After reading comments on witchcraft I must note that these 2020-22 years are most reminiscent of what the social climate must have been like during the Salem Witch Trials and before that the European Witch Trials. There is a disturbing trend toward mass hysteria and trending psychopathology in common.
Must Barbara Ehrenreich be so anti-male? Granted, he favored calomel, but Benjamin Rush (male AFAIK) also attempted to include freedom of medicine in the Bill of Rights. Has the war of the sexes no better alternative?
This essay is from the 1970s, so although not knowing what you're referring to that context needs to be kept in mind. Have a look at some youtube videos from the time, I recommend a Hunter S Thompson interview where a Hells Angel motorbiked onto the stage, the casual sexism (not so much Hunter as the interviewer and the Hells Angel) was off the charts.
Jun 9, 2022·edited Jun 9, 2022Liked by Richard Seager
That pamphlet from 1972 was a bit of a find. I was unaware of its existence. I've got five of Ehrenreich's books, and I quite like her writing. The first one I bought was: For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice to Women (1978), which looks like a longer, more ambitious reworking of that 1972 pamphlet. It was also co-written by Deirdre English. My Doubleday edition goes for 324 pages, excluding notes and index. It's been sometime since I read it, so I wouldn't like to say just how out of date some of it might be.
From memory, I remember liking the early section about how the male doctors of the future sat around for most of the nineteenth century waiting for modern science to deliver the method by which they could start charging for their services. It's worth noting here that Ehrenreich and English were writing about America and not Europe, where a centuries-long university tradition prevailed in doctoring. They also relied on established medical histories to inform their writing of the period .
I've just taken the briefest of skims through a few pages on the earlier section on witchcraft, which wouldn't be out of place in the sort of feminist thinking of the seventies, which declared the witch hunts gendercide; but which doesn't wholly accord with the scholarship on witchcraft of more recent decades.
Today, we are all aware of a different kind of feminism which seeks to upend the legal system with the exhortation to believe women regardless of the evidence. And while there are many, myself included, who would deplore this travesty of justice, the witchcraft trials cast the 'believe women' exhortation in a different light.
A little over half of the denunciations were actually made by women, although it's true the denunciations had to be carried forward by a man. We know today they were lying because women testified to seeing the accused flying through the air on broomsticks and cavorting with Satan in woodland glades, with much detail about the characteristics of the satanic member submitted in evidence. The male authorities of the day were of the view that it could all be put down to women's squabbles in the towns and villages, which may explain why around half of the accused walked free.
In societies organised along survival lines, elderly "witches" would have been most at risk of being targeted because of their declining ability to care for themselves. It doesn't look too much different from today, when you think about it, although jabbing the elderly to death in aged-care homes may well be considered a more humane way to go than being burned at the stake.
And in case anyone may be thinking that children should be believed, then you need to remember that it was two girls who kicked off the Salem witch trials, which ended with the execution of twenty-one people and two dogs.
It's also worth mentioning that in France more men than women went to their death for witchcraft, so this out-of-date, feminist idea of gendercide is no longer tenable.
I think the "more witches were male" was spread throughout Europe. Suppressed info, it was not just the women who the Establishment came after. Also I have an old friend who was/is into witchery. From what I remember the males were called witches and the female witches were called by another term which (witch?) escapes me now.
Jun 11, 2022·edited Jun 11, 2022Liked by Richard Seager
I'm not quite sure what your meaning may be here.
Since the mid-1970s there has been a concerted effort to bring some clarity to the witch-hunt mania through the examination of trial records. An uneven picture has emerged regarding the extent and intensity of the mania on a country-by-country basis between the key years of 1450-1750, notwithstanding a long tapering-off period, commencing around 1648, with the end of The Thirty Years War and the consequent signing of The Treaty of Westphalia.
Overall, the victim count is believed to be around 75% female and 25% male, which apparently still gives succour to those with a commitment to the gendercide hypothesis, even when the denunciation rate by women is known to them, though it should be noted there is no reason why we should exclude persons of the same gender who may wish to commit gendercide. The word is technically gender neutral.
