As I have actually read the article, contrary to the three other posters, obviously, it's not about the fact that women were mostly accused. It analyses why they were accused. They analyzed over 80.000 case files of astrologer and elixir healer Richard Napier. I think they make a fair point.
I can see that the title has confused some people, so to explain: That women were the predominant victims of witch-hunts is well established, what's less well understood is why this was the case. We don't really the same with trials for heresy for example. Now a narrative has been that this was simply because of misogyny, as in the hatred of women, the idea being that men went after women because they hated them or wanted to kill women who went against the patriarchical order. However this narrative has been gradually rejected by academics as they have gone over the evidence, the current view instead being that it's not that women were being specifically targeted but rather than women's place in society made them particularly vulnerable to being targeted. The study in question looks at how the jobs women performed made them more likely to be targeted.
But… isn’t that going the long way around to get back to misogyny/maintaining the patriarchal order?
Why were women disproportionately killed? The patriarchal order.
Vs
Why were women disproportionately killed? They were disproportionately vulnerable, in part because of the types of jobs they were allowed to hold. Why were they disproportionately vulnerable/only allowed to hold those jobs? The patriarchal order.
(I do understand that this will go further in allowing historians to understand why the witch hunts happened when and where they did and took the forms they did.)
I think the implication that women were handed these jobs(food management, childcare, midwife, healing, cheesemaking) specifically to be more vulnerable to accusations of witchcraft to be a pretty dubious notion. Especially when the article specifically discusses these things prior to witch-hunts really kicking off. Midwifery being women's work wasn't an issue until proximity to a child dying might get you accused of witchcraft which manual labor out in the field would distance you pretty far from.
But if said man worked your fields, and then your crop failed, that could put them in the firing line for accusations.
Theyre saying the misogyny is an emergent property of the system, and as the system runs into things, due to that new issues will disproportionately harm women.
No one said they were placed in those roles specifically to be more vulnerable, but that as a result of the position they are in are/were more vulnerable, which leads to misogynistic results. And much as people point to crime statistics to say specific people are bad due to inherent traits, the same happened to women. This would explain the association pretty clearly.
The problem is, it's entirely proximity based and gives zero damns about being male coded or female coded. If you could be considered related to the tragedy, male or female, you were a prime suspect.
Again, the person working in the field all day, male or female, would never be the suspect in your child's death compared to the person, male or female, who delivered that child. And guess which gender is more involved with childbirth and wetnursing?
> If you could be considered related to the tragedy, male or female, you were a prime suspect.
Yes, this is how it started, no one is arguing this. But the thread is about how that changed
> And guess which gender is more involved with childbirth and wetnursing?
Yes, and im saying because of those associations alongside the witchcraft fervor, misogyny happened. That is how witchcraft got associated with women, a self-reinforcing feedback loop because of their social vulnerability in combination with their socially-acceptable labor. This thread is about how witchcraft, once non-gendered, socially became considered gendered.
I get your point, I am just trying to explain the shift from 'anyone can be a witch' to 'mostly women are witches' in cultural zeitgeist, not necessarily reality, because the first of those matter for the purpose of explaining social misogyny.
The Malleus Maleficarum is overtly misogynistic (explicitly saying women are carnal, malicious, and easily tempted by Satan). The misogyny was there in the witch hunts, explicitly. This is about explaining how it got in. I think it's irresponsible to say that misogyny wasnt involved, when the most famous book about witches (especially for the period) was overtly so. And that was written 200 years before the witch hunts being talked about in this article.
My problem with the idea that it was to maintain the patriarchal order is that the majority of accusations were made by women.
That is, witch trials of this period consist primarily of women accusing other women of using magic to hurt them.
Women were disproportionately affected because women did the accusing.
I have trouble seeing how women accusing other women of being witches because of feuds and conflicts that arise from the fact that they are women is about the patriarchal order.
When you have little to no power or control in your own life, any power you can get over someone probably feels nice, especially if you are already feuding with that person. Not excusing these women, what they did is still awful and evil.
