Bitchy History - A Brief History of Setting Women on Fire

00:00:00.000 Welcome to Bitchy History, where we cut through the myths and nostalgia to get to the raw, 1.00

00:00:17.360 unvarnished truth about the past. With sharp analysis, a feminist lens, and just the right 0.99

00:00:22.640 amount of bitchiness, we're here to show you that history isn't just something to study, 0.97

00:00:26.300 it's something to question. Let's get started. 1.00

00:00:30.000 welcome back to bitchy history before we get started today i need to start this episode with 1.00

00:00:36.620 a little bit of a disclaimer i'll address it again later in the episode as well the medical 1.00

00:00:41.660 system is a nightmare for women and people of color doctors are routinely trained to see whiny 1.00

00:00:47.560 women and drug-seeking behavior from those of us just trying to get a diagnosis for chronic pain 0.54

00:00:52.760 cysts on our ovaries and dozens of other issues that impact us does that mean that we don't trust

00:00:58.820 science? No. I was vaccinated as an infant, I get my flu shot every year, and my COVID booster

00:01:04.680 when I can convince the pharmacist to let me have it. I grew up without health insurance,

00:01:09.200 so any lingering reluctance to go to the doctor for issues is related to that habit,

00:01:13.800 not because I think I can cure anything that's wrong with me with organic food and crystals.

00:01:18.900 Doctors do save lives, but their training sometimes leads them to disregard their

00:01:23.360 patient's autonomy and knowledge about their own body. Does that mean I think you should

00:01:27.960 give birth in a field and never take a single tablet of folic acid while pregnant? Absolutely 1.00

00:01:32.780 the fuck not. So while this episode is a scathing criticism of the patriarchal formation of the 0.98

00:01:38.640 professional medical field, which was built on the literal ashes of medieval midwives and herb

00:01:43.920 women, it's also not advocacy for an anti-vax, woo-woo, free birtherism mindset. Get prenatal

00:01:51.420 care. Go to trained midwives and doctors for your pregnancy, but also know how to advocate for

00:01:57.700 yourself. Now, let's move on to the pyres. Let's be honest. Whenever someone says witch hunts,

00:02:05.200 most people picture medieval peasants, a bonfire, a pointy hat, and maybe a live-action

00:02:10.460 reenactment of the Monty Python and the Holy Grail scene. That's cute, but it's also wrong.

00:02:25.540 The witch hunts didn't actually belong to the so-called Dark Ages.

00:02:29.920 They weren't the product of medieval ignorance or backward superstition.

00:02:33.580 They were, in fact, a feature of the very era that also produced the Renaissance,

00:02:38.260 the Scientific Revolution, and whole cities full of dudes arguing about astronomy while wearing tights.

00:02:44.140 According to historians like Ronald Hutton in The Witch, A History of Fear,

00:02:48.100 the real witch hunting frenzy happened between the years of 1450 and 1750,

00:02:53.360 smack in the middle of Europe's celebrated intellectual awakening. 0.69

00:02:57.720 Essentially, the same society that gave us Shakespeare also gave us, 1.00

00:03:01.440 let's burn that woman over there for looking a little weird. 1.00

00:03:04.420 And you wonder why feminists have trust issues. 1.00

00:03:07.640 Of the roughly 40,000 people executed for witchcraft in Europe, 0.99

00:03:12.020 75 to 85% of them were women,

00:03:14.680 a statistic so tilted that it might need to visit a chiropractor.

00:03:19.060 As Owen Davies emphasizes in the Oxford History of Witchcraft and Magic,

00:03:22.860 witchcraft accusations weren't random bolts of cultural lightning. They were part of a highly

00:03:27.980 gendered system of fear. Witches became shorthand for anxious masculinity. Women who refused to 1.00

00:03:34.160 obey, women who lived alone, women who owned property, women who knew things, women who

00:03:39.820 weren't sufficiently deferential. In other words, women who did absolutely anything except smile 0.96

00:03:45.280 politely and die quietly. But witch hunts weren't merely about misogyny in the abstract. They were 0.59

