The Feminist Syndrome examines how post-WWII labor shortages and factory conditions—like the 1950s-60s baby boom—pushed women into the workforce, not feminism itself. The speaker argues that women’s 80% consumer spending dominance and rise in "service" professions (HR, teaching) reflect economic shifts tied to globalization, offshoring, and the U.S. dollar system, not ideological revolution. Elite complicity, from the 19th Amendment to public education, is questioned as a tool for control rather than liberation, while gendered job preferences are framed as natural, not imposed. Ultimately, it suggests feminism was a symptom of systemic change, not its cause. [Automatically generated summary]
Prior to the 1970s, we had 5% of mothers with school-aged kids working outside the home.
And for all of human history, even during the Industrial Revolution, you know, 17, 18, 1900s, like you said, in the 40s and 50s, you could be a janitor and support a family and have four kids on one income.
And something shifted in the 1970s and it's now.
All right.
Don't you think that people like this have a wildly naive conception of the past?
And by wildly, I mean this bourgeois, egalitarian, utopian view of history.
I don't even know where to begin, but the mistreatment of the poor during the Victorian age and so much of the 19th century was appalling.
Living in the Dustbowl, the sort of social and familial breakdown that was occurring on a daily basis during the Great Depression was tremendous.
You know, it's like we think that the past was the 1950s.
In many ways, the 1950s and the boomers who were getting married all the time was a reaction to the past.
It was a reaction to familial breakdown.
Unwanted pregnancies, abortions, dad leaves us.
The last thing he said is that I'm just going to the store to get some milk and we never saw him again.
This kind of thing was occurring all over the place.
And the idea that life in the Industrial Revolution was this sort of egalitarian middle class society where janitors had four kids or whatever is just wrong.
And in terms of human history, we know this through empirical research, but elites were outbreeding the underclass at a rapid clip throughout human history.
And you can actually research this and see this mostly through names and marriage records, etc.
So that 1950s utopia where the janitor had a stay-at-home wife and four kids and a garage and a vacation or whatever.
Is that like where we want to go back to?
Or is that an aberration, an exception that sort of proves the rule?
And if you're starting from this point, I don't quite know what to say.
Yeah, I mean, we just can't get beyond the fact mentally as a society that we've had a slow living standards improvement when you're looking back a thousand years.
And we had this recent bump where it shot up so fast.
And now we're kind of coming down from a high, but all we can think of is the fact that we don't feel as good as we did when we had that high.
And now people are kind of righteously pissed that like they're not living better than their parents, despite they might be more educated.
And telling them like, oh, hey, at least you're not living in the year 1700.
Only rich people could afford soap or just be grateful you have running water is the coldest of cold comforts.
And people are reacting figuratively violently when told that when society is telling them no to their idealized versions of idealized living standards.
And you can't blame the person that's mad because no one wants their life to be a kind of sacrificial lamb to history.
And they want to grasp at straws whatever ways they can.
And you can't blame them.
Well, first of all, pre-industrial revolution, there was no single income.
Everybody was working.
And like, yeah, the janitors children were the minds.
I'm sorry.
And I think that much of the kind of cost concern is driven primarily by the fact that lower classes now have bourgeois expectations.
If you don't give your kid away to school, to university, if he works, if he could work at a McDonald's at age seven, you could actually afford a life and it would be manageable.
Or you could go the African-American route and just live off of SNAP benefits and get six babies and do it that way.
Women in STEM: Debunking Myths00:13:03
You know, like there's still a very much attainable high fertility path, but nobody wants to take it.
Yeah, I'll keep going.
Ever shifted back.
So it can't be like how the stock market's doing.
It can't really be like all these other independent economic factors that have shifted and changed and been so different over the course of the last 50 years.
The one big thing that we changed is we pushed women into college and into the workforce.
And by the 1980s, they were on par with men in workforce participation.
So in the span of about 20 years, we almost doubled the labor force by pushing all the women in.
And men's wages have never recovered.
So now you are stuck in a two-income trap where even women who want to stay home and even dads who would love to have their wife home with their kids, it's really tough.
So why did women entering the workforce keep men's wages stable or keep them from going up along with the inflation?
It really fundamentally changed the economy.
I have a friend named Aaron Clary who wrote a book about this.
It's an analysis of what he calls a female-based economy where it's more consumer driven.
Women are like responsible for 80% of consumer spending.
And now that they're all educated and in the job market, we have a lot more of things like HR departments, psychology, sociology, like the economy.
Okay.
There's a lot to go into there.
Okay.
So I agree with the basic notion that if you double the size of labor, that labor costs are going to go down.