You just said women were targeted due to their place in society making them vulnerable. How does that equate to them having plenty of power over their own lives and choices?
Ah, sorry I misinterpreted your first comment. It was late last night, and your first comment doesn’t specify that.
But I would like to add there were hierarchies of power, like men having power over their wives. That is what I meant by women not having a whole lot of power over their own lives. I would also argue most white women who owned slaves didn’t have the most power over their own lives, even if they had power over the slaves. People feel better if they have someone “below” them in the hierarchy.
It isn't really necessary for the reinforcement of patriarchy in such activities to be actually deliberate. Actually a lot of things started as something expressly unrelated to the enforcement of male dominance but simply became that as a result of how things ended up being implemented over time.
Intensive agriculture (use of early plows) and the rise of property (also the need to defend it) are thought to be among the earliest drivers of patriarchal social structures, and they didn't become widespread just because they reinforce patriarchy.
It seems you do not understand that in a patriarchal society, women are reacting rather than being proactive, and apparently have not heard the term internalized misogyny.
It also seems you are referencing the Salem witch trials and Puritans. What is your source that during the centuries of witch trials that women did the bulk of the accusing? The witch hunters, inquisitors, and judges were all men. Not women, but men. Women participating in labeling a woman as evil continues today, and for the same reasons. They are no longer burned at the stake, but vilified in the media and online instead.
In any case, I find it quite laughable that misogyny would be discounted by any serious scholar when the Malleus Maleficarum, the book that inflamed hysteria over witches, and has been shown to have increased witch trials everywhere it appeared, is all about the demonic nature of women.
“It described how witches supposedly recruited new members, cast spells, engaged in intimate acts with demons, and caused misfortunes ranging from crop failures to sudden death. The tone was relentlessly misogynistic, attributing witchcraft’s prevalence to women’s supposed moral and intellectual weakness. It also offered remedies to prevent witchcraft or help those affected by it.”
Accusations of witchcraft did commonly come from women - that’s what the article here is about. Judges didn’t accuse people of witchcraft, they presided over trials; witch hunters usually gathered evidence from the community - i.e. found people in the community willing to make an accusation of witchcraft - rather than being the first person to make an accusation; inquisitors dealt with heresy, not witchcraft.
Malleus Malificarum was influential for a short period of time at the start of the witch-craze, but its popularity waned as the witch-craze gained its own momentum. Its popularity wasn’t universal: it was initially dismissed by most Church authorities (a famously feminist institution /s) as nonsense when it was first published.
‘The witch trials occurred because of misogyny’, while technically correct, is a very, very poor explanation of the rise in witch trials. It does not explain why a patriarchal society led to witch trials; it doesn’t explain why witch trials occurred frequently in the 16th-17th centuries but were rare/non-existent in the proceeding/subsequent centuries despite misogyny existing before and after the 16th/17th century; it doesn’t explain why witch trials were so unevenly spread geographically and temporally across Europe during this period, even though misogyny was a consistent feature. No one is discounting misogyny, but no one is using it to explain witch trials because ‘witch trials happened because of misogyny’ doesn’t explain anything.
To clarify, I mean misogyny in the sense of the hatred or dislike of women so in that sense no, women were not pushed to those jobs because they were disliked or hated but rather because they were seen as less capable. Though that's certainly something that would fall under misogyny under the usual broader definition.
The difference here is that women weren't targeted as a way to maintain the patriarchical order but rather as a consequence of it, and we can even go so far as to say that the witch-hunts didn't even particularly help maintaining it. Now why this distinction is of some particular interest goes back to that previous idea that the witch-hunts were carried out with the explicit aim of oppressing women.
It’s all just a big coincidence! Women were just in the places where they thought witches were, by incident. It’s not like witches are something they *made up—*whose characteristics and modus operandi are totally fabricated fiction—witches are real and women were tragically collateral damage incurred during their noble hunt.
So glad this has been cleared up by academics. So many people falsely believing this era was wildly, hatefully misogynistic but it’s all a silly coincidence. Thank you, academia!