I'm not keen on the word myself because it sounds too much like genocide, and therefore too open to abuse by a particular strain of feminism seemingly predisposed to not only weaponising words, but to producing a never-ending stream of statcrime that distorts perceptions of reality for people who don't follow this strategy closely. And in relation to the witch-hunt mania under consideration, it's well worth noting that 99.9% of European women got through it unharmed.
It's fairly easy now to look back and see the witch-hunt mania as mass hysteria, a culmination, panic event of years of wars, plague and famine, bearing down mainly on women with their long association with Eve and, in the case of older women, the realisation of what an economic burden they had become to their neighbours. Of the men who were also victims, they appeared in the main to be poor men, ordinary men, dissident men who often spoke out against the hysteria.
It's of further interest to note that the mania for persecution was strongest in the English-speaking countries of Northern Europe and their North American colonies, where the 'little ice age' of the seventeenth century brought crop failure.
Religion was another contributing factor, especially in the countries
swayed by the protestant reformation, which brings Germany into the mix of persecutory zeal. The countries which remained strongly Catholic, like Italy and Spain remained for the most part largely untouched by the mania, but also Ireland, worth noting because of its geographic location.
Another fact worth mentioning regarding the correlation of Protestantism with persecution is the prosecution of cases, which mainly took place in the secular courts rather than the church courts.
I don't profess to know very much about the actual practice of witchcraft, which is a separate issue, so I wouldn't like to hazard a guess at what that other word for a female witch might be. Obviously, there are synonyms like sorceress and enchantress, and terms like old hag and old crone which might impute witch in certain contexts. In Anglo Saxon English the words wlcce and wicca denote more a soothsayer than a witch. I mention this because wicca was rejuvenated in the mid-20th century in a sometimes more fanciful way, with an emphasis on its pre-Christian, pagan aspects, which could vary from coven to coven. And that may be the case in relation to the word you are looking for. Let me know if it comes to you.
Jun 9, 2022·edited Jun 9, 2022Liked by Richard Seager
My birth was terrible for my mother and me, because I was breech and only one leg came out first, so they had to push that leg back in and get both legs. A midwife would have known I was in the wrong position and usually they start on a process of turning the baby inside the womb manually weeks before. The trauma I have from birth physically and mentally is still with me, I think I almost died. Then, since my Mom was told she didnt have enough milk, I was of course put on formula. Then, I was given the childhood vaccines, and had reactions. So a man in a white coat, to me, is a symbol of much badness. Uncaptured, Intelligent and human doctors are '1 in a million'.
Thank you Another friend has a story about a rough birth from anesthesia...there were so many babies born on one night in 1966, (April 18), they knocked out her mother with the drugs just to delay the birth...and my friend has such issues with frustration to this day, and I can see how that delay in proper birth was burned into her personality.
re Nile, you mean that river de-Nile? Glad you got nursed, you have probs had better health....formula fed babies are hungry for something they never get, and remain so, I think....I am still a milk addict, and the best I can do is get good quality org milk and cream, but I know it is not something we actually need physically. Goat milk is better for me, so I do splurge on that sometimes....need a goat....backyard issues....best-
thanks, yes i hope so, almost know so...i want to help her housing to stabilize and not live with her projabrother....we are in communique tho so hard to get concrete info on each other in this day of bigbro looking down on us...eeeeuuuuuuu
After I broke my neck I was in therapy for a long time. The therapist named Sue was instrumental in my ability to leave the wheelchair. She worked me hard and would not let me give up. I have been to women doctors and they seem to be more concerned about the outcome of the treatment and the quality of life that I have.
Interesting. Thanks for the recommendation. Not sure if I'll read it because I come from a family of "Woman Healers". Both sides of my family, Grandmothers and my mother. We only ever went to the doctor if blood was spraying or a limb was broken. And, though I am male, I continue using cures and treatments handed down for generations in my family. NO shots and never testing (especially just to keep a job or travel!) for things to see if I have something scary to run to the doctor for or sit at home scared that I'm going to die. We've had this crap backwards for a long time now. But especially the last two years.
Both the approach and the segmentation are obsolete, but there are interesting details that might or might not be substantiated. Factual errors, inconsistencies, and contradictions are inevitable on such shaky foundations.
Feminists of the time had the uncanny habit of of projecting distorted images acquired through their distorted lenses. Those were the days when "Women's Studies" were introduced in higher ed as a "discipline," effectively confusing people with another destructive ideology.
Everything is distorted though. Although I have an issue with modern feminism (with its male focus) I think a lot of the 70s feminists got a lot right.
Yes communication is tough. I don't think there is any perspective with Sage though. Sage's hate started with Frank but now I'm the target. The post over there is just an attempt to associate me with some of Frank's 'pushing the envelope' posts and is therefore dishonest. A bit more caught up in the establishment than claimed if you were to ask me.
We have a very rich inheritance in the Americas of Native American knowledge of many disciplines. Quite amazing how thoroughly we have managed to avoid the central issue. The very wisdom from those who survived and thrived on these continents for many thousands of years before us is ignored, marginalized or worse to our eternal detriment.
Sad the AMA and medical board types seem to have a trademark on "allopathy" (cf "alleviate", though that can be a bad thing; the "allopaths™" use antipyretics for any fever whatsoever, which demolishes the immune response). Just means countering the ailment; not necessarily what Mormons called "heroic medicine" - calomel, leeches, and now vaccines, statins, and remdesivir (as opposed to homeopathy, which means something causing the same effects will help you deal with it).
I put that in past tense because that's ancient history, despite vestiges still appearing in the Doctrine & Covenants. The Corporation of the President is Big Medicine and Big Pharma all the way. Its president is a surgeon.
I'm not sure the Mormons ever had much affinity for homeopathy. Eclecticism, herbalism, and midwifery perhaps.
I should have mentioned in my comment below that in her later 1978 book, she does credit Native American herbal knowledge and its adoption by white healers in the communities they served.
After reading comments on witchcraft I must note that these 2020-22 years are most reminiscent of what the social climate must have been like during the Salem Witch Trials and before that the European Witch Trials. There is a disturbing trend toward mass hysteria and trending psychopathology in common.
Hopefully the worst of it is over this time.
We may only hope. In many ways seems as if it is just beginning.
Must Barbara Ehrenreich be so anti-male? Granted, he favored calomel, but Benjamin Rush (male AFAIK) also attempted to include freedom of medicine in the Bill of Rights. Has the war of the sexes no better alternative?
This essay is from the 1970s, so although not knowing what you're referring to that context needs to be kept in mind. Have a look at some youtube videos from the time, I recommend a Hunter S Thompson interview where a Hells Angel motorbiked onto the stage, the casual sexism (not so much Hunter as the interviewer and the Hells Angel) was off the charts.
That pamphlet from 1972 was a bit of a find. I was unaware of its existence. I've got five of Ehrenreich's books, and I quite like her writing. The first one I bought was: For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice to Women (1978), which looks like a longer, more ambitious reworking of that 1972 pamphlet. It was also co-written by Deirdre English. My Doubleday edition goes for 324 pages, excluding notes and index. It's been sometime since I read it, so I wouldn't like to say just how out of date some of it might be.
From memory, I remember liking the early section about how the male doctors of the future sat around for most of the nineteenth century waiting for modern science to deliver the method by which they could start charging for their services. It's worth noting here that Ehrenreich and English were writing about America and not Europe, where a centuries-long university tradition prevailed in doctoring. They also relied on established medical histories to inform their writing of the period .
I've just taken the briefest of skims through a few pages on the earlier section on witchcraft, which wouldn't be out of place in the sort of feminist thinking of the seventies, which declared the witch hunts gendercide; but which doesn't wholly accord with the scholarship on witchcraft of more recent decades.
Today, we are all aware of a different kind of feminism which seeks to upend the legal system with the exhortation to believe women regardless of the evidence. And while there are many, myself included, who would deplore this travesty of justice, the witchcraft trials cast the 'believe women' exhortation in a different light.
A little over half of the denunciations were actually made by women, although it's true the denunciations had to be carried forward by a man. We know today they were lying because women testified to seeing the accused flying through the air on broomsticks and cavorting with Satan in woodland glades, with much detail about the characteristics of the satanic member submitted in evidence. The male authorities of the day were of the view that it could all be put down to women's squabbles in the towns and villages, which may explain why around half of the accused walked free.
In societies organised along survival lines, elderly "witches" would have been most at risk of being targeted because of their declining ability to care for themselves. It doesn't look too much different from today, when you think about it, although jabbing the elderly to death in aged-care homes may well be considered a more humane way to go than being burned at the stake.
And in case anyone may be thinking that children should be believed, then you need to remember that it was two girls who kicked off the Salem witch trials, which ended with the execution of twenty-one people and two dogs.
It's also worth mentioning that in France more men than women went to their death for witchcraft, so this out-of-date, feminist idea of gendercide is no longer tenable.
I think the "more witches were male" was spread throughout Europe. Suppressed info, it was not just the women who the Establishment came after. Also I have an old friend who was/is into witchery. From what I remember the males were called witches and the female witches were called by another term which (witch?) escapes me now.
I'm not quite sure what your meaning may be here.
Since the mid-1970s there has been a concerted effort to bring some clarity to the witch-hunt mania through the examination of trial records. An uneven picture has emerged regarding the extent and intensity of the mania on a country-by-country basis between the key years of 1450-1750, notwithstanding a long tapering-off period, commencing around 1648, with the end of The Thirty Years War and the consequent signing of The Treaty of Westphalia.
Overall, the victim count is believed to be around 75% female and 25% male, which apparently still gives succour to those with a commitment to the gendercide hypothesis, even when the denunciation rate by women is known to them, though it should be noted there is no reason why we should exclude persons of the same gender who may wish to commit gendercide. The word is technically gender neutral.
I'm not keen on the word myself because it sounds too much like genocide, and therefore too open to abuse by a particular strain of feminism seemingly predisposed to not only weaponising words, but to producing a never-ending stream of statcrime that distorts perceptions of reality for people who don't follow this strategy closely. And in relation to the witch-hunt mania under consideration, it's well worth noting that 99.9% of European women got through it unharmed.
It's fairly easy now to look back and see the witch-hunt mania as mass hysteria, a culmination, panic event of years of wars, plague and famine, bearing down mainly on women with their long association with Eve and, in the case of older women, the realisation of what an economic burden they had become to their neighbours. Of the men who were also victims, they appeared in the main to be poor men, ordinary men, dissident men who often spoke out against the hysteria.
It's of further interest to note that the mania for persecution was strongest in the English-speaking countries of Northern Europe and their North American colonies, where the 'little ice age' of the seventeenth century brought crop failure.
Religion was another contributing factor, especially in the countries
swayed by the protestant reformation, which brings Germany into the mix of persecutory zeal. The countries which remained strongly Catholic, like Italy and Spain remained for the most part largely untouched by the mania, but also Ireland, worth noting because of its geographic location.
Another fact worth mentioning regarding the correlation of Protestantism with persecution is the prosecution of cases, which mainly took place in the secular courts rather than the church courts.
I don't profess to know very much about the actual practice of witchcraft, which is a separate issue, so I wouldn't like to hazard a guess at what that other word for a female witch might be. Obviously, there are synonyms like sorceress and enchantress, and terms like old hag and old crone which might impute witch in certain contexts. In Anglo Saxon English the words wlcce and wicca denote more a soothsayer than a witch. I mention this because wicca was rejuvenated in the mid-20th century in a sometimes more fanciful way, with an emphasis on its pre-Christian, pagan aspects, which could vary from coven to coven. And that may be the case in relation to the word you are looking for. Let me know if it comes to you.
My birth was terrible for my mother and me, because I was breech and only one leg came out first, so they had to push that leg back in and get both legs. A midwife would have known I was in the wrong position and usually they start on a process of turning the baby inside the womb manually weeks before. The trauma I have from birth physically and mentally is still with me, I think I almost died. Then, since my Mom was told she didnt have enough milk, I was of course put on formula. Then, I was given the childhood vaccines, and had reactions. So a man in a white coat, to me, is a symbol of much badness. Uncaptured, Intelligent and human doctors are '1 in a million'.