00:03:51.660 about power, who got to heal, who got to speak, and who got to control women's bodies. When a 1.00

00:03:57.720 society is terrified of the people who deliver babies, something deeper is going on. Before we

00:04:03.960 get to the midwives who were caught in this gendered crossfire, let's sit for a moment with

00:04:08.580 the long-term consequences, because here's the thesis of this entire episode. Every time a 0.54

00:04:14.620 government, a church, or a medical establishment has panicked about women having too much authority,

00:04:19.500 the results have been catastrophic. Ask any woman who's ever tried to get a doctor to take her pain 1.00

00:04:25.600 seriously. If you're listening and thinking, wow, this sounds familiar, congratulations,

00:04:31.600 you've cracked the code. The witch hunts were the original moral panic about uppity women, 0.99

00:04:36.420 and the blueprint they created still shapes everything from obstetric violence to anti-abortion 0.94

00:04:41.420 laws. So how did we get from community healers to courtroom trials? Why midwives? Why now? And

00:04:47.940 why were women who literally kept everyone alive through childbirth suddenly the villains of the

00:04:52.980 story? To answer that, we need to go back. Before the bonfires, before the demon-hunting manuals,

00:04:59.360 before the witch hunters wrote the world's first fanfiction about satanic girlbosses,

00:05:03.980 we need to look at the world before fear swallowed women's knowledge whole.

00:05:08.460 Picture Europe before the professionalization of medicine. A world without hospitals as we know

00:05:13.540 them without anesthesia, without the calming presence of a man in a white coat who charges

00:05:17.920 $600 for a consult. For any Brits or Europeans listening, that's American health care without

00:05:24.180 insurance. I am not exaggerating. Healing wasn't a profession. It was a practice woven into daily

00:05:29.940 life, community rituals, and women's expertise. The line between healer, midwife, herbalist,

00:05:35.400 and neighbor with common sense was blurry and in most places completely unpoliced.

00:05:40.720 Women were the frontline workers of the medieval and early modern world. 1.00

00:05:44.720 They treated fevers, dressed wounds, mixed remedies, whispered prayers, 1.00

00:05:48.340 and most importantly, brought babies into the world.

00:05:51.420 As Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English note in their book, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses, 0.66

00:05:56.400 women's medical authority existed not because it was permitted by institutions,

00:06:00.100 but because it was necessary. 0.63

00:06:02.320 Childbirth was the central medical event of life, and who attended it every single time? 0.99

00:06:07.640 Women.

00:06:08.800 Midwives weren't fringe figures. 0.99

00:06:10.580 They were essential to communities.

00:06:12.300 They were trusted.

00:06:13.180 They were often the most experienced medical practitioners a community had.

00:06:17.260 They understood herbs, anatomy, labor techniques, and what to do when things went wrong.

00:06:22.400 They were what we would now call experiential experts.

00:06:25.660 And they gained that knowledge the only way possible in a world without medical schools,

00:06:29.740 by doing the work, again and again and again.

00:06:33.040 But here's the twist.

00:06:33.940 the very qualities that made midwives indispensable also made them threatening. 0.98

00:06:39.000 Women who had knowledge about the body, especially the reproductive body, 0.98

00:06:42.700 held a kind of power that patriarchal institutions couldn't control.

00:06:46.680 As Maxwell Stewart shows in Witch Beliefs and Witch Trials in the Middle Ages, 0.85

00:06:50.940 church authorities as early as the 13th century issued warnings about women who heal through herbs and incantations.

00:06:57.640 You can almost hear the subtext. 0.85

00:06:59.160 We do not understand female bodies, and therefore anyone who does is suspicious. 0.69

00:07:03.940 not that that's changed much with men in power today.

00:07:07.440 You recognize for a follow-up?

00:07:08.840 Thank you, Mr. President.

00:07:10.080 And my question is, it starts on page three.

00:07:14.780 On line nine, we have a bullet there where, no pun intended,

00:07:20.600 where it states that abortion is okay to remove an ectopic pregnancy.

00:07:26.380 And can you explain to me why that exception is in there?

00:07:31.040 I don't know. It's crazy.

