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We are Alyssa and Bri, two sisters who believe God wants more for women than we've been taught. Join us as we dive into the intersection of faith and feminism, learning together as we go.
To the We Are More Pod cast. My name is Alyssa. And my
Speaker 2:name is Bree. We're two sisters passionate about all things faith and feminism. We believe
Speaker 1:that Jesus trusted, respected, and encouraged women to teach and preach his word. And apparently, that's controversial. Get comfy.
Speaker 2:Happy Christmas, Harry. Happy Christmas, Harry. What a lovely thing to say. Brie and I
Speaker 1:have been listening to the second Harry Potter book, which don't hate me. I don't know the names of all the individual ones. Like, don't know them in order. It's the chamber of secrets. I don't know.
Speaker 1:What? I'm sorry. What do you mean? I couldn't tell you them in order. To what are you referring?
Speaker 1:There's seven books. I've read them all. I've seen all the movies, but I couldn't tell you, like, which story goes where.
Speaker 2:Okay. I'm gonna try. I'm ready. The Sorcerer's Stone. But also, they called it The Sorcerer's Apprentice, didn't they?
Speaker 2:Or is that something totally different? That's Disney. That's Disney. Okay.
Speaker 1:There is another name for that one. Listen, cut that. No. I'm leaving that in. That's Mickey Mouse.
Speaker 1:It's like, the philosopher's stone. The philosopher's stone.
Speaker 2:The The philosopher's apprentice, you know? Potato potato. And then the chamber of Secrets, that's two. And the third one is Prisoner of Azkaban, where he meets Sirius Black and that guy who's famously ugly. And Do we
Speaker 1:need a summary of each one too?
Speaker 2:Is that what we're going for? Oh. And then the fourth one is or is the fourth one Prisoner of Azkaban?
Speaker 1:Girl, I don't know. That's the
Speaker 2:point And then of Goblery. And then and and the Deathly Hollows.
Speaker 1:What we're learning
Speaker 2:today Someone's gonna hate us.
Speaker 1:Is that Brie is a liar and neither is.
Speaker 2:No. No. No. No.
Speaker 1:No. I have them right over there. It needs to be noted. She's trying to look for them.
Speaker 2:Okay? I have them on my bookshelf. They're just on the bottom.
Speaker 1:So I win. I've been vindicated.
Speaker 2:What are the other ones? I don't know. There's Harry Potter and the Wow. And the There's the order
Speaker 1:of the phoenix somewhere Oh, in
Speaker 2:maybe that's the third one. Or that's the fourth one. That's third or fourth. And then goblet of fire might be the fifth. Because then after goblet of fire, all the you know what breaks loose, and then what's his face is alive.
Speaker 2:Wow. And then what's the second to last one?
Speaker 1:Can I say I don't know in a different way?
Speaker 2:Harry Potter and the boy who lived.
Speaker 1:He is the boy who lived. What's I don't know.
Speaker 2:There's gotta be another one.
Speaker 1:There are definitely more. Why? I have what's wrong with me? You're just now admitting to yourself what I've already admitted to the world, that you don't know them in order.
Speaker 2:No. We're gonna cut all of this. And then I'm just gonna blee, blee, blee, blee, blee, blee.
Speaker 1:Absolutely not. The world needs to know. And frankly, I think most of the world is right along with us. There are definitely some people that know them all straight through. But we grew up little tiny Christian girls
Speaker 2:Mhmm. That's true.
Speaker 1:In the, like, demon panic of the nineties. Mhmm. And we were not allowed to read these as children.
Speaker 2:Because you wanted to stay as far away from, like, magic as you could.
Speaker 1:And witchcraft and all that stuff.
Speaker 2:But then, I'm sure we've said this before. Alyssa secretly read them, and she would put, like, different book jackets on them. Yep. She could hide that she was reading them. And eventually, our mom found out.
Speaker 1:Because I posted something on Facebook. Because I'm a genius. Yeah. Genius. Not the brightest.
Speaker 1:But I was in high school. So
Speaker 2:And then our mom turned around and read them.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And then fell in love with them.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And then we
Speaker 2:went to Harry Potter world when it opened.
Speaker 1:We did. I forgot about that. As intros go, this is one of our weirder ones.
Speaker 2:We're just talking about Harry Potter.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But how do we get here? The other day, I was hanging
Speaker 2:out with mom and dad, and we spent literally I don't
Speaker 1:think we moved for six hours because we watched two, three, and four. Wasn't that, like, the day after Black Friday or something, though?
Speaker 2:I think
Speaker 1:so. So that makes sense to me.
Speaker 2:You're exhausted. And I I remember we watched Godlet of Fire and Prisoner of Azkaban. And
Speaker 1:Which one? I think Chamber of Secrets.
Speaker 2:We're just going on so long talking about stupidness. Nobody cares.
Speaker 1:No. But they they understand our pain. They're there with us, except for one person who's really, really mad right now, and they're gonna send us messages.
Speaker 2:And they're probably mad at JK Rowling too. So why don't you just add her in the hate mail?
