[HN Gopher] Women dominated beer brewing until they were accused...
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Women dominated beer brewing until they were accused of being
witches
Author : jctwinkle
Score : 47 points
Date : 2021-03-09 21:51 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| elmomle wrote:
| 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!
| scarmig wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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
| steel beer from women because the Smithsonian said so.
| pskinner wrote:
| 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.
| Footkerchief wrote:
| Good luck finding any substantiable facts or useful citations in
| this article. Here's an article with actual sources:
|
| https://digpodcast.org/2018/10/21/witches-brew-how-the-patri...
| scarmig wrote:
| Much better article. It does have this point:
|
| > 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.
| c06n wrote:
| 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 1/2 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.
| monksy wrote:
| Well to be fair.. they were making some wicked brews.
| phekunde wrote:
| Wrong timing!
| nomel wrote:
| I'll check back in another 500 years to see if I can laugh at
| the joke yet.
| saladgnu054 wrote:
| Ah yes, another article on the war to sow hatred among people.
| Good job.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't post unsubstantive or flamebait comments to HN.
| We're trying for a different sort of conversation here.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| zionic wrote:
| Glad to see this here calling the article out for what it is.
| dang wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| redis_mlc wrote:
| 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.
| notJim wrote:
| 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.
| cambalache wrote:
| As always the real reason is buried 1 or 2 articles down
|
| > Historically women were involved in brewing, since it was seen
| as another domestic task.
|
| This is it. Move along.
| lovegoblin wrote:
| Sure. Why dig deeper when a surface-level answer will do?
| cambalache wrote:
| Yeah, let's make an elaborate tale with no serious
| scholarship behind instead.
| krtkush wrote:
| Something very similar - https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-
| news/computer-programmi...
| exporectomy wrote:
| 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.
| balthasar wrote:
| I read it as women dominated beer pong.
| nomy99 wrote:
| maybe that's what triggered the witch hunt
| defen wrote:
| > 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.
| marzell wrote:
| 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?
| yesbabyyes wrote:
| Before settling on hops (which has a calming effect, btw), it
| was common to use henbane in beer brewing. See also e.g.
| https://oct.co/essays/history-hallucinogenic-beers-magic-mus...
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