I mean, it's a just brute reality of supply and demand.
I get that.
But at the same time, I do think that her analysis is quite blind because women entering the workforce is going to create a bigger economy overall.
It's similar to like Richard Hanani appraising immigration where I do feel like he's missing something where it's like, yeah, you bring in millions of people and you're going to have to have millions and more homes.
You're going to have to have millions and more McDonald's selling them food.
You're going to have to have millions and more Walmart selling them goods.
Sell millions and more cars, et cetera.
The economy grows.
It's not growing per capita per person.
And it might be getting worse in that way, but it's going to sort of, it's going to grow the economy.
And women entering the workforce, there's going to be a greater division of labor, et cetera.
She seems to be blaming women for like technological and geopolitical realities of which women entering the workforce was in fact a symptom and not a cause.
So it's not like women came into the workforce and we're like, oh, wow, we all used to be lumberjacks, but now we're going to be HR directors and psychologists or something.
That's not how it works.
We benefit in the United States from the dollar system.
The dollar is in effect the gold standard.
And we benefit from this post-World War II system where we can outsource a lot of the hard labor and benefit from furthering the division of labor so that you don't have to own a small farm where you're raising your eggs and your cows so you can eat first and your family, and then you might sell the surplus or whatever.
You don't have to do that.
There's going to be a egg place that takes care of that and they're going to sell you eggs at five cents a pop and you can do something else.
And again, like we're able to have a country where you can have an HR manager, you can have a college professor, you can have a poet, you can have a beauty consultant that can be your career, in fact.
Whereas if we didn't benefit from this geopolitical reality and post-industrialization and offshoring, et cetera, if we didn't benefit from the United States and the dollar system being the center of a global economy, so we can outsource all that grunt labor to other people, then that kind of thing couldn't exist.
It is like the Marxist utopia.
Like you, you actually can be a poet in the afternoon if you want to.
If you are working for your own survival to feed yourself, you have no time to do something like that.
Now we have this luxury.
And it's almost like she wants to turn the world into a factory.
It's like a kind of weird type of communism where it's like we want to go back in time to this point where we're overpaying men to be lumberjacks so that they can have a family of four.
It's just very strange.
And again, was it just that like women entered the workforce and just transformed the economy?
And they're like, ooh, what?
Working at a factory, working with your hands?
Yuck.
No more of that.
I'm going to be a social media manager.
That's not what happened.
Like women's entrance into the workplace is a symptom of these technological and material changes.
We needed more people working because of the economy growing.
And secondly, women are arguably better at a lot of things, like being nurses, like being social media managers, like being HR directors, like working in an office.
It just is what it is.
I agree that there's some like bad things about it and their trade-offs.
I agree with all that, but it just is what it is.
It's not like, I don't think we should give women in a way the credit that they like transform things.
And I'll just add one more thing on here, which is that running a household used to be a just all day thing.
Like women think they have it bad now, you know, or like if you're a home, a homemaker, you're like, oh my God, I don't even have time for the laundry.
It's 3 p.m.
I've got a soccer practice already.
I get it that it's life is stressful.
That is nothing in comparison with doing the laundry by hand, slaughtering animals before you cook them.
I could just go on cleaning out the outhouses.
I mean, the washing machine, the dishwasher, indoor plumbing, the telephone, the fax machine, the internet door dash on your phone.
I think it's great to be a homemaker.
My mother was a homemaker and you can do that, but like you, you would need to be part of a team to take care of a home in previous times.
So it's sort of understandable that women could go into the workplace while their washing machine is running, if you understand what I'm saying.
Like there are just material technological changes that led to this.
And feminism, women entering the workplace is just a symptom.
I mean, I think there's this way in which you like demonize intellectuals.
And I don't think intellectuals are without power, but there's this like sense of like, if only Gloria Steinem hadn't written that magazine article that inspired women to go in the workplace.
And if she hadn't done that, then they just all stay at home.
And we just have a, everyone would be a lumberjack or a manual laborer and it would just be just badass.
We just, you know, every job would be tough.
You'd come home dirty and your wife would have dinner ready.
It's just, that's a total fantasy.
Gloria Steinem is symptomatic.
She's not causal, in my opinion.
She is basically rationalizing or justifying historical, technological, and material change.
She's not causing it.
Isn't this Maoism that Rachel basically wants?
Yeah.
Punch all the people wearing glasses.
Yeah, put them in the field.
I almost want to say it's like, like on some level, she's like annoyed that her husband's a podcaster and she like wishes he was breaking his back somewhere.
That's true.
He's not getting dirty.