Speaker 1:That's fair. That's Many of us are mad at her.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's alright. We'll continue living our lives. Speaking of magic
Speaker 2:And we're just gonna ease right in. What a great transition. It's been a minute since I've done that. It has. And if you wanna go back and listen to my other transition sounds, listen to the other 80 something episodes of us.
Speaker 2:We might be on 88 now?
Speaker 1:A good year. 87 or 88.
Speaker 2:We're talking about Mrs. Claus today, etcetera. Etcetera. Other, like, women of Christmas. We're continuing with our women of Christmas or, like, what we've defined as Christmas series.
Speaker 2:And today we're talking about Mrs. Claus. Anybody know the song by Adina Menzel? How about a hand for Mrs. Claus?
Speaker 2:Think Ariana Grande as well.
Speaker 1:I do remember that one. I like
Speaker 2:that song. It's only in the more modern era that we've started kind of reclaiming Mrs. Claus. Mhmm. And recognizing her for all her hard work and taking care of Santa and realizing maybe Santa is, you know, kind of a bum.
Speaker 1:Now, I wanna preface this by saying, we do know that this is a fictional character. No. She's real. And you watch yourself. I'm sorry, children.
Speaker 1:Turn off the radio.
Speaker 2:Mrs. Claus was not part of the original St. Nicholas story. So St. Nicholas is based off of St.
Speaker 2:Nicholas who would go around and give little treats to children. Maybe we should have looked into him a little bit more. It wasn't part of his original story that he had a wife. And it wasn't until about the Victorian era that we started saying, maybe Santa needs wives. Maybe he needs to check a wife.
Speaker 1:Finally.
Speaker 2:And what is that quote from Pride and Prejudice? He must be in good fortune because because he's Santa, so he must be in want of a wife. I don't think that was the quote. I made my own.
Speaker 1:A single man of good fortune must be in want of a wife.
Speaker 2:Yes. That's exactly right. So, The idea of him having a missus Claus came about in the Victorian era. They were obsessed with the idea of domestic morality. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And in the Victorian era, they believed that women were like the epitome of morality in the home. Mhmm. And they thought men on their own left to their own devices were chaotic and crazy. And they needed a wife to keep them moral and good. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And the Victorian era was the time of industrial revolution. They had a lot of uncertainty going on in the world. So think back to when you were in like eighth and ninth grade and learning that in history class. And you probably watched the newsies. I don't even know that that's in the that's in my head.
Speaker 2:And the workhouses and the Scrooge of it all. So they were scared of that. And there was stress on traditional hierarchies. They weren't sure Those were starting to weaken. There was Darwin who came into the picture, he started challenging religious certainty.
Speaker 2:So people were scared that their religion maybe wasn't true. Or maybe there were other religions coming into the picture. So yeah, they were scared. So they started to cling to the home. And that's where Mrs.
Speaker 2:Claus came in because Santa must be in want of a wife.
Speaker 1:One thing I think is really interesting that you had said earlier is that the woman is kind of the spiritual lead in the home. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:She was the moral backbone.
Speaker 1:Right. And nowadays, in our modern Christian churches, we talk about the man as the spiritual head of the household all the time. You hear this everywhere. Even in, I think, like, the more modern churches where a lot of people like us would walk in and be like, oh, yeah. This feels like a a church that's gonna value me as a woman.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They still see the man as the spiritual head of the household. But I think it's really important to look back to eras like this and say, that wasn't always true.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And if it wasn't always true cause the church now wants you to think this was always how it's been. If it wasn't always true, then is it true now? Melissa
Speaker 2:and I were talking about this earlier. Even before then, they thought that women were the promiscuous ones. Mhmm. They thought they were more sinful because there were something different about their bodies. And then you turn over to the Victorian era, and they're like, no.
Speaker 2:No. No. Women are naturally moral and good. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And now you have women are not intelligent enough to lead themselves.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. So they must be led by their husbands. Mhmm. Yeah. It's very interesting how we've warped women.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I really think if you can if you have the ability to look back in history and not just to forget what's happened before, what's come before, it becomes a lot easier to come at religion from the perspective that we're talking about from a feminist perspective when you realize that the church hasn't always been like this.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What they say is traditional values is traditional to, like, the nineteen fifties. In The United States. In The United States. It's not truly traditional.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Because if you were looking at traditional, you would have to look at Jesus era. Mhmm. Right? And Jesus didn't do any of this to women. He didn't married.
Speaker 1:Exactly. And he didn't make women the sole moral backbone. But he also didn't make men the spiritual leaders.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:He brought everyone in.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And we've talked about this a million times. But in a time where women had no value Mhmm. He put value on them. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And he spoke to them, which was unheard of So at the he was radical. He was a hippie at
Speaker 1:the time.
Speaker 2:The first appearances of Mrs. Claus came in 1849 in something called A Christmas Legend by James Reese. And it's a story, I think it's like a children's story, and Santa visits a house and a woman is mentioned and she helps him with, you know, general labor. General helpingness. And she remains unnamed and is only seen as like a support act.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. So that's the earliest view of her. And I think that says a lot about her of the time she was unnamed. Mhmm. She provided an amount of labor that Santa clearly needed.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. And then Santa turned around and got all the credit for it. I know it's fictional. But it just says a lot about how we view women Mhmm. Constantly.