00:07:33.020 Maybe, just maybe, it's because an ectopic pregnancy is not viable and would kill the

00:07:39.180 woman carrying it. But what do I know? I'm just a woman with working fallopian tubes.

00:07:44.240 Maybe I'm the crazy one. Add to that the fact that healing often involved charms, rituals,

00:07:50.980 or prayers passed down through generations. These were forms of knowledge outside the

00:07:55.600 official church hierarchy. Midwives become a walking symbol of unauthorized authority. 1.00

00:08:01.180 They weren't ordained. They didn't have degrees. They didn't answer to anyone except the pregnant 1.00

00:08:05.860 woman in front of them. And that autonomy, that made them dangerous. Look, in a world where 0.99

00:08:11.040 childbirth was one of the leading causes of death, midwives were doing life or death work 1.00

00:08:16.060 every single day. Some births went well. Some didn't. Some infants survived. Some didn't. 0.95

00:08:22.260 And when things went wrong, people wanted someone to blame. Who better than the woman with all the 1.00

00:08:27.540 knowledge. Here's the part that gets messy in the historical record. Midwives were not the majority

00:08:33.540 of those accused of witchcraft. That's a myth created in the 1970s and corrected by later

00:08:38.800 historians like Roper and Hutton. But midwives were disproportionately targeted in specific 0.97

00:08:44.600 regions and specific circumstances, particularly in periods when infant mortality was high or when

00:08:51.040 childbirth trauma created the perfect storm of grief, confusion, and fear. Because here's a

00:08:56.640 universal truth of patriarchal societies. When men don't understand something, they make women 0.99

00:09:02.580 pay for it. Childbirth was terrifying. Infant mortality was rampant. Medicine was rudimentary. 0.70

00:09:09.300 And women who held knowledge, real, tangible, life-saving knowledge, looked like sorceresses 0.83

00:09:14.400 to people who believed life and death were in God's hands alone. This is where the slowly rising 0.65

00:09:19.960 tide of male scholars, the university-trained physician, started to matter. These men considered

00:09:25.880 themselves the future of medicine, the vanguard of rational healing. They also didn't want

00:09:31.320 competition from women who actually knew how to treat women's health issues. Ehrenreich and

00:09:36.560 English argue that learned physicians and clerical authorities formed an accidental

00:09:40.960 alliance to do something very clever. They reframed women's knowledge as dangerous. 0.84

00:09:46.820 Women weren't wise, they were busybodies. Women didn't heal, they meddled. Women didn't know 1.00

00:09:52.740 herbs, they consorted with spirits. Women didn't help babies, they risked their souls. And once 1.00

00:09:58.740 you establish that a midwife's skill might come from dark forces, the next step is obvious. Put 0.96

00:10:04.260 her on trial. The shift didn't happen overnight. It simmered. It brewed. It seeped into sermons and

00:10:10.240 legal codes and gossip. It set the stage for what would become the largest gendered persecution in 1.00

00:10:15.480 European history, the witch hunts. But let's be honest, none of this is actually about demons or

00:10:20.720 spells or goats with suspiciously human voices. It's about the oldest story in the world,

00:10:25.800 controlling women's labor, women's knowledge, and women's autonomy. The witch has always 0.99

00:10:30.980 represented a kind of woman who moves beyond her socially constructed limits, a woman in motion,

00:10:36.620 a woman with agency, a woman with knowledge and skills. And in 1500, that was the woman who caught

00:10:42.840 babies. The 16th and 17th centuries were masterclasses in multi-level crisis. Climate

00:10:49.000 patterns shifted violently during the Little Ice Age. Harvests failed, and waves of plague and

00:10:53.860 famine tore through families before they could catch a breath. Religious conflict set entire

00:10:59.320 regions on fire, sometimes literally, and political authority swung between extremes faster than you

00:11:05.060 could say Inquisition. Infant mortality rates soared. Communities were stretched so thin that

00:11:10.500 any misfortune, from a sick child to a spoiled churn of butter, felt like the universe taking

00:11:16.540 something personal. Historians like Lyndall Roper and Ronald Hutton emphasize that witchcraