Please don't post like this. We're trying to avoid the online shaming/callout culture on HN, because it leads to extremely predictable (and nasty) interactions. The goal of this site is unpredictable and kind interaction, oriented around curiosity.
That was the intention of the author, but her words tell a different story:
"In the 1500s some towns, such as Chester, England, actually made it illegal for most women to sell beer, worried that young alewives would grow up into old spinsters."
Young women today are being told that work is more important than having children, but find out in their 30s that it was a lie - when it's often too late. They're not called spinsters now, they're called cat ladies.
That article actually identifies certain actions of male programmers that it credits with the reason most programmers are male today. That's certainly not known. The article is just a sexist rant.
> The process took time and dedication: hours to prepare the ale, sweep the floors clean and lift heavy bundles of rye and grain
I wonder if they really were brewing up "magic potions" (inadvertently) with ergot contaminated rye. I've seen people suggest that ergot poisoning could explain some of the truly weird behavior that you sometimes hear about from the Middle Ages.
Well yeah, probably at some point. They were also preparing food which included rye. Isn't this one of the common speculated causes for witch hunts and the like?
The director of The Witch (2016) hinted in several interviews that ergot may have been the cause not only of the erratic behaviour of the presumed witches, but also of the accusations made against them.
In other words, people poisoned with ergot may have been hallucinating and believe they saw the alleged witches do gruesome and unbelievable things.
This is fascinating, though I'm rather disappointed by their citation of sources (or non-sources).
The most salient citation in the whole article, with the text "accused female brewers of being witches", points to https://bigthink.com/scotty-hendricks/the-dark-history-of-wo... . This article makes absolutely no reference to female brewers being accused of being witches.
Now, I find it plausible and even fairly likely that campaigns against witchcraft also resulted in women being forced out of beer production (to say nothing of the deaths of many women whose sole crime was their independence), but this isn't about that for me. It's lazy at best or dishonest at worst to imply that a source backs up a core statement of your article when it does not.
It's all the worse that the Smithsonian article is mostly a shameless repackaging of the BigThink article, with the unsourced (though we're made to think it's sourced!) prosecution-of-alewives-for-witchcraft claim being the main addition of this new article!
I cannot trust an article (podcast) where people say the following:
> Historian Judith Bennett notes that medieval women made about 1d./day while men made 1 ½ or 2d./day when doing similar work, like brewing, as men. 700 years later, women still make just 80 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men.
The statement "80 cts on the dollar for the same work" is a falsehood. Simple as that. If people cannot get these simple facts right, I will not trust the rest they are saying.
> That said, I haven’t found any evidence to suggest that brewsters were more likely to be accused of or killed for witchcraft than other women. Bennett certainly doesn’t make that claim.
I heard a podcast (sadly hidden behind another wonderful platform startup's paywall) featuring Judith Bennett, who is a scholar on this topic, and IIRC she makes the argument that what really drove women out of brewing was access to capital and to markets. When brewing was a smalltime village affair, it was easy for women to participate, because they would make beer for their local markets and their family. The beer didn't last very long, partly because they didn't have hops yet, so transporting it over long distances wasn't really possible.
As hops were adopted, people started transporting beer over longer distances, because it kept better. Unfortunately, at the time, it wasn't acceptable or safe for women to travel long distances, which meant that men tended to step in more. Additionally, larger batches and longer distances meant raising capital was more important. At the time, women couldn't really enter contracts from what I remember, so the husband had step in there as well. It seems like we suspect that women were often doing the real brewing, but under their husbands name, but over time this resulted in brewing turning into men's work.
The podcast is Tides of History (which I strongly recommend), and Bennet's book (which I have not read) is called Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women's Work in a Changing World, 1300-1600.
The issue with this type of article is that it's less interested in being an accurate depiction of reality than it is feeding certain popular narratives.
There's a kernel of truth: women in many cultures held responsibility for food preparation, and beer was an important method of preparing and preserving food. Brewsters are thus an essential part of the history of brewing. You can go too far in this--men also made plenty of beer (e.g. monastic), but it's true that beer-making was feminine-coded until the early modern era.
But there is absolutely no evidence that accusations of witchcraft were used to murder innocent brewsters so that dastardly men could come and dominate the market. What does the article attribute this to?
> Just as women were establishing their foothold in the beer markets of England, Ireland and the rest of Europe, the Inquisition began.
This makes no sense at all. The Inquisition wasn't some universal phenomenon that swept the entirety of Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals: it was a locally scoped institution centered on Catholic Mediterranean countries, particularly Spain. Catholic Ireland barely experienced it owing to separation from the continent, and Protestant England didn't have one at all.
Let's be generous, though, and reinterpret this sloppiness as "men used the religious turmoil at the time to accuse women of witchcraft with a renewed salience." Indeed, the article says:
> To reduce their competition in the beer trade, these men accused female brewers of being witches and using their cauldrons to brew up magic potions instead of booze.
But as we click on it to find out about these accusations, it turns out the article doesn't even make a claim that female brewers were accused of being witches, let alone provide evidence that it happened.