Speaker 2:And we've talked about this in previous episodes too, the invisible labor of women. Mhmm. Especially around the holidays. Cooking and cleaning and buying the presents and staying in budget and maintaining relationships and keeping things magical. And all of that goes unnoticed.
Speaker 1:I think every piece of that story, you can pull into how we see women now because she's unnamed. Women now are expected to take their husband's name. That's true. They lose a part of their identity in order to become this married person. And if that's your choice, then that's great, and that's your choice.
Speaker 1:But it's an expectation.
Speaker 2:And even little subliminal things, you go from a miss to a missus. Whereas a mister is always a mister. Mister. Mhmm. He's not defined by his marital status.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. So if you hear Mr. Smith and Mr. Smith, you have no idea which one is married. Right.
Speaker 2:But if you have Mrs. Smith and Ms. Smith, you know. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And when you have a wedding, oftentimes, you'll hear the pastor pronounce like, and for the first time ever, I wanna introduce to you mister and missus John Smith.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:She loses her first name in that scenario too. And that happens to women for decades where she would be missus his first name and last name.
Speaker 2:I remember growing up too and thinking, oh, I
Speaker 1:wonder what my name will be.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. And I think that is kind of brain altering for girls is the idea that your life doesn't start until you're married. You don't even know what your name is yet until you're married. Mhmm. And I slowly started playing with the idea of, should I choose to take husband?
Speaker 2:Not changing my name. And now that's solidified in my brain. Because I'm like, no, I am Brianna Johnson. Mhmm. I would like to always stay Brianna Johnson because that's who I am.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. And I've built my life, and I've done all my things as Brianna Johnson. I don't really wanna change that. Mhmm. So I'm in no hate to anybody who does change their name.
Speaker 2:Alyssa changed her name. But, yeah, I think it should be a choice and not an expectation.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I think it's important that we start giving that message when girls are young to say, when you're older, you may choose to change your name, and you may not. And either one is okay.
Speaker 2:And also for boys, let's start making it wild and say, maybe you take her last name.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Or maybe you come up with a new last name together because you're a new family.
Speaker 2:The Patagonias. Yes. Exactly. That's the first name that came to my mind.
Speaker 1:That's a strange first thing to come to your mind.
Speaker 2:I know. I don't know why. In 1851, Yale Literary Magazine, they first coined the phrase Mrs. Claus. So that's when her name actually appears.
Speaker 2:But she never has a first name. I think you can look back through different stories and different, you know, legends of Mrs. Claus, and they have a million different names
Speaker 1:for her.
Speaker 2:But she's always Mrs. Claus. Right. So in that magazine, it appears in print that she's Mrs. Claus, and she's described as efficient, matronly, responsible for logistics.
Speaker 2:So she's like, the administrator of Christmas. Mhmm. Then that, again, is reflected of how they see women. Administrators, but not the boss. Right.
Speaker 2:And in the mid to late eighteen hundreds, Mrs. Claus became more defined as like elderly but warm, round and rosy cheeked, always indoors, baking, sewing, mending. She makes Santa's clothes, she feeds him, she keeps him healthy, runs a household. And then they specifically say she mirrors like the angel in the house ideal of womanhood, which we will get into more later. But that was from a poem that wasn't super popular at the time, but gained popularity when they realized like, oh, this is how an ideal woman should be.
Speaker 2:So, yeah. Just again, like, Santa gets all of the credit, and she
Speaker 1:gets all of the labor. Mhmm. It bothers me greatly anytime someone uses the phrase or implies the idea of an ideal woman.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Because let me just ask the question. Do we have a male equivalent? Would you say this is the ideal man? Danny Warbucks. Not this is my ideal man.
Speaker 1:Like, this is what I'm looking for in a partner or something like that. But this is the global ideal man. Jason Momoa. Thank you for that. There's not an equivalent.
Speaker 1:There's not like a, okay. Check this box and this box and this box and this box, and you're the ideal man. But there is for women.
Speaker 2:Uh-huh.
Speaker 1:And there can't be. There cannot be an ideal woman because every woman is different. We are individuals. There is no box that you can put 100% of women into and say, you have to be this. Because that type of woman doesn't work in every society, in every family,
Speaker 2:for every person. I think God is smart. You know? What?
Speaker 1:No. And he gave everybody free will. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And with that comes, like, a million different personalities and a million different ways of thinking. And that is good. Mhmm. God said it was good. Why would he want a bunch of cookie cutter people?
Speaker 2:Right. A bunch of like, what do you call them? Drones? Robots? I don't know.
Speaker 2:Blobs? Who all think and act the same way. Mhmm. It just doesn't make sense. I don't think we would have gotten this far if everybody thought the same way and acted the same way.
Speaker 2:Okay. Another sighting of Mrs. Claus was in 1889. There's a children's book called Goody Santa Claus and the Sleigh Ride. Well No.
Speaker 2:I don't know exactly what they're trying to imply. But I think Goody's a child. Oh. She's adventurous. She's curious.
Speaker 2:And Santa initially says that she cannot go on the sleigh ride with him, but she goes anyways. And the story includes a Mrs. Claus who pushes against restrictions, a woman whose desire for adventure is gently scolded. That's the kind of vibe Mhmm. Going on here.