Well, when your newborn dies who are you going to suspect? Jack who works out in his family's (notably not your) fields each day or Jill who was your wife's midwife? And notably of course, you also wouldn't expect Tammy who never touched your newborn even though she might also be a midwife.
And then of course there is the tit for tat where you deny someone food and then something bad happens, you expect they cursed you. Except of course, if they cursed you and it worked, it must mean you were secretly a witch ala the woman beggar from "Beauty and the Beast".
But if women are typically in charge of managing food supplies, guess who is typically going to be aware they're running short of something and go around asking and trying to buy said food? A woman of course, so they get the blame and not the husband or rest of the family who wanted the specific food.
Its a system of blame working through proximity or imagined proximity of someone to a problem and women were overall far more exposed to being associated with something going wrong for another family.
While witches are of course not real it's not as if there was some person who one day sat down and decided to invent the whole thing. As far as people at the time were concerned magic was a very real thing and so was its misuse.
"Witch" didn't have an inherent gender connotation for a good while and there were large amounts of men who got accused and burned as witches. Of course the accused were disproportionately women, and there is a lot of scholarship about why that may have been. It's been a pretty big point of study on the Witch front for a while.
Science and history should not rely on default assumptions, but on empirical study. Even the confirmation of something that is widely "known" is valuable.
In traditional finnic gender roles public or outside facing activity was men's domain whereas domestic activity was women's domain. As such perception of magic use was also that of wisemen going around singing eachothers into swamp eyes, cursing bears to attack homesteads and so forth, whereas wisewomen used magic to keep animals healthy and produce well. Witch hunts were naturally were much more concerned about the former rather than the latter.
Given the article, it in large part reflects the work they do and the likelihood that something going wrong would be attributed to their work being witchcraft.
Like, it really shouldn't be surprising that when a newborn would get sick and die that the person to be suspected for witchcraft would be the midwife. By the time you have doctors commonly delivering newborns, witchcraft accusations had been long out of vogue.
Even something that is "common knowledge" should be verified through empirical study, because that's how science works. Not by taking things for granted.
"Everyone knows" yet you don't appear to know that the penalty for witchcraft in England was generally hanging. Burning was more commonly for heresy, treason or forgery (though only for female forgets, which really is misogynistic) so where you have people accused of witchcraft being burned it's usually because it was a secondary charge to one of these. Or because you're mixing up England and Scotland.
hoho50670 | a day ago
As I have actually read the article, contrary to the three other posters, obviously, it's not about the fact that women were mostly accused. It analyses why they were accused. They analyzed over 80.000 case files of astrologer and elixir healer Richard Napier. I think they make a fair point.
Blitcut | a day ago
I can see that the title has confused some people, so to explain: That women were the predominant victims of witch-hunts is well established, what's less well understood is why this was the case. We don't really the same with trials for heresy for example. Now a narrative has been that this was simply because of misogyny, as in the hatred of women, the idea being that men went after women because they hated them or wanted to kill women who went against the patriarchical order. However this narrative has been gradually rejected by academics as they have gone over the evidence, the current view instead being that it's not that women were being specifically targeted but rather than women's place in society made them particularly vulnerable to being targeted. The study in question looks at how the jobs women performed made them more likely to be targeted.
YakSlothLemon | 23 hours ago
But… isn’t that going the long way around to get back to misogyny/maintaining the patriarchal order?
Why were women disproportionately killed? The patriarchal order.
Vs
Why were women disproportionately killed? They were disproportionately vulnerable, in part because of the types of jobs they were allowed to hold. Why were they disproportionately vulnerable/only allowed to hold those jobs? The patriarchal order.
(I do understand that this will go further in allowing historians to understand why the witch hunts happened when and where they did and took the forms they did.)
dutchwonder | 12 hours ago
I think the implication that women were handed these jobs(food management, childcare, midwife, healing, cheesemaking) specifically to be more vulnerable to accusations of witchcraft to be a pretty dubious notion. Especially when the article specifically discusses these things prior to witch-hunts really kicking off. Midwifery being women's work wasn't an issue until proximity to a child dying might get you accused of witchcraft which manual labor out in the field would distance you pretty far from.