It's a flimsy series of unsupported claims only held together by the hope that readers will turn off their critical thinking because it's being published on smithsonianmag.com, and the knowledge that anyone calling out its flimsiness will be accused of being a misogynist. Of course, for every one person who realizes the article is nonsense, a hundred people will now know for a fact that women invented beer and witchcraft was used to steal beer from women because the Smithsonian said so.
A lot of this is not true. The majority of women accused (in the UK) were accused by other women, not these all powerful male brewers - around 500 people (men included) were found guilty of witchcraft in the UK during this period, out of roughly 2000 accused.
This is biased material promoting a political ideal and not factual.
26 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 65.0 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"In the 1500s some towns, such as Chester, England, actually made it illegal for most women to sell beer, worried that young alewives would grow up into old spinsters."
Young women today are being told that work is more important than having children, but find out in their 30s that it was a lie - when it's often too late. They're not called spinsters now, they're called cat ladies.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I wonder if they really were brewing up "magic potions" (inadvertently) with ergot contaminated rye. I've seen people suggest that ergot poisoning could explain some of the truly weird behavior that you sometimes hear about from the Middle Ages.
In other words, people poisoned with ergot may have been hallucinating and believe they saw the alleged witches do gruesome and unbelievable things.
The most salient citation in the whole article, with the text "accused female brewers of being witches", points to https://bigthink.com/scotty-hendricks/the-dark-history-of-wo... . This article makes absolutely no reference to female brewers being accused of being witches.
Now, I find it plausible and even fairly likely that campaigns against witchcraft also resulted in women being forced out of beer production (to say nothing of the deaths of many women whose sole crime was their independence), but this isn't about that for me. It's lazy at best or dishonest at worst to imply that a source backs up a core statement of your article when it does not.
It's all the worse that the Smithsonian article is mostly a shameless repackaging of the BigThink article, with the unsourced (though we're made to think it's sourced!) prosecution-of-alewives-for-witchcraft claim being the main addition of this new article!
https://digpodcast.org/2018/10/21/witches-brew-how-the-patri...
> Historian Judith Bennett notes that medieval women made about 1d./day while men made 1 ½ or 2d./day when doing similar work, like brewing, as men. 700 years later, women still make just 80 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men.
The statement "80 cts on the dollar for the same work" is a falsehood. Simple as that. If people cannot get these simple facts right, I will not trust the rest they are saying.
> That said, I haven’t found any evidence to suggest that brewsters were more likely to be accused of or killed for witchcraft than other women. Bennett certainly doesn’t make that claim.
As hops were adopted, people started transporting beer over longer distances, because it kept better. Unfortunately, at the time, it wasn't acceptable or safe for women to travel long distances, which meant that men tended to step in more. Additionally, larger batches and longer distances meant raising capital was more important. At the time, women couldn't really enter contracts from what I remember, so the husband had step in there as well. It seems like we suspect that women were often doing the real brewing, but under their husbands name, but over time this resulted in brewing turning into men's work.
The podcast is Tides of History (which I strongly recommend), and Bennet's book (which I have not read) is called Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women's Work in a Changing World, 1300-1600.
> Historically women were involved in brewing, since it was seen as another domestic task.
This is it. Move along.
There's a kernel of truth: women in many cultures held responsibility for food preparation, and beer was an important method of preparing and preserving food. Brewsters are thus an essential part of the history of brewing. You can go too far in this--men also made plenty of beer (e.g. monastic), but it's true that beer-making was feminine-coded until the early modern era.
But there is absolutely no evidence that accusations of witchcraft were used to murder innocent brewsters so that dastardly men could come and dominate the market. What does the article attribute this to?
> Just as women were establishing their foothold in the beer markets of England, Ireland and the rest of Europe, the Inquisition began.
This makes no sense at all. The Inquisition wasn't some universal phenomenon that swept the entirety of Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals: it was a locally scoped institution centered on Catholic Mediterranean countries, particularly Spain. Catholic Ireland barely experienced it owing to separation from the continent, and Protestant England didn't have one at all.
Let's be generous, though, and reinterpret this sloppiness as "men used the religious turmoil at the time to accuse women of witchcraft with a renewed salience." Indeed, the article says:
> To reduce their competition in the beer trade, these men accused female brewers of being witches and using their cauldrons to brew up magic potions instead of booze.
With "these men accused female brewers of being witches" being a link to https://bigthink.com/scotty-hendricks/the-dark-history-of-wo...! Wonderful, maybe some concrete evidence.
But as we click on it to find out about these accusations, it turns out the article doesn't even make a claim that female brewers were accused of being witches, let alone provide evidence that it happened.
It's a flimsy series of unsupported claims only held together by the hope that readers will turn off their critical thinking because it's being published on smithsonianmag.com, and the knowledge that anyone calling out its flimsiness will be accused of being a misogynist. Of course, for every one person who realizes the article is nonsense, a hundred people will now know for a fact that women invented beer and witchcraft was used to steal beer from women because the Smithsonian said so.
This is biased material promoting a political ideal and not factual.