No, he can't open a pickle jar.
So maybe she thinks he would be a manlier man if podcasting wasn't a career option.
It is like they, I don't have the words for this, but yeah, it's like you women have forced my man to be a podcaster.
Whereas like he could have been a lumberjack.
He could have been a sexy lumberjack.
Sexy lumberjack.
You women have made me go on Joe Rogan.
I just wanted to be at home knitting.
You made me do it.
So I'm going to do it.
I'm going to go have a career as a talking head.
Anyway, let's listen to a little more.
We shifted away from being like manufacturing and production and more male-dominated things to we have all these women coming out of university.
And, you know, they, what do they get degrees in?
I think 80% of psychology degrees are earned by women.
And then despite all our efforts to push women into STEM, they're still like maybe 20% of STEM degrees.
So we have all these very educated women and we have a lot of kind of fluffy jobs like office.
Yeah, but doesn't that demonstrate that sex differences haven't been overcome in a way?
Well, she'll make, I'm sure she makes a point that women are more people focused and men are more things focused.
And yet somehow it's scandalous that women are getting psych degrees over engineering.
Does she want them to go get engineering degrees?
I mean, I don't get her criticism.
I don't know what she's arguing there exactly.
China is also a manufacturing economy.
Their fertility rate is in the dumpster.
That is true.
Yes.
That is true.
The janitor doesn't have four kids.
I think that she's buying into like the STEM propaganda that like any degree STEM is useless, even though that a psychology degree actually can be very useful.
My grandfather had a master's in psychology and he was like managing human resources.
We men invented psychology.
Why are we like psychology?
These people like psychoanalyze horrors all day and then they want to pretend that like psychology is something beneath them.
I don't understand.
It's obviously a real study.
I sort of love the fact that this stems the STEM race or getting like genocided.
Like I'm overstating my case here, but you know, this whole like 10 years ago was like learn to code.
Yeah.
You vote for Trump because you want your coal mining job to stay, but like you don't have the creativity or gumption to like create an app or what like all that just like, I granted that kind of talk was totally annoying.
But the ironic outcome is that AI can just build your app for you.
Like you don't need these STEM people anymore.
You know, I always disliked that kind of notion anyway.
Like they'll say like, oh, you, you have a degree in underwater basket weaving or like you have a degree in feminism.
But they would say the same thing about like a degree in the classics or like, oh, you read Shakespeare.
How's that going for you?
You know, working at a coffee shop or like, I don't know, you an art history?
Oh, wow.
It's like, oh, yeah.
Heaven forbid someone like study like sculpture and painting or whatever and not like how to be an engineer.
I just always hated that attitude.
But it's sort of interesting that at least in terms of coding.
Now we'll see about other things.
Law, coding, and to a lesser degree, medicine, I think are going to be the first victims of the AI revolution.
But coding, 100%.
Why would you conceivably hire a low-level coder at this point?
I mean, it's literally just computer language.
So obviously the AI is going to do that better than a person.
I think medicine will be fine, though, just due to the heavy regulatory nature of it.
Yes.
Taxing Everything00:09:36
Jobs, HR jobs, social media managers.
And mostly women do a lot of the same things.
Again, what are the Wilsons, if not products of social media?
Literally.
Yeah.
Two podcasters telling you your psych degree.
Yeah.
I get it.
Yeah.
So they're nurses, they're early childhood educators, they're retail workers, they're cooks, they're housekeepers.
They're doing a lot of the stuff they used to do, which the Marxist feminists called unpaid labor, right?
This is the myth of women's paid labor.
So instead of cleaning your own house, educating your own children, cooking meals for your family, maybe for your parents or grandparents who can't cook for themselves, all the things we used to do for our own family, clerical work, bookkeeping for your husband's business, things like that.
We're doing those things for corporations.
So that, and this was kind of by design.
A lot of the book is about the fact that there were people who pushed feminism and it wasn't because women were oppressed and they cared about the position of women necessarily.
It's because the same people who pushed, you know, the 19th Amendment and pushed progressivism and feminism were the same people who drafted the Federal Reserve legislation, came up with the income tax, came up with the compulsory education system.
And especially on the Marxist side, they pushed feminism because they said, if we can push mothers and women into the workforce and we double the workforce, workers of the world unite.
You know what I'm saying?
So it's like we have this huge workforce and through the university systems, we can propagandize the young women to be socialists and to be Marxists because they kind of tend that way anyway.
The way that women's brains work is very like communitarian for a reason.
Oh, yeah.
Great contributions by women to Marxism.
It's just obviously men did this, Rachel.