Speaker 2:I feel like it's
Speaker 1:a child. Because what adult is named Goody? Well, in Crucible, that was kind of what they used as like a precursor. Instead of like miss or missus, it was like Goody Smith. Oh.
Speaker 1:So it could be that. I'm not really sure.
Speaker 2:I don't know. But she's in the 1889 Goody Santa Claus and the sleigh ride. Weird.
Speaker 1:Is she immortal? A good question. A good question. A really good question. I ask that all the time about fictional Is she magical?
Speaker 1:Apparently, because she manages to manage everything.
Speaker 2:Some people say that she has magic by association. Oh, ick. Yeah. And that, like, being married to Santa grants you longevity.
Speaker 1:Boys and girls. This is a fictional character.
Speaker 2:Some people say it's Christmas magic.
Speaker 1:That they live forever? Yeah. Oh, sure.
Speaker 2:And some people say she's a former human turned Fae like.
Speaker 1:Okay. Where are you getting this? ChadGPT.
Speaker 2:But some modern interpretations say that she's like, older than Santa. Say that she taught Santa his magic.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:She binds the North Pole with protective magic. Protective magic. Anyways, so that's a lot of what ChatGPT says about Mrs. Claus. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:But then I wanted to dive deeper and learn more about the Victorian era, and how they viewed women, and how that shaped Mrs. Claus.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:So the again, the Victorian era people were obsessed with domestic morality. And the Victorian era was around like 1837 to nineteen o one. They had something called the doctrine of separate spheres. There's two spheres. Get ready.
Speaker 1:I'm ready.
Speaker 2:There's a public sphere, which men are designated to. Sure. And there's a private sphere, which women are designated to. Public sphere means industry, politics, commerce, law, temptation. And private sphere is home, children, morality, religion, and emotional life.
Speaker 2:Interesting, Women were believed to be naturally more moral, spiritually superior, and emotionally refining.
Speaker 1:To me, the idea of public versus private says ownership. Yeah. Like, when I'm married, I belong to this person. Therefore, I am his private property. Or when I am a child, I am my parents' private property.
Speaker 1:I don't have a public persona.
Speaker 2:Like, I have to get permission to be seen. Right. Permission to speak. Permission to do everything. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like, you're an object. She's not really a a person in a partnership. Interesting. I just find it very interesting that they're like, she's spiritually superior.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. So a man has to find a wife if he wants to like get into heaven. Right. Which is very different from the way that we're thinking now. We say that men are the spiritual head of the household and that, like, in order to get to heaven, you have to, like, go through your husband and follow everything that he says.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I feel like when young girls are in church and they're, like, thinking about what their future husband is gonna be, they're told to, like, look for the guy who volunteers all the time. Look for the guy who's a a deacon at the church. Look for, you know, like, someone that never leaves the doors of the church, I guess.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And yet you look back then, and it's like, a man wasn't even expected to be moral almost until he got a wife.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Like, men are wild, and women need to tame them. Mhmm. But then why are men the leaders? Right.
Speaker 2:If they're wild and untamable Right. Why are they leading things? And why are they still leading things?
Speaker 1:Well, we do have that still in a way. Like, obviously and it's like men take both sides of it. Because on the one hand, now they've taken the moral superiority. They wanna be the spiritual leaders of the household, blah blah blah. But then on the flip side, women have to worry about modesty because men can't control their lust.
Speaker 1:Men can't control their sexual urges.
Speaker 2:Throw out it both ways.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So essentially, they they do. They get to be the spiritual leaders, but then they also get to not worry about their base or instincts.
Speaker 2:I think it's you're right. It's interesting because they wanted to be like these public leaders, right, in the public sphere. They wanted that power. And then they realized that they were giving any amount of power over to women. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And they were like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We want that too. Mhmm. We don't want you to have any power.
Speaker 1:Right. Because you're our private property. Well, because also, if you take it even further, if women are morally superior, then why were men leading the churches?
Speaker 2:True. True, true. So there is a poem that came out in 1854 called Angel of the House. And it's by Coventry Petmore. That's a great name.
Speaker 2:I know. And it was a poem about his deceased wife who he found to be the ideal woman. And when you look it up, it says that it was poorly written, and it's, like, excessively long. Mhmm. Because it documents her life from, like, birth to
Speaker 1:death. Good heavens.
Speaker 2:And he just talks about how, like, she is ideal. She is the perfect woman. And at the time, it wasn't that popular. But it gained popularity when they realized, oh, maybe this is a way that we can talk about what the ideal woman is. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And give her a list of rules. And his wife's name was, because we always speak their names, Emily Augusta Andrews. 1824 to 1862 is when she lived. But yeah, here's a little excerpt of it. Is that how you say it?
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Excerpt? I don't like that word.
Speaker 1:I'm so sorry.
Speaker 2:Man must be pleased, but him to please is woman's pleasure down the gulf. Of the condoled necessities, she cast her best, she flings herself. I don't wanna go on. That's fair. It it it not only talks about, like, the perfect wife in, like, domestic sense, but, like, also, like, sexually.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Oh, ick. Yeah. You
Speaker 1:know what that reminds me of? The Proverbs 31 woman.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. I was gonna say that. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:It's it's a list of rules, but it was never meant to be a list of rules.
