Bitchy History

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A few years ago, a friend of mine said, “Sometimes I forget Republican Meredith was a person.”

I responded that I was less a person and more a stack of delusions in a trench coat.

Republican Meredith does sound fake now.

Like a cryptid. Grainy footage filed somewhere between Bigfoot and a flying saucer in the X-Files.

Unfortunately, she was real.

The machine that produced her was real, too.

I worked in conservative media. I was part of the “new media” wing of the GOP, back when we still pretended “new media” meant we were “democratizing” political conversation and not manufacturing outrage faster with ring lights.

Conservatism didn’t sell itself to me as cruelty. That would have been easier to spot.

It sold itself as reason.

Common sense.

Freedom.

Limited government.

All those polished little phrases that sound sturdy until you press on them and realize they are mostly stage scenery.

That’s how the myth factory works.

It doesn’t begin by asking you to hate people.

It begins by handing you a very flattering story about yourself.

You aren’t selfish or hostile to equality. You’re sensible, you understand economics, you believe in small government and personal responsibility.

Except I started noticing that the people who talked most about small government didn’t actually want small government.

They wanted selective government.

Government small enough to stay out of corporate boardrooms and large enough to crawl into classrooms, doctors’ offices, and bedrooms.

And history was one of the main tools used to make that contradiction feel natural.

I watched the machinery at work from the inside. Culture war narratives pushed to distract while someone else was dismantling social safety nets and consolidating power.

I watched history get cherry-picked to justify policies that harmed the most vulnerable.

I watched talking heads confidently repeat historical nonsense they either knew was false or didn’t care enough to fact-check.

The point was never accuracy, it was repetition.

Say it often enough, loud enough, and with enough patriotic wallpaper and eventually the lie sticks.

The right doesn’t fight over history because it’s sentimental. They do it because the past is politically useful. The myths we tell about what happened then become the policies we accept now.

If you can convince people that feminism destroyed the family or racism ended with a few speeches and a federal holiday, you can make attacks on women’s rights sound like restoration and civil rights enforcement sound like special treatment.

Historical erasure isn’t an accident. It’s a strategy.

That is what I eventually had to face. I hadn’t just been lied to. The lie had been useful to me.

It let me feel reasonable. Moderate. Sophisticated. It let me imagine I was standing above the mess, when really I was standing on top of people the system had already pushed down.

The myth factory doesn’t ask you to become a monster.

It asks you to become comfortable.

My breaking point came in 2016, when I watched Trump win the Florida Republican primary and realized this was not an intellectual movement that had been hijacked. It was not a good-faith policy debate that had temporarily gone off the rails.

This was the product.

The fear. The cruelty. The historical illiteracy. That had been the point the entire time.

My mother, sensing either political disaster or impending personal growth, handed me tequila.

The next morning, hungover, I changed my party affiliation and took a sledgehammer to load-bearing walls of my career.

But leaving wasn’t enough.

I had helped carry the myth, so I had to help dismantle it. You don’t get to walk out of the factory covered in soot and pretend you were only sightseeing.

I study history because history isn’t safely behind us. It’s alive, badly behaved, and currently being used in campaign emails.

I teach it, write about it, and yell about it online because people who understand the past are much harder to control in the present.

So when my friend says she forgets Republican Meredith was a person, I get it.

Sometimes I forget too.

But she was real.

She was a person standing in the myth factory, pulling the levers and pretending she wasn’t setting fires.

And now I spend my life loudly pulling the fire alarm.

Thank you LeftieProf, Kit Thornton, Karma, Annabelle, Maura, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dana DuBois and Letters from a Feminist!

I had so much fun on the show!

In this episode of Bitchy History, we take on Phyllis Schlafly, the anti-feminist career woman who built a very successful career telling other women that feminism would ruin their lives.

Using Schlafly’s own books, debates, and the modern afterlife of her arguments, we unpack how she helped defeat the Equal Rights Amendment by selling women’s legal and economic dependence as “protection.” Schlafly argued that equality would rob women of their “rights and privileges”: exemption from the draft, husbandly support, maternal custody, and the sentimental safety of the traditional family. But what kind of privilege disappears when women become equal?

We trace how Schlafly turned equality into a panic machine: draft panic, custody panic, daycare panic, bathroom panic, gay rights panic, abortion panic, and family-collapse panic. Then we follow that same logic into the present, where conservative women are still insisting that public childcare is tyranny, male provision is freedom, and motherhood only counts when it is private, unpaid, and politically useful.

This is not an episode attacking mothers, homemakers, religious women, or stay-at-home wives. Feminists are not trying to ban women from choosing domestic life. The issue is whether domesticity should be made compulsory through law, economics, religion, and shame.

