--- Charles Brown <cbrown at michiganlegal.org> wrote: CB: I'm thinking it was a generalized "ir-rationale" for subordinating women. Anytime a woman or women got uppity or "frisky" , she or they could be put in her "place" because, afterall, she is prone to devilishness. It seems to have been an ideological enforcement mechanism for male supremacy. --
Maybe. I think that ideologies have a momentum of their own, somewhat divorced from though perhaps based on actual concerns of domination, and I'm not looking to try to distinguish the chicken from the egg here. What I do insist on, though, is that when people were burning witches/wizards (as male witches were called), they usually genuinely thought that the people burned were actual servants of Satan and thus a grave threat. It was not a conscious subterfuge.
As an undergrad, I took a class from the Kant scholar Mary Gregor (RIP), and I remember how she said, "if we thought there were a group of people bent on evil, and we thought they only way to get rid of them was by burning them, what would we do?" I found it hard to answer that question. :)
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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