But if said man worked your fields, and then your crop failed, that could put them in the firing line for accusations.
Falsequivalence | 10 hours ago
Theyre saying the misogyny is an emergent property of the system, and as the system runs into things, due to that new issues will disproportionately harm women.
No one said they were placed in those roles specifically to be more vulnerable, but that as a result of the position they are in are/were more vulnerable, which leads to misogynistic results. And much as people point to crime statistics to say specific people are bad due to inherent traits, the same happened to women. This would explain the association pretty clearly.
dutchwonder | 10 hours ago
The problem is, it's entirely proximity based and gives zero damns about being male coded or female coded. If you could be considered related to the tragedy, male or female, you were a prime suspect.
Again, the person working in the field all day, male or female, would never be the suspect in your child's death compared to the person, male or female, who delivered that child. And guess which gender is more involved with childbirth and wetnursing?
Falsequivalence | 10 hours ago
> If you could be considered related to the tragedy, male or female, you were a prime suspect.
Yes, this is how it started, no one is arguing this. But the thread is about how that changed
> And guess which gender is more involved with childbirth and wetnursing?
Yes, and im saying because of those associations alongside the witchcraft fervor, misogyny happened. That is how witchcraft got associated with women, a self-reinforcing feedback loop because of their social vulnerability in combination with their socially-acceptable labor. This thread is about how witchcraft, once non-gendered, socially became considered gendered.
I get your point, I am just trying to explain the shift from 'anyone can be a witch' to 'mostly women are witches' in cultural zeitgeist, not necessarily reality, because the first of those matter for the purpose of explaining social misogyny.
The Malleus Maleficarum is overtly misogynistic (explicitly saying women are carnal, malicious, and easily tempted by Satan). The misogyny was there in the witch hunts, explicitly. This is about explaining how it got in. I think it's irresponsible to say that misogyny wasnt involved, when the most famous book about witches (especially for the period) was overtly so. And that was written 200 years before the witch hunts being talked about in this article.
Select-Ad7146 | 22 hours ago
My problem with the idea that it was to maintain the patriarchal order is that the majority of accusations were made by women.
That is, witch trials of this period consist primarily of women accusing other women of using magic to hurt them.
Women were disproportionately affected because women did the accusing.
I have trouble seeing how women accusing other women of being witches because of feuds and conflicts that arise from the fact that they are women is about the patriarchal order.
JudgeHoldensToupe | 9 hours ago
The concept that men are to blame for women’s poor behaviour is ironically somewhat patriarchal, it robs women of agency
doegred | 11 hours ago
Who or what institutions turned accusations into actual punishment?
iCoeur285 | 20 hours ago
When you have little to no power or control in your own life, any power you can get over someone probably feels nice, especially if you are already feuding with that person. Not excusing these women, what they did is still awful and evil.
Select-Ad7146 | 20 hours ago
They also clearly had plenty of power.
Nor does it really represent what was happening.
iCoeur285 | 20 hours ago
You just said women were targeted due to their place in society making them vulnerable. How does that equate to them having plenty of power over their own lives and choices?
plarc | 10 hours ago
Targeted women were vulnerable, targeting women were holding power.
iCoeur285 | 10 hours ago
Ah, sorry I misinterpreted your first comment. It was late last night, and your first comment doesn’t specify that.
But I would like to add there were hierarchies of power, like men having power over their wives. That is what I meant by women not having a whole lot of power over their own lives. I would also argue most white women who owned slaves didn’t have the most power over their own lives, even if they had power over the slaves. People feel better if they have someone “below” them in the hierarchy.
aqtseacow | 20 hours ago
It isn't really necessary for the reinforcement of patriarchy in such activities to be actually deliberate. Actually a lot of things started as something expressly unrelated to the enforcement of male dominance but simply became that as a result of how things ended up being implemented over time.
Intensive agriculture (use of early plows) and the rise of property (also the need to defend it) are thought to be among the earliest drivers of patriarchal social structures, and they didn't become widespread just because they reinforce patriarchy.