Speaker 2:And it wasn't supposed to be about one specific woman who embodies all of these. Right.
Speaker 1:It's supposed to be
Speaker 2:all women embody attributes of these.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Here's some good things.
Speaker 2:And women are great. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:But this, it it gives me that same vibe of not of what was meant from Proverbs 31, but of what we've turned it into. Because here, he's saying, like, alright, my ideal woman never really bothers me. She never makes me apologize. She says yes, dear. All of her desires are for me.
Speaker 1:She is the base of my pyramid and the linebacker to my what what's the main dude in football?
Speaker 2:The The quarterback? The tight end? The quarterback. Thank you.
Speaker 1:I think linebacker took I think I missing that right? All of you let me know.
Speaker 2:The the defense to my d.
Speaker 1:I don't nope. Nope. Take that back. Walk that one right back.
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 1:But that's the vibe is like, my perfect woman is a robot. My perfect woman is not human, has no desires for herself, has no needs, has never asks anything of me.
Speaker 2:Which is what you hear in the conservative Christian churches right now. Mhmm. And what you hear in The United States right now coming from top down is that a wife should be submissive. Mhmm. And this is what it looks like.
Speaker 2:It means she has no more dreams. Mhmm. All of her dreams are for her husband. It means she has no personality. She is soft and gentle and does whatever her husband tells her to do.
Speaker 2:Because she is just a blob.
Speaker 1:Has no career outside the home, raises her children, etcetera, etcetera. And yet, when you look at the examples of women that are preaching this, I'm specifically thinking I've seen a ton of media on Erica Kirk lately. Yeah. And if you're outside of The US, you can look her up. It's just a lot of wild stories.
Speaker 1:But she her husband was killed just a few months ago, and she wrote a book and went on a press tour. She took over a multimillion dollar organization. She is not home raising her children. She is not doing anything that these traditional people are supposed to be doing. She's not dressing the way that they say that you're supposed to dress.
Speaker 1:But she's preaching it at you. She's telling other women what they're supposed to be and not doing it herself. She's trying to put everybody else in a box. And you see that in a lot of these women that have sided with our current administration where they tell everybody else what to be, and then they do whatever they want.
Speaker 2:I think it's in some ways, they'll call it, like, a survival technique. Like, if I just agree with what they're saying and go along with it, that will get me further. Mhmm. Because if I push against it, I'm going to be oppressed more or I'm in danger more or whatever it is. But that only is gonna get you so far.
Speaker 2:With an abusive person, they're going to be abusive. Right? Even if you go along with what they say, the second you step out of line in any way, they're gonna come at you. And they change the rules all the time, clearly, if you look back through history. Women are sinful and lusty, and they're the more sexual of the two genders.
Speaker 2:Just kidding. They're moral and spiritual and good. Just kidding. They can't turn their heads to breathe. Just kidding.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There's no way to do it right. And I think that's why long term, there are decisions that I think people are trying to tell you are easier. Because I see this from the conservative party all the time where they'll say, feminism is because women want everything that they want. Because women don't wanna play by the rules.
Speaker 1:Because it's easier for women to be whatever. The reality is, if you're coming from the conservative spaces that Brie and I have been in, have grown up in, it is very hard to be a feminist, to stand up for your rights, to say I will no longer tolerate abuse. I will no longer tolerate churches that tell me I'm less than. It's really hard. We don't do it because, well, we just wanna slip into immorality.
Speaker 1:We do it because long term, this is not only what's good for us, it's what's good for God's kingdom. Mhmm. Without it, we only get half the voices.
Speaker 2:Because God told us to go out to preach and teach his word. He told everybody to do that. He didn't just tell men to do that. And how limiting if you were just to tell men to do it. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:How many more people can I reach? How many more circles can I insert myself into? And if you think my only job is to raise up other men, you dead wrong. I'm the last person you want doing that. No, think you'd be good.
Speaker 2:I think that'd be good. I'd be like, yes, dear. Yes, dear. I added a sandwich to your lunchbox, and it's full of arsenic.
Speaker 1:I'm sorry. Just ignore that last bit.
Speaker 2:Yes, Jer. Go wash your hair. You smell. It's full of nair.
Speaker 1:Well, you know, malicious I
Speaker 2:take all my, you know, ideals of woman, Christian womanhood, biblical womanhood, from JL. You know? She's stabbing people.
Speaker 1:She's absolutely stabbing people. And, again, we're worried about her. So the etcetera we're gonna be talking about etcetera. We're gonna talk about is Catherine Dickens. And she was the wife of Charles Dickens, who I'm sure most of you know but wrote A Crisp Carol, wrote many classics.
Speaker 1:Decrease the surplus population. Thank you for that quote.
Speaker 2:I was gonna say the whole thing, and I don't know it. Good. Thank you. Are there no poor houses? Right?
Speaker 1:Yes. I believe that was in there. Now our dad's favorite movie is any version of A Christmas Carol. Any version. I have seen He
Speaker 2:has, like, a few of his favorites. Mhmm. But probably every single version
Speaker 1:of Scrooge, we've seen. Oh, like, 20 times. Mhmm. And every year, it was like, let's watch this version and also this version and also this version.
