, attempted suicide, and exploited her groupies – all the while feeling victimized by them (which she was). She couldn’t be counted on to remain lucid at a press conference. She also fell in love, and tried to have her way, quite aggressively, with woman after woman (including me). (Chesler, Politically Incorrect, loc. 2939.)
Given her anything-goes approach to sexuality, Kate Millett finally alienated her own sister from the movement when she tried to take her to bed. The erasure of the categories of male and female and even ending the stigma of sleeping with children were issues Kate Millett promoted for most of her career.
Millet, her minions, and the other grandmothers of second-wave feminism set the diabolical narrative that has affected nearly every woman on the planet. These broken women are responsible for the 50-year-old narrative that says female empowerment can only be achieved through promiscuity, abortion, and the destruction of the family.
The matriarchy made up of elite men and women dictates to the rest of us what we are to believe through their control of the press, Hollywood, academia, daytime TV, book publishing, public policy, magazines, the fashion industry, public schools, and now even Disney. While the world stopped under the threat of Covid and the 3.5 million deaths, the 43 million abortions procured by women worldwide in the year 2021 can be laid at their feet.
The biggest question is, why haven’t men and women of goodwill and reason been able to stop this movement? Much of the answer resides in the fact that the matriarchy has been able to create a closed system that ignores, maligns, or suppresses any competing data, bullying or railroading any opposition. Power and control are the emphasis, not debate, real science, and reason.
The other key to their success goes back to Kate Millett’s litany. The greatest tool that has silenced opposition is the continued rail against the patriarchy, a vague word—much like racism today—that has silenced much of the population like kryptonite, particularly men. Few slogans have had more staying power than “smash the patriarchy”; it shows up at every woman’s march and in every feminist diatribe.
At its heart, it is the belief that all women are victims (even if they haven’t been victimized), while all men are the oppressors (even if they have never oppressed anyone), but again, it is about exercising control. Few could define patriarchy, no one wants to be guilty of engaging in it, so apologies and denunciations abound anytime it is asserted. So men and women continue to bow to every feminist demand for “women’s equality,” while real women are trounced and triumphed over by men in heels and swimming suits.
The trans movement is the biggest fulfillment yet of the second-wave ideal of erasing gender, and is perhaps the final battle before Kate Millett’s vision is complete. That pseudo-litany chanted by the 12 women in the upper room has been heard, felt, and suffered by all the world as the family has been destroyed, replaced by a population of noble narcissists.
Most of us feel weak and powerless to stop the ideological juggernaut, especially as we watch institution after institution cave to the narrative. The true antidote to the problem of trans and all Marxist ideologies is also in the litany: to restore the family.
This article first appeared at The Federalist.