OutsideFlat1579 | 19 hours ago
It seems you do not understand that in a patriarchal society, women are reacting rather than being proactive, and apparently have not heard the term internalized misogyny.
It also seems you are referencing the Salem witch trials and Puritans. What is your source that during the centuries of witch trials that women did the bulk of the accusing? The witch hunters, inquisitors, and judges were all men. Not women, but men. Women participating in labeling a woman as evil continues today, and for the same reasons. They are no longer burned at the stake, but vilified in the media and online instead.
In any case, I find it quite laughable that misogyny would be discounted by any serious scholar when the Malleus Maleficarum, the book that inflamed hysteria over witches, and has been shown to have increased witch trials everywhere it appeared, is all about the demonic nature of women.
“It described how witches supposedly recruited new members, cast spells, engaged in intimate acts with demons, and caused misfortunes ranging from crop failures to sudden death. The tone was relentlessly misogynistic, attributing witchcraft’s prevalence to women’s supposed moral and intellectual weakness. It also offered remedies to prevent witchcraft or help those affected by it.”
https://www.discoveryuk.com/mysteries/the-malleus-maleficarum-the-witch-hunters-handbook-that-changed-history/
AceOfGargoyes17 | 15 hours ago
Accusations of witchcraft did commonly come from women - that’s what the article here is about. Judges didn’t accuse people of witchcraft, they presided over trials; witch hunters usually gathered evidence from the community - i.e. found people in the community willing to make an accusation of witchcraft - rather than being the first person to make an accusation; inquisitors dealt with heresy, not witchcraft.
Malleus Malificarum was influential for a short period of time at the start of the witch-craze, but its popularity waned as the witch-craze gained its own momentum. Its popularity wasn’t universal: it was initially dismissed by most Church authorities (a famously feminist institution /s) as nonsense when it was first published.
‘The witch trials occurred because of misogyny’, while technically correct, is a very, very poor explanation of the rise in witch trials. It does not explain why a patriarchal society led to witch trials; it doesn’t explain why witch trials occurred frequently in the 16th-17th centuries but were rare/non-existent in the proceeding/subsequent centuries despite misogyny existing before and after the 16th/17th century; it doesn’t explain why witch trials were so unevenly spread geographically and temporally across Europe during this period, even though misogyny was a consistent feature. No one is discounting misogyny, but no one is using it to explain witch trials because ‘witch trials happened because of misogyny’ doesn’t explain anything.
Select-Ad7146 | 14 hours ago
The article linked in the post, the one we are so posting on, literally says that the majority of accusations were from women.
Did you not even read that article?
Blitcut | 22 hours ago
To clarify, I mean misogyny in the sense of the hatred or dislike of women so in that sense no, women were not pushed to those jobs because they were disliked or hated but rather because they were seen as less capable. Though that's certainly something that would fall under misogyny under the usual broader definition.
The difference here is that women weren't targeted as a way to maintain the patriarchical order but rather as a consequence of it, and we can even go so far as to say that the witch-hunts didn't even particularly help maintaining it. Now why this distinction is of some particular interest goes back to that previous idea that the witch-hunts were carried out with the explicit aim of oppressing women.
enemyofchrist | 20 hours ago
Ooooh
It’s all just a big coincidence! Women were just in the places where they thought witches were, by incident. It’s not like witches are something they *made up—*whose characteristics and modus operandi are totally fabricated fiction—witches are real and women were tragically collateral damage incurred during their noble hunt.
So glad this has been cleared up by academics. So many people falsely believing this era was wildly, hatefully misogynistic but it’s all a silly coincidence. Thank you, academia!
dutchwonder | 13 hours ago
Well, when your newborn dies who are you going to suspect? Jack who works out in his family's (notably not your) fields each day or Jill who was your wife's midwife? And notably of course, you also wouldn't expect Tammy who never touched your newborn even though she might also be a midwife.
And then of course there is the tit for tat where you deny someone food and then something bad happens, you expect they cursed you. Except of course, if they cursed you and it worked, it must mean you were secretly a witch ala the woman beggar from "Beauty and the Beast".