Phyllis Schlafly called the lock privilege.

And we are done admiring the upholstery.

Readings Used but Absolutely Not Recommended

Phyllis Schlafly, The Power of the Christian WomanA theological anti-feminist manual in which women are told they have “power,” as long as that power never threatens male authority, legal hierarchy, or the sacred right to smile while structurally dependent.

Phyllis Schlafly, Feminist FantasiesA greatest-hits album of anti-feminist panic, complete with claims that feminists are miserable, homemakers are happy, and equality is somehow bad for women. Includes Ann Coulter treating Schlafly like Joan of Arc with a newsletter.

Phyllis Schlafly and Suzanne Venker, The Flipside of Feminism: What Conservative Women Know—and Men Can’t SayA book whose subtitle is basically “what patriarchy wants said in a higher voice.” Useful for understanding how Schlafly’s anti-feminism got repackaged for the twenty-first century.

Phyllis Schlafly, Who Will Rock the Cradle?The childcare panic text. Public childcare becomes government takeover, daycare becomes the nanny state, and mothers are once again handed the bill for civilization’s emotional stability.

Phyllis Schlafly, Who Killed the American Family?A late-career murder mystery where the victim is the 1950s family and every suspect is feminism, judges, gay people, professors, social workers, childcare, divorce, women’s studies, and probably a woman wearing pants somewhere.

Anne Schlafly Cori, “Phyllis Schlafly was right: America must put babies and mothers first,” Fox News, May 2026Proof that Schlafly’s argument did not die. It simply logged into Fox News and started yelling about daycare.

“Debate 1980, ERA: Phyllis Schlafly and Peg Anderson”Schlafly’s claims that the ERA had nothing to do with equal pay and would instead strip women of existing protections. Useful. Infuriating.

“Phyllis Schlafly Interview on ERA,” Today Show, 1972Used for the “each parent gets one child” custody panic and Schlafly’s claim that ERA would take away women’s “rights and privileges.” A short clip, but spiritually exhausting.

“Phyllis Schlafly Explains Why Americans Don’t Support the Equal Rights Amendment”Schlafly’s “women don’t want to be treated just like men” draft panic argument, where she frames equality as women being forced into military service rather than full constitutional citizenship. An hour long, but it contains Ann Scott reading Schlafly to filth, so it’s less annoying than some clips.

History didn’t forget women. It decided they didn’t matter.

In this episode, we dive into the work of Gerda Lerner—the historian who helped build women’s history as a field and, in the process, exposed how traditional history erased half the population while pretending to be objective.

From The Creation of Patriarchy to The Female Experience, Lerner shows that patriarchy is not natural, feminist consciousness is not automatic, and history itself is a site of power.

We also talk about something a little more personal: what it means to live inside a system you don’t yet have language for—and why naming things, whether in history or in your own life, is often the first step toward understanding them.

If you’ve ever felt like something was wrong but couldn’t quite explain why, this one’s for you.

Reading List

* Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (1986)The blueprint. If you read one thing, read this. Explains patriarchy as a historical system, not a biological fact.

* Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness (1993)The follow-up. How women learned to see themselves as a political group—and why that took centuries.

* Gerda Lerner, The Female Experience (1977)A documentary history built from women’s voices. This is where the archive starts talking back.

* Gerda Lerner, The Majority Finds Its Past (1979)Essays on why women’s history changes how we do history, not just what we study.

* Gerda Lerner, The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina (1967)Feminist consciousness in motion. Also a great entry point if you like narrative-driven history.

Gossip Girl was never just a teen soap about rich kids in absurd headbands making terrible decisions on the Upper East Side. It was also a glittery little blueprint for influencer culture, public shaming, digital surveillance, aspirational wealth, and the deeply American habit of packaging cruelty as glamour.

In this episode of Bitchy History, I’m joined by Lindsay Denninger to talk about her book You Know You Love Me: How Gossip Girl Changed Pop Culture as We Know It, why female-centered pop culture is so often dismissed as unserious, and why that dismissal is complete nonsense. We get into the show’s feminism, its failures, its cultural afterlife, and the reason it still feels weirdly relevant in an era of curated identities, toxic men, and lives lived half for the camera.

Because popular media matters. “Trashy” media matters. The things girls and women are told not to take seriously usually turn out to be doing a whole lot of cultural work behind the scenes.

So yes, we’re talking about Gossip Girl. But we’re also talking about power, gender, performance, and the fact that this show walked so the modern internet could run headfirst into a wall.

XOXO

Buy: You Know You Love Me: How Gossip Girl Changed Pop Culture as We Know It

(Buy local if you can, but Amazon is fine if it’s all you have at home.)

