The Family Room (The Quest)
Join co-hosts Mari Cleveland from St. Jude the Apostle and John Gordon and Craig Wesemeyer from St. Peter Chanel as they speak with authors, theologians, and local priests and lay leaders to provide your family encouragement, resources, and hope. Enjoy heartfelt stories and engaging conversations with Catholics who are excited to share their life experiences and acquired wisdom to help your family continue to live out your faith with joy.
Jan 22, 2025
If You Get the Women, You Get Everybody!
Carrie Gress, author, philosopher, and mom
When you look at a culture, the way women behave will dictate how the men and children respond. That’s a harsh statement, but Dr. Carrie Gress stresses this realization helped form her decision to win back the hearts of women.
Betty Friedan’s 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique, promised women equality with men and liberation from their comfortable concentration camps at home. Through manipulating emotions and maligning motherhood, feminism aimed to make women independent of husbands, children, and faith. Men were portrayed as incompetent and self-absorbed. Sixty years later, with families crumbling, Carrie understood most women didn’t learn this through intellectual reading, but by the propaganda they found flipping through Cosmo magazine or watching The Oprah Winfrey Show. By portraying motherhood as a lost career, a “woman’s right to choose” cemented abortion in the culture, and Carrie understood it was the culture that had to be attacked head on.
As a prolific author, she describes her books as both a diagnoses and remedy to the maladies that plague today’s women. In her recent article for the National Catholic Register, “3 Essentials for Rebuilding a Pro-Life Culture,” Carrie shows how feminism’s corrosive ideology preaches a gospel of discontent to women and shows that real womanhood is what God intended for them all along.
Carrie Gress, Ph.D., is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a scholar at the Institute for Human Ecology at The Catholic University of America. She is editor of the online women’s magazine, Theology of Home, and co-author of its book series. Holding a doctorate from The Catholic University of America, she is the author of several books, including The End of Woman: How Smashing the Patriarchy Has Destroyed Us, The Marian Option: God’s Solution to a Civilization in Crisis, and The Anti-Mary Exposed: Rescuing the Culture from Toxic Femininity. She is also co-author with George Weigel of City of Saints: A Pilgrims Guide to John Paul II’s Krakow. Carrie’s work has appeared in numerous publications, and she is a frequent radio and podcast guest, appearing on Fox, BBC, CBC, EWTN, OAN, and Russia Times television. A home-schooling mother of five, she and her family live in Virginia.
Resources:
When you look at a culture, the way women behave will dictate how the men and children respond. That’s a harsh statement, but Dr. Carrie Gress stresses this realization helped form her decision to win back the hearts of women.
Betty Friedan’s 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique, promised women equality with men and liberation from their comfortable concentration camps at home. Through manipulating emotions and maligning motherhood, feminism aimed to make women independent of husbands, children, and faith. Men were portrayed as incompetent and self-absorbed. Sixty years later, with families crumbling, Carrie understood most women didn’t learn this through intellectual reading, but by the propaganda they found flipping through Cosmo magazine or watching The Oprah Winfrey Show. By portraying motherhood as a lost career, a “woman’s right to choose” cemented abortion in the culture, and Carrie understood it was the culture that had to be attacked head on.
As a prolific author, she describes her books as both a diagnoses and remedy to the maladies that plague today’s women. In her recent article for the National Catholic Register, “3 Essentials for Rebuilding a Pro-Life Culture,” Carrie shows how feminism’s corrosive ideology preaches a gospel of discontent to women and shows that real womanhood is what God intended for them all along.
Carrie Gress, Ph.D., is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a scholar at the Institute for Human Ecology at The Catholic University of America. She is editor of the online women’s magazine, Theology of Home, and co-author of its book series. Holding a doctorate from The Catholic University of America, she is the author of several books, including The End of Woman: How Smashing the Patriarchy Has Destroyed Us, The Marian Option: God’s Solution to a Civilization in Crisis, and The Anti-Mary Exposed: Rescuing the Culture from Toxic Femininity. She is also co-author with George Weigel of City of Saints: A Pilgrims Guide to John Paul II’s Krakow. Carrie’s work has appeared in numerous publications, and she is a frequent radio and podcast guest, appearing on Fox, BBC, CBC, EWTN, OAN, and Russia Times television. A home-schooling mother of five, she and her family live in Virginia.
Resources:
- Carrie Gress' blog and books
- Online Women’s Magazine: Theology of Home
- National Catholic Register article, “3 Essentials for Rebuilding a Pro-Life Culture"
