Biting All The Apples

Mother’s Day and Memorial Day show up like clockwork, but the stories we tell about them are missing the peaceful roots. We go back to the nineteenth century to recover what got sanded down: Julia Ward Howe’s Mother’s Day Proclamation is not soft-focus nostalgia, it’s a direct anti-war demand for women to refuse a world that sends husbands home “reeking with carnage” and trains sons to injure oth...

America loves the word “freedom,” so why do so many of us feel spiritually starved, politically cornered, and weirdly isolated from our own bodies? We pull a thread from The Great Cosmic Mother and it turns into a whole tapestry: patriarchal religion doesn’t just shape private belief, it builds the rules of the modern world. When the sacred gets split from the lived, you end up with what the book calls the America...

We’re deep in The Great Cosmic Mother, landing in the final section on “Patriarchal Culture and Religion” where the dots connect fast: the split from Earth to sky, the invention of a distant father God, and the long campaign to make the body feel dirty, dangerous, and controllable. Something that affects each and every one of us, whether we attend church or not.

We talk through how The GCM tells us that pa...

Wonder how you got trapped in the machine?  We've got all the answers for you. Using our book of the moment, The Great Cosmic Mother, we break down how ancient goddess-centered cultures that were so real and connected through birth, death, creativity, ecstacy, and the earth - got totally crushed and rewritten with a patriarchal influenced monotheistic jealous god. The change coincided with a rise in conquering, violence, and a...

We cheese out enough with the whole biting an apple/biting knowledge analogy in this episode so we'll spare you here in the show notes. 

We are back for season two - starting the first in a 3 (or 4, we'll see) episode series where we read and discuss and tangent about The Great Cosmic Mother. The biggest feminist text you aren't carrying around in your handbag, but should. 

SK & JV discuss some major points, read some m...

Time for a tweener episode! What's that you ask? Oh it's just the kind of episode gals make when they're closing out one season and setting up an even cooler second season, but need a sec to tell their audience about all that.  Tweener. Not to be confused with Tweezer. 

Quick Episode Outline:

• standing between seasons 

• why hidden knowledge and history matter when institutions fail 

• why isn't anyone saying patri...

Oh it's been a minute but you'll be glad you listened to this episode. Yes there are podcast updates, yes there's a cool new eZine/book you have to get: The Biting All The Apples Holiday (and any day) Book of 19th Century Inspired Home Amusements & Creative Endeavors  here's the direct link if it's not showing up: https://payhip.com/b/75vhY

The holiday joy doesn't stop there.  We've got a short hype message for all of ...

A suffrage convention, a censored book, and a friendship that held the line—this is the 1896 showdown few of us were ever taught. We open the appendix to The Woman’s Bible and step into the room where NAWSA leaders tried to distance the movement from Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s fiercest work. The resolution’s catty phrasing calling it the “so-called Woman’s Bible” was more than shade; it was s...

A late October check in bonus episode with a spooky theme. Well, that is if you thinking chit chatting with the dead is spooky. Lots of Victorian people thought it wasn't spooky but important. Serious. There was a huge surge of interest in spiritualism in the 19th century. We thought maybe we should see if any of our Victorian feminists that we've been reading were also into the occult.  It has opened up a can of worms.  

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The gods of our fathers are our devils.   That's what the victorian feminists say an ancient Arabic proverb says. Knowing how much the people of the 19th century liked to embellish the mystical and such, we're not sure if that's actually a thing but it's a thing now because MJG said it.  In this episode we tackle Peter and John’s epistles, then flip the script on Revelation with Matilda Joslyn Gage, reading it throu...

If you like your podcasts with a side of crashout then this episode is for you. If not, this is still the episode for you but you may want to jump to around 18 minutes to get straight to the part where we talk about the book.

You're going to love the victorian feminist takes on the Epistles to the Ephesians, Phillipians, and Timothy. I mean, someone had to respond to all the men-win doctrine and instructions for women in marriage, a...

Not even a back to school headcold could keep us away for too long. In this episode we analyze (in our own analytic fashion and with the help of witty Victorian feminists)) the Apostle Paul's letters (epistles) to the Romans and Corinthians from Elizabeth Cady Stanton's "The Woman's Bible," revealing how biblical passages about women have been weaponized to limit their rights throughout history. We expose the contradictions in Paul...

Uncovering the hidden history of women in the early church, this episode dives deep into the Book of Acts as viewed through Elizabeth Cady Stanton's groundbreaking feminist lens. Sara Kaye and Joanna V reunite to explore what Victorian feminists discovered about women's roles in spreading Christianity – roles that male religious authorities have systematically erased over centuries.

Through stories like Sapphira (who d...

We’re pondering the book of John today by golly. And the selections our Victorian Feminists chose to critique cover sizzling hot topics like miracles, mothers, prejudice, and hogsheads to cover.

This is a tidy zippy episode that will reveal deeper questions about the tales we've been told. 

Did you know Jesus only speaks to his mother three times in the entire Bible? Or that Mary Magdalene's devoted presence at the tomb co...

In this seriously-worth-your-time episode, we explore how Elizabeth Cady Stanton's 1895 "The Women's Bible" called out religious justifications for female subordination that mirror today's Christian nationalist rhetoric.

Here's what you get:

• Examining the books of Mark and Luke, which address marriage, divorce, and women's status in early Christianity
• Stanton reveals how the New Testament made divorce laws even more re...

The battle for reproductive rights and women's autonomy isn't just modern politics—it's a struggle with deep historical roots. In this episode, we dive into the New Testament section of Elizabeth Cady Stanton's revolutionary Woman's Bible, where Victorian-era feminists dissect biblical patriarchy with remarkable insight and surprising humor.

Their analysis strips away supernatural elements while preserving Jesus's mora...

What if everything you thought you knew about biblical gender roles was based on deliberate mistranslations? We dive deep into a brilliant 1895 feminist analysis that exposes how religious authorities systematically erased the divine feminine from scripture. Frances Ellen Burr, founder of Connecticut's first Women's Suffrage Association, boldly declared "the Bible is an occult book" while revealing how the ancient Kabbalah actually...

We're back after our short summer podcast pause to bring you the very last books of the Old Testament through the lens of our favorite Victorian Feminists. 

They rip through the last six or so (who's counting?) books of the OT and we're covering it for you in under an hour.  We start with the book of Job and that's great because we're kind of living in the book of job right now. 

Then we move on to the books written by...

People said but you can't fit all of the genius and hilarity and nuance of Biting All The Apples in a short trailer! And we said hey we will try because people really need to get a sense of what it is all about. 

Biting All The Apples is an unhinged bookclub-ish conversation that channels the sassy wisdom of long dead victorian feminists to analyze the puritanical influences still messing with our world today.   We start o...