Speaker 2:Just a couple Sundays ago, he turned on one of them, and we watched it through. Mhmm. And then he immediately turned on another. It's his favorite. I hate when that guy is in the green robes, and he opens up his robes, and there's two kids underneath.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's alarming. Man, that's scarring. I think that's from the eighties.
Speaker 1:I'm not really sure. Anyway, so Catherine. So Catherine and Charles got married relatively young. I think she was, like, 21, which maybe was not young for the time, would be young now. And right towards the early part of their marriage was when his career ramped right up.
Speaker 1:He got very famous very quickly. Her role was very different. She had 10 kids in fifteen years. That makes me want to sew up my downstairs and throw Sorry,
Speaker 2:dad. That sounds awful. Can you imagine?
Speaker 1:No. No. I cannot. Not only what your body is going through,
Speaker 2:but then on top of what your body is going through, you have 10 kids.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Ugh. Now meanwhile, her husband is incredibly famous, probably doing a lot of traveling, probably not paying a lot of attention to her and her kids except for, you know, some kinds of attention. Clearly paying some kinds of attention.
Speaker 1:Just nightly attention. Yeah. But not daily attention.
Speaker 2:Maybe I'm gonna stop
Speaker 1:there. Okay. So in addition to raising 10 children, Catherine was also trying to manage this very large home and deal with all of this stuff. Right? And she was struggling.
Speaker 1:All of you out there, are you surprised? Are you surprised amongst 10 children that she was struggling?
Speaker 2:Because she was also probably juggling his calendar as well. Mhmm. I know a lot of wives out there who are their husband's private secretary.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:The husband just says, I don't know. You're gonna have to ask my wife what I have on the agenda today. Yep. I don't know. Ask my wife.
Speaker 2:I don't know. Ask my wife. And then you add 10 kids. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Ew. Well, and the expectations of the time. So if he randomly brought fancy famous people to dinner, now she has to deal with that. And, like, the home was expected to be perfect at all times. Angel of the household.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Amongst 10 kids, for heaven's sake. Yeah. So somewhere along the line, he decides he's not so thrilled with her anymore. Now meanwhile, in the background, he's having an affair.
Speaker 1:Shocking. Aren't we? We're so surprised. Right? But when that starts, he's like, I'm tired of her.
Speaker 1:I'm tired of her in this life that we've built together. So he starts a smear campaign. He's got all these channels. He's got links to the media. He's got important fancy friends.
Speaker 1:So he starts some rumors. She's mentally unstable. She's a terrible mother. She's neglectful. She's unkind.
Speaker 1:She's not submissive. All of these things. Right? He just, you know, slowly, like, putting them out there. And then he gets the reputation of the long suffering husband.
Speaker 1:Oh, she's awful, but he stayed with her. And how wonderful is he? He must just be the best husband.
Speaker 2:Has anybody seen the housemaid yet? It also reminds me of that. That's not ideal. It's literally the housemaid. Yep.
Speaker 2:Read the book. This is that story, except for the weird tooth thing at the end. I don't think that happened.
Speaker 1:I haven't seen that, so that means nothing to me.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:So she does her best. Current scholars believe that she probably had very severe postpartum, that she was dealing with a lot of stuff.
Speaker 2:She had to have. Think about all of the things your body go well, I don't personally know. But like, all of the things your body does to produce a child, grow a child, spit out a child. And before you can even think again, you're with child again Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Your hormones would be insane. They say it takes two to three years for your body to go back to normal after having a child. That means, like, your emotional state, your physical state, everything takes two to three years. So her body never, in a total of fifteen years, got back to baseline. Don't they say something like it's the most traumatic thing your body can go through without dying?
Speaker 1:Well, I'm gonna tell you from personal experience.
Speaker 2:Yes. I'm a agree with you. I saw that. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's traumatic. It's a bad time. And I don't care how good of a birth experience you have. It's still major trauma on your body
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And your hormones. Mhmm. And she was dealing with that over and over and over with an unsupportive husband who was worried about his own fame. So as time goes on, eventually, they separate. I don't believe they actually got divorced because that was just not a thing at the time, but they did separate.
Speaker 1:And when they separated, he continued his smear campaign. He continued his affairs. But because of that smear campaign, he got custody of nine of their 10 children. Now I'm really unclear on why the judge would be like, yeah. Nine of them.
Speaker 1:But the tenth one you can keep. I'm not sure. Maybe she was, like, so old. You know? She kept the oldest son, their oldest child.
Speaker 1:So that was the one child that she was allowed to continue to live with, to keep. He took all nine of the other children. And you have to assume, because he already was probably an absent parent, that these children were now not in a great situation. This was very uncommon for the time. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Divorce and separation was very uncommon for the time too. But she spent the rest of her life in society as the woman whose husband was wonderful, and she sucked.
Speaker 2:Well, because the world loved him. Right? Mhmm. He's a celebrity. He's telling stories, and I don't know what else he's doing.
Speaker 1:Well, he comes to the parties, and he's the most interesting man in the room. You know, he's got all of these stories to tell. He's, oh, what what are you working on? He's
Speaker 2:so rich.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like, he would be the man of mystery that walks through the doors. The whole world knows his name.