Find Lindsay on social media!

https://www.instagram.com/lindsaydenninger

lindsaydenninger.substack.com

We love to treat the Seneca Falls Convention as the moment feminism began.

A group of women gathered, declared that “all men and women are created equal,” and kicked off the fight for the vote. Simple. Inspiring. Done.

Except… not quite.

In this episode, we take a closer look at what actually happened in 1848—and what didn’t get included in that story. Because while the Declaration of Sentiments used universal language, the reality of the movement was much more specific.

We’ll break down:

* how abolition and reform movements made Seneca Falls possible

* why the demand for the vote was controversial—even in the room

* how Frederick Douglass helped push suffrage forward

* and how Sojourner Truth exposed the limits of who counted as a “woman”

Along the way, we’ll bring in historians like Gerda Lerner, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Angela Davis to keep us grounded in what was actually happening—not the polished version we like to tell later.

RECOMMENDED READING

Primary Sources

* Declaration of Sentiments

* Report of the Woman’s Rights Convention

* Ain’t I a Woman?

Key Background

* Gerda Lerner — The Creation of Feminist Consciousness; The Meaning of Seneca Falls

* Angela Davis — Women, Race, & Class

The women’s rights movement didn’t begin in 1848.

Long before the Seneca Falls Convention, Black women were already speaking publicly about freedom, citizenship, labor, and political power in a nation that denied them all four. In this episode, we move beyond the tidy origin story and look at the women who came first—Maria W. Stewart, Sojourner Truth, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper—and how their work reshapes what we think we know about the fight for women’s rights.

Because the question was never just whether women should vote.

It was who counted as a full political person in the first place.

Core Primary Sources

* Maria W. Stewart, Productions of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart (1835)

* Sojourner Truth, Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850)

* Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Speeches, Poems, and Essays

* Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South (1892)

Secondary Sources

* Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920

* Martha S. Jones, Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All

* bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

* Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins” (1989)

Maria Mitchell discovered a comet, but she also calculated data for the U.S. Coast Survey, built one of the first rigorous observatory programs for women in the United States, supported abolition, worked alongside suffragists, and challenged institutional pay inequality.

In this episode, Professor Meredith steps back and lets her sister lead a conversation about a woman who refused to be professionally contained. We talk about celestial navigation, the science of comets, Quaker radicalism, and why Mitchell’s life challenges the idea that women must narrow themselves to a single identity. A story about the stars and the freedom to embody multitudes.

Find Alexandria on SubStack (where you can also find her links to TikTok, Youtube, and Instagram).

For the final episode of Arc III: Pretty Cages, we’re ending where containment gets subtle.

No laws.

No contracts.

No sermons about obedience.

Just vibes.

In recent years, the language of the “divine feminine” has exploded across social media and wellness culture. Women are encouraged to soften, surrender, receive, flow, and “drop into their feminine energy.” We’re told that masculine and feminine energies are natural polarities. That men and women are wired differently. That harmony depends on balance.

It sounds empowering. It sounds spiritual. It sounds like healing.

But when you look closely, something feels familiar.

In this episode, we trace how divine feminine discourse echoes older systems of gender containment — from Victorian separate spheres ideology to 20th-century pop psychology to long-standing pseudoscientific claims about biological difference.

We explore:

* How “complementarity” survives by rebranding hierarchy as balance

* Why “wired different” arguments never really go away

* How softness becomes prescription rather than choice

* The selective editing of goddess history in modern spiritual culture

* And how the most effective cages relocate enforcement inside the self

This isn’t an attack on spirituality, intuition, or softness.

It’s an investigation into how power adapts.

Because pretty cages don’t disappear.

They evolve.

And sometimes the pedestal just becomes an altar.

Sources Used in This Episode (I can’t, in good conscience, necessarily recommend reading most of them…)

* Holy & Human, “The Divine Masculine and Divine Feminine Long for Union”

* The Good Trade, “What Is The Divine Feminine?”

* Soulaia, “The Rise of the Divine Feminine”

* Helena Aeberli (Substack), “the modern myth of the divine feminine”

* Morgan Migliorisi, 365 Days of Divine Feminine Wisdom

* Mari Silva, Divine Feminine and Masculine Energy: Unlock Inner Power and Achieve True Balance

* Heather Dolson, Divine Feminine Unveiled

* Deya Smith, Soft is the New Power

* Anodea Judith & Isabella Price, Goddess Power: Awakening the Wisdom of the Divine Feminine in Your Life

* Reemus Bailey, Healing the Feminine Energy: The Wounds of Your Inner Child

* Michelle Cross, How To Connect To Your Feminine Energy

* Angela Grace, Feminine Energy Awakening: Goddess Energy Secrets & How To Step Into Your Divine Power

* John Gray, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus

* Gina Rippon, The Gendered Brain

* Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender