You must log in or # to comment.
Post menopausal women without a family to play nurse to were just “wrong” back in the day. Worse, if they dared to compete with doctors in things like midwifery.
I wish I could remember (panel 2 lol) but there was a fairly comprehensive analysis of literary tropes in European folklore that put forth that the reason the “hag” was demonized is that it is a woman who is unable to provide the patriarchal definition of worth: childbirth, domestic duties, sex. To the same degree as younger women and is also a source of advice/wisdom that could fly in the face of said patriarchal definitions.
To answer the question though, literally me.
Yep! The only thing that’s off for me is that I don’t like gardening
Same here!
I’ll happily do the veg growing if someone else does the cookery :D
The last one isn’t a middle-aged lady problem, it’s an early modern-aged lady problem.
Nah religions were “burning witches” for centuries if not millennia. It just was just more acceptable before and better recorded in more modern ages.
Catholic Church doctrine at the time was literally that there’s no such thing as witches, therefore you couldn’t just go around hunting and burning witches. That only started happening with the emergence of protestantism.
The Catholic Church did burn heretics though.
Depends on how you translate the Hebrew I suppose, but it’s in the Bible, in Exodus 22:18 for example. KJV: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” Or the Wycliffe Bible in Middle English, “Thou schalt not suffre witchis to lyue.”
The “witch hunt” era just repopularize the use of the term “witch”, but it was specifically women who they accused of using dark magics. The Catholic Church as well as the Jewish Temples and several other religious organizations over time absolutely burned respected women they didn’t like being respected. Maybe they called them the more general “heretic” term or some other word since this covers many languages across time, but it was still innocent women being murdered without a fair trial for being smart and/or not staying in their place.