I'd rather be a woman.
I don't want to, there actually have been female contributions to Marxism, but what I'm saying is like, we did it.
We were the fucking Marxist.
We did, we men, we did the French Revolution.
What are you talking about?
Even if your theory is true, it didn't work.
We don't live in a socialist society.
That's why everyone's complaining.
You guys want a socialist society.
You just want a socialist society for the middle class in this really weird way where we're going to like have a planned economy based around lumberjacks and janitors.
This is like Steve Bannon's wet dream as well.
Horrifying.
I just can't get over her like utter lack of just imagination even.
It's like everything's monocos.
Everything's downstream of feminism.
And they just created feminism because I don't even know why, because they're witches.
I guess that's her explanation.
It's literally male.
Maybe that was like the earlier book was like the impulse and feminism.
But then now she seems to, she sounds like, she sounds like a dimmer version of Phyllis Schlafly or something now, like the Marxist wants you out of the home where you'll be reading manifestos of all sorts, not to mention spreading your legs for every Tom, Dick, and Harry.
It's just so stupid.
I don't know.
Why does she get to go on showropes about this nonsense?
I don't know.
It's just really goofy.
I think it does appeal to his audience.
It does.
But I think it's just very obvious that rather than feminism just happening for some reason and causing all this change.
I mean, Rachel, feminism becomes a thing at a time where our whole relationship to labor and each other is like completely being upended by like huge technological changes.
I just, how do you not see that?
It doesn't take like a high IQ to understand the relationship there.
Maybe she, rather than keep talking about communists, she should actually like read some marks.
It would actually help her.
No, I think that's true.
Also, feminism, the civil rights and et cetera, sort of emerged out of the peak of the American empire in many ways.
Now, the Cold War was still going, so there was still an opposition, but I think that opposition was almost sort of good.
Like go, you want to go back to this period of the 1950s that birthed everything that you're talking about.
Like when was when were most people like proudest to be an American?
It's like mid-century.
Interesting.
That's coincidal and not necessarily causal, but it's still interesting.
Yeah.
I mean, what it's funny.
It is everything she says is just the reverse because it's not that women came.
We invented feminism and women came into the workplace.
Feminism comes out of women being in the workplace and women were in the workplace because again, we had an industrial revolution.
Then we actually had a shortage of labor.
And so that's, they were like begging women to come back and be nurses and teachers.
There just wasn't enough people to do this during the baby boom because there were so many more people all of a sudden.
You have a growing population.
They don't have enough workers actually for the demand.
So they needed women to come back into the workforce, actually.
And they did.
And every time they've come into the workforce, what's happened?
And this is because feminism is ultimately a labor movement.
Like it happened in the early 20th century is that women come into the workplace and they're having their working conditions are terrible in these factories.
You know, all these women like burned alive in a factory.
Horrible working conditions.
They have kids working in there.
The women are concerned for the children.
Feminism comes out of that.
And then again, women start entering the workforce in the 70s, as she's pointing out.
And the workplace is, well, aggressive and mean towards women.
It's not very welcoming.
And the men are sexually harassing them.
So yeah, feminism comes out of women actually just being in these places of employment, actually being out in the world.
It's not that women just came into the workplace after we had feminism.
It's the reverse.
But I don't know.
Rachel is obviously has an agenda to push and it's that women made my husband gay.
Chris.
When you talk about the appeal of this sort of narrative to the Joe Rogan audience, it reminds me of something Mark said a while back.
It's like, if you, if you engage to some degree with like just 100 normie core guys, you'll find that very often they've absorbed significant elements of this sort of mere narrative that, man, these college educated liberal women are just out of control.
They're nuts.
Like something's gone terribly wrong here.
And you can see how the Rachel Wilson narrative kind of fits into that.
Yeah, definitely.
Reason we're moms.
So it's very easy to radicalize.
And this isn't my opinion.
Like I again, I don't understand her argument because her argument is that women go into the workplace and then they do womanly things.
Like, isn't that good?
It's only good when you're doing it at home and you're not being paid.
The minute you do it in public and you get money for it, then it's suddenly bad.
I see.
Okay.
Go over in the book how you can just read the writings of these people and they tell you August Babel, Alexander Kolentai, Margaret Fuller, like all these early 1800s writers were saying we need to get women away from the home and away from being mothers and push them into the workplace because then we can politicize them.
We can motivate them into becoming revolutionaries.
And that's how we'll get the numbers to make this work.
Wow.
Yeah.
So now instead of staying home with your kids and doing all these things for you.
Doing revolutions.
But you're not, though.
I think they just wanted money to support their families.