Speaker 2:Literally just watched the housemaid. My gosh. This must have been about
Speaker 1:Charles Dickens. So towards the end of her life actually, soon before she passed away, she went to a friend and said, can you publish these letters? And it was all of the love letters that he had written to her, that Charles Dickens had written to her when they were dating and first married. Not dating, but, you know, first married Courting. Early relationship.
Speaker 1:Yes. And she did it because she said she wanted the world to know that she had been loved.
Speaker 2:Well, clearly, at least 10 times.
Speaker 1:It breaks my heart to hear something like that. She didn't go out and try and smear his name. Now she wouldn't have had the same channels to do that anyway, and no one would have believed her likely anyway. But that's not what she tried to do. She went out and she just said, look, he loved me.
Speaker 1:I wasn't so crazy and awful. Someone loved me enough to write all of these things to tell me that they loved me, to marry me. It's just it tells you the value that she had in herself
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Was just that she wanted to be loved. That's all she wanted in life. And yet he became famous on the back of her labor. Because he couldn't have done what he did. He couldn't have written incredible works and gone out to promote those works.
Speaker 2:And been the family man If raised to the it weren't for her. He probably wouldn't have gotten as much recognition if he was a single man Mhmm. At the time. Based on this is the Victorian era also. They thought men were not as respectable Mhmm.
Speaker 2:As women if they were unmarried.
Speaker 1:So he would have been a little scandalous.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And he wouldn't have been able to write the characters that he wrote. And I wanted to compare Katherine to some of his characters because it's really interesting the way that Charles Dickens writes women. They're very one note. The first one I wanna focus on is missus Cratchit from a Christmas Carol because Christmas. Happy holidays.
Speaker 1:No. Missus Cratchit is a very one note character. She's not in a lot of the story. But when she is, she is very like, all of the poverty around her woman is in major poverty, and she's like, everything's fine. We're good.
Speaker 1:All is wonderful. You know, that very calm, graceful presence. Have some pudding. Her life is centered around her husband. Everything about her focuses on her husband, his needs.
Speaker 1:He sits at the head of the table. He carves the turkey. He, you know, The all the roast goose. The goose. I'm so sorry.
Speaker 1:What was your thinking? She provides emotional warmth. She does not complain about the situation. She I mean, she complains a little bit. But that so that's also an interesting thing.
Speaker 1:So when Scrooge comes into the picture, she does initially kind of get upset, but then immediately takes it back. It's just for a moment that she, like, has an emotion and then reels back in because it would upset her husband if she had that emotion. So he's showing, okay, women, don't do that. You can have emotions, but you actually can't. Right.
Speaker 1:Reel it in. Right. So that's how he wrote her. Anger is only acceptable if it's quickly corrected. Quickly corrected and in defense of your husband.
Speaker 1:Right. Right? And what he wanted in the first place.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And yet Catherine wasn't that. He wrote this ideal woman, and Katherine wasn't that. Mhmm. She couldn't be put in the box because she was a real human person. Right.
Speaker 1:Another character from A Christmas Carol is Belle. That's the woman that dated Scrooge when he was young. And they don't end up getting together, which I feel like is an interesting ending to the story. Well, because he chose his career, and that was the wrong thing.
Speaker 2:Right. Not a family. He should've he should've chose the family. Right.
Speaker 1:But Belle is also very one note. Even though she is a major part of the story, she leaves him because of his greed, which makes her the very moral character.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:It makes her upstanding. Just like the Victorian era was trying to do to women. Mhmm. She's upstanding. She can't be around someone who's greedy.
Speaker 1:She can't be around someone who doesn't want to save the population, which I mean, okay. He kinda sucked. Break up with him for sure. But that was really her only purpose in the story. Her breaking his heart only existed to turn him around
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:To fix him.
Speaker 2:And he would have been saved if he did get married to her. But then it took multiple angels coming down from the sky. They're ghosts. Ghosts coming down from the sky in chains and whatnot with kids under their robes to turn his life around.
Speaker 1:If that's right ahead. Seen that particular version. This is very alarming.
Speaker 2:There's also a version with Fonzie. Dad likes that.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. I forgot about that one. Henry Winkler. But we really just we don't know much about Belle other than that she's there to make him more moral. She's there to be a moral compass for him.
Speaker 1:And that's really just who she is. And he lost that compass. He did lose the compass. But again, that wasn't Catherine. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Charles Dickens is writing these women as perfect homemakers, as perfect moral compasses.
Speaker 2:As what he wants. Exactly. As of what he wanted them to be and what he wanted Catherine to be. Exactly. And it's not realistic, and it's not real human nature.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. And I think that's what happens when you live in a fantasy world. And I see that on social media right now. Mhmm. When you live in that space where it's just an echo chamber of your own thoughts coming back at you Mhmm.
Speaker 1:You see so many men expecting women to be the type of person that they're talking about on the bro podcasts, the type of person that the nineteen fifties, like, June Cleaver type woman was. Now I don't think women were even really like this back then, But we see it on TV, and so therefore it must be true.
