Women dominated beer brewing until they were accused of being witches
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
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!
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.
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.
This is biased material promoting a political ideal and not factual.
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.
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.
> Historically women were involved in brewing, since it was seen as another domestic task.
This is it. Move along.