Yeah.
Do you think like these millennial like HR managers are like doing revolution or something?
Like, what is she talking about?
None of these things happened, even if you can find some writer who theorized about that writer was wrong.
Like she's also correct that like women in the workplace are kind of girly, you know, like, I don't know what to say.
Where is this communist revolution or something?
It's just family for your community.
You're doing them for a corporation.
You're paying income tax.
You're paying all the other taxes associated with having to work outside the home gas tax because you're driving back and forth to work, payroll taxes, all that kind of stuff.
You're getting easy.
And you can have a credit card in a bank account of your own for the first time.
What is the highest income tax?
35?
It's like 37.
37.
Okay, 45%.
All right.
But yeah, like you're also making like $10 million if you're paying 40% of your income and taxes.
I mean, yeah.
Yeah.
What is she talking about?
Women aren't doing this for their community anymore either.
The two most common professions for women are nurse and teacher.
Incompetent Parents, Screwed Kids00:05:05
They're actually, who are they teaching?
Who are they healing at the hospital?
That is their community, Rachel.
Like, I don't know what you're talking about.
You make a point that women are doing all these jobs that they would have otherwise been doing at home, but then suddenly your picture of a woman with a job is like a VP at a Fortune 500.
Like, I don't know.
That's not the average woman, obviously.
average woman is like a nurse, a teacher, just doing a job probably better suited for her because she's a woman in jobs that men don't tend to pick because they don't tend to have an interest in it or tend to excel at it.
Most men don't want to teach like a room full of five-year-olds.
Yeah.
But someone has to.
Yeah.
You are away from your kids all day.
Where do they go?
They go to public schools where the public school system then can dictate to them what the values should be, how, you know, what the worldview should be instead of the parents.
Yeah.
It just makes you wonder.
Like there's all these giant shifts in culture.
And it makes you wonder, what would we look like if that had never taken place?
We would look like a bunch of rural idiots is what we would look like.
Is the implication that like feminists invented public school as well?
No, it's obviously like a Prussian model.
I mean, it's, it's just, I don't know what to also say.
Yes, we, you should go to school.
If I were in charge of an Apollonian government, we would have public education.
Sorry.
In fact, like, I'm sorry, but homeschooling would just be banned.
Oh, I think that's what I mean.
You just should not do that.
You need to instill a value system in the population through these institutions.
And yeah, you could probably find some of these examples of like crazy blue-haired people talking about like gender or whatever.
But most of public school is like saying the Pledge of Allegiance at 8:30 and like learning some kind of balderized, like happy version of American history for you to love your country.
I don't know what people are talking about.
It's not like that, at least out here in Montana.
They just learn the basic stuff and they do learn a narrative history of why America is good.
Now, I'm sure there's some exception to that that you can find, but you need that to have a cohesive community and a cohesive nation.
Homeschoolers, I don't, I just inherently dislike it.
But don't you think it's more an issue of culture?
Because I mean, European aristocracy was homeschooled and you could replace the social activities that you have in public education with young clubs.
I'm talking about the age of Barry Linden or something.
Sorry, that just came to mind.
But we're talking about like hiring a tutor to educate your children.
The alternative was very little education at all and illiteracy.
Yeah, certainly.
But they're in a different world now.
It's very different.
That's the way I meant it because well.
Homeschooling now is like some woman telling her children that dinosaurs don't exist.
What I am saying is if your parents are incompetent, you're screwed regardless of whether you go to public school or are homeschooled.
Whereas if your parents are competent, they can still set up a way better program education-wise.
I think if your parents are totally incompetent, you're kind of screwed, but you're actually, you have a chance if there is public education.
You're better off going to a public school and at least just for the social aspect alone.
Being isolated with your weird, incompetent parents is not horrifying.
It's not a good thing.
It's good to actually have an experience outside of the home in that case that actually is better.
If your parents are awesome, highly functional, then they might very well be good homeschoolers.
And I've even heard of examples just anecdotally of like, my kid had this really bad year.
He was bullying.
He was lost.
So we like did a homeschool year to sort of like take a breath and then he went back.
I think that is acceptable.
But Again, I hear those anecdotes from highly functional parents.
You know, like, I don't know what to say.
Even in South Chicago, like that little black girl whose dad is gone and mom is drugged out of her mind has a chance by going to a public school.
I mean, homeschooling, like a lot of stuff people did were to avoid diversity then.
Yeah, yeah, I get that.
It's just another American activity of avoiding diversity.
And if you're, I guess, poor and have a statement.
I just think you're giving them too much credit because I think it's actually another American tradition of being retarded.