Thank you Another friend has a story about a rough birth from anesthesia...there were so many babies born on one night in 1966, (April 18), they knocked out her mother with the drugs just to delay the birth...and my friend has such issues with frustration to this day, and I can see how that delay in proper birth was burned into her personality.
re Nile, you mean that river de-Nile? Glad you got nursed, you have probs had better health....formula fed babies are hungry for something they never get, and remain so, I think....I am still a milk addict, and the best I can do is get good quality org milk and cream, but I know it is not something we actually need physically. Goat milk is better for me, so I do splurge on that sometimes....need a goat....backyard issues....best-
de-nile is not a river, Jacquelyn.......
Maybe turn on the TV, it could be on there.
thanks, yes i hope so, almost know so...i want to help her housing to stabilize and not live with her projabrother....we are in communique tho so hard to get concrete info on each other in this day of bigbro looking down on us...eeeeuuuuuuu
That will be awesome!
Yeah getting her housing situation stabilized, wish I could 'do' something.
It's wonderful you two connected in the middle of way too much insanity.
u r already doing something by being in converse re thank you so E
After I broke my neck I was in therapy for a long time. The therapist named Sue was instrumental in my ability to leave the wheelchair. She worked me hard and would not let me give up. I have been to women doctors and they seem to be more concerned about the outcome of the treatment and the quality of life that I have.
Thanks for the recommendation.
Interesting. Thanks for the recommendation. Not sure if I'll read it because I come from a family of "Woman Healers". Both sides of my family, Grandmothers and my mother. We only ever went to the doctor if blood was spraying or a limb was broken. And, though I am male, I continue using cures and treatments handed down for generations in my family. NO shots and never testing (especially just to keep a job or travel!) for things to see if I have something scary to run to the doctor for or sit at home scared that I'm going to die. We've had this crap backwards for a long time now. But especially the last two years.
I did not know people read books anymore. Books are "racist, sexist and bigoted"!
Barbara's writing contains too much feminism for me. :)
She also fails to address the territorial and temporal distribution of her subject.
Quite irritating...
I liked this essay. I havn't read her otherwise. Well not that I can remember anyway.
Both the approach and the segmentation are obsolete, but there are interesting details that might or might not be substantiated. Factual errors, inconsistencies, and contradictions are inevitable on such shaky foundations.
Feminists of the time had the uncanny habit of of projecting distorted images acquired through their distorted lenses. Those were the days when "Women's Studies" were introduced in higher ed as a "discipline," effectively confusing people with another destructive ideology.
Everything is distorted though. Although I have an issue with modern feminism (with its male focus) I think a lot of the 70s feminists got a lot right.
Someone said that?
You can stay if you want I'm not about to ban you, just that you might score a bit more honesty here than elsewhere.
Yes communication is tough. I don't think there is any perspective with Sage though. Sage's hate started with Frank but now I'm the target. The post over there is just an attempt to associate me with some of Frank's 'pushing the envelope' posts and is therefore dishonest. A bit more caught up in the establishment than claimed if you were to ask me.
We have a very rich inheritance in the Americas of Native American knowledge of many disciplines. Quite amazing how thoroughly we have managed to avoid the central issue. The very wisdom from those who survived and thrived on these continents for many thousands of years before us is ignored, marginalized or worse to our eternal detriment.
Sad the AMA and medical board types seem to have a trademark on "allopathy" (cf "alleviate", though that can be a bad thing; the "allopaths™" use antipyretics for any fever whatsoever, which demolishes the immune response). Just means countering the ailment; not necessarily what Mormons called "heroic medicine" - calomel, leeches, and now vaccines, statins, and remdesivir (as opposed to homeopathy, which means something causing the same effects will help you deal with it).
The Mormons (or maybe their establishment) are currently right into the melding of humans and IT. Not sure how that works with homeopathy.
I put that in past tense because that's ancient history, despite vestiges still appearing in the Doctrine & Covenants. The Corporation of the President is Big Medicine and Big Pharma all the way. Its president is a surgeon.
I'm not sure the Mormons ever had much affinity for homeopathy. Eclecticism, herbalism, and midwifery perhaps.
I should have mentioned in my comment below that in her later 1978 book, she does credit Native American herbal knowledge and its adoption by white healers in the communities they served.