Speaker 2:People talk about this a lot on social media, but, like, the idea of women written by men Mhmm. And women written by women Mhmm. Are completely different women. Yep. And something that I really like in today's TV, television, not every movie and show, but there's more complexities to the characters now.
Speaker 2:They're not all one note, and they're not all good, and they're not all bad. Mhmm. There's some in between y. Like, even on Wicked. There's some choices that maybe she shouldn't have made, but there's also some choices that she did made, and there's more emotion.
Speaker 2:There's more depth to these characters, and that makes them more human. Right. And I like that.
Speaker 1:We make jokes a lot about how we don't read books written by men. Mhmm. And in some ways, it's just to be funny. But the reality of it is, for me, the reason that I often will pass by books written by men is because men write women on this one note type of thing. They describe their boobs, and they build this this perfect woman however they want her.
Speaker 1:And what that says to me is not just I wanna live in a fantasy world, but I haven't actually paid attention to the women in my
Speaker 2:life. Mhmm. I think you could say something similar to the way that women will write men. But I do think the difference is the way that women are writing men is how they should be treated. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Rather than how they are treated. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:How they wish they were treated.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And that's not to say all good, all bad, but just the way that women and men interact and talk and deal with each other Mhmm.
Speaker 1:How they wish it was. With respect.
Speaker 2:With respect. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think if you if you approach other people with respect and you see that in most not all. In a lot of books written by women, that ideal relationship, it's not about, oh, and he's the perfect man. Oh, and he looks perfect. Oh, and he makes this amount of money.
Speaker 1:Oh, and his body is this, that, whatever.
Speaker 2:It's like, oh, he listens. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Like these books and they maybe initially describe his figure or something like that. But mostly, the reason that the word is swoony. Everybody's like, oh, he's so swoony. It's because he's nice. It's because he's kind and speaks to her in a respectful way and loves her for who she is and doesn't try and change the person that she is.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. And that's why I do more often than not read books written by women. And you have to wonder what a story like A Christmas Carol would be like if it was written by a woman. All the same characters. But what would it look
Speaker 2:like if Catherine had written it? Melissa McCarthy would star as Scrooge. I can picture it now.
Speaker 1:I think it would be a really interesting story from her perspective. When we look at stories like this, when we look at stories like Miss Claus or Catherine Dickens, and we see women that can't be three-dimensional, women that are forced into a box, women that are told who they will be, women whose only desires are for their husband. We don't see healthy women. I see all the time online, like, I've got guys, I've got so many memes. I've been, like, screenshotting everything so that we can do an episode on that again.
Speaker 1:But I keep seeing these ones, and it'll be like this picture of 1950s family whatever. And it'll say something along the line of women, this is what feminism stole from you. As though this is the ideal. That is not a healthy person because anyone who is oppressed is not healthy. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Anyone who is told who to be is not healthy. Not that no stay at home moms are healthy. Not that no women who choose to focus more on their family are not healthy. But that anyone who is told that's what they're gonna do. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And told that that's all that they can do. Mhmm. And specifically, because we're coming from a religious point, told that God wants you
Speaker 1:Exactly. To do Catherine was not healthy. If that was the ideal life, she should have been. They were wealthy. They had tons of kids.
Speaker 1:She had a big house. If that's the ideal life, she should have been very mentally well. Mhmm. She wasn't. Because she had no support.
Speaker 1:Because she was a real person Mhmm. Who had real emotions and real needs. And those were not being met. So I think we need to give women give them a third dimension or fourth. Maybe a fifth.
Speaker 1:Fifth dimension?
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's a band. Is it? Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Alright. So next week, we are post Christmas, finally.
Speaker 2:Happy holidays.
Speaker 1:No. We're done with that. Merry Christmas. No.
Speaker 2:We're done with that. Wait. Are we into the new year yet?
Speaker 1:Not quite into the new year.
Speaker 2:Oh, the last episode of the year.
Speaker 1:The last episode of the year. So what I kinda wanted to do is do a reflection on the year. Talk about where we started in January. We've been doing this for almost two years now. It'll be two years in March, so we're getting there.
Speaker 1:And just reflect on on the year, on what we did, on how we grew, on some of our favorite things that we did.
Speaker 2:I think we should make some predictions. Oh, dear. Predictions. Make some 2026 predictions, things that we expect to see. Oh.
Speaker 2:In the year. Oh, dear. 2026.
Speaker 1:The year of our Lord 2026. Indeed. Alright. So tune in for that next week on our regularly scheduled day on Thursday. Unfortunately, this year, all the holidays have been on Thursday.
Speaker 1:That's been a pain.
Speaker 2:That has been a pain.
Speaker 1:But it's our day. It is. It's our day.
Speaker 2:And how holidays shouldn't take
Speaker 1:How dare they? How dare they? So tune in next week for that. Check us out on social media. You can find us on TikTok and Instagram and on Facebook because I've been posting there lately.
Speaker 2:Proud of you. Thank you. Wow.
Speaker 1:Just search the hashtag we are more, and you'll find us. And I'll be putting out some polls this week to see some of the things that you thought about our year. So go let us know about that. Let us know.
Speaker 2:Alright. We'll talk to you next week. Have great night. I love you. Bye.