But if women are typically in charge of managing food supplies, guess who is typically going to be aware they're running short of something and go around asking and trying to buy said food? A woman of course, so they get the blame and not the husband or rest of the family who wanted the specific food.
Its a system of blame working through proximity or imagined proximity of someone to a problem and women were overall far more exposed to being associated with something going wrong for another family.
ajmeko | 18 hours ago
Yeah, your snarky comment sure showed those PhDs who have literally 100x more knowledge on this subject than you.
Blitcut | 16 hours ago
While witches are of course not real it's not as if there was some person who one day sat down and decided to invent the whole thing. As far as people at the time were concerned magic was a very real thing and so was its misuse.
Rakdospriest | a day ago
I'm not entirely sure this should be newsworthy. Wasn't this the default assumption? I guess it's good to be "proven" a bit more empirically.
finbarrgalloway | a day ago
"Witch" didn't have an inherent gender connotation for a good while and there were large amounts of men who got accused and burned as witches. Of course the accused were disproportionately women, and there is a lot of scholarship about why that may have been. It's been a pretty big point of study on the Witch front for a while.
stormyarthur | 3 hours ago
Witches weren’t burned in England.
boywithapplesauce | 23 hours ago
Science and history should not rely on default assumptions, but on empirical study. Even the confirmation of something that is widely "known" is valuable.
UCanBdoWatWeWant2Do | 16 hours ago
It explores why, so how is it not newsworthy?
humanexperimentals | 20 hours ago
How dare they not accuse more men of being capable of witchraft. We can do magic just as good as women.
oh_YES_helios | 18 hours ago
I remember hearing once that in Finland it was more common for men to be accused than women.
Unsure if it's true or the reasons behind it, though.
Manzhah | 13 hours ago
In traditional finnic gender roles public or outside facing activity was men's domain whereas domestic activity was women's domain. As such perception of magic use was also that of wisemen going around singing eachothers into swamp eyes, cursing bears to attack homesteads and so forth, whereas wisewomen used magic to keep animals healthy and produce well. Witch hunts were naturally were much more concerned about the former rather than the latter.
dutchwonder | 14 hours ago
Given the article, it in large part reflects the work they do and the likelihood that something going wrong would be attributed to their work being witchcraft.
Like, it really shouldn't be surprising that when a newborn would get sick and die that the person to be suspected for witchcraft would be the midwife. By the time you have doctors commonly delivering newborns, witchcraft accusations had been long out of vogue.
humanexperimentals | 8 hours ago
Never thought of that, thanks.
mrBeeko | a day ago
Finally! someone thought to address this. It has never been considered in any way.
judolphin | 9 hours ago
My wife has a t-shirt that says "they didn't burn witches, they burned women."
stormyarthur | 3 hours ago
In England they burned neither.
ISB00 | a day ago
Everyone knows witch hunts have been predominantly used against women. You can find cases of men being burned for it but it’s mostly women.
Select-Ad7146 | 22 hours ago
The study is about which women were targeted and why, not that women were more likely to be targeted.
Safe_Manner_1879 | 15 hours ago
Its interesting that "The majority of both accusers and suspects were women"
ISB00 | 14 hours ago
Women accused other women because often times they were afraid being accused first if they didn’t.
theLastvoider | a day ago
Doesnt mean it's not worth studying why, and why in some regions it's majority men or exclusively men and many other dynamics.
boywithapplesauce | 23 hours ago
Even something that is "common knowledge" should be verified through empirical study, because that's how science works. Not by taking things for granted.
iwillfuckingbiteyou | 14 hours ago
"Everyone knows" yet you don't appear to know that the penalty for witchcraft in England was generally hanging. Burning was more commonly for heresy, treason or forgery (though only for female forgets, which really is misogynistic) so where you have people accused of witchcraft being burned it's usually because it was a secondary charge to one of these. Or because you're mixing up England and Scotland.
IskandarAli | 9 hours ago
Its hilarious that someone is researching this. This is a water may make things wet study and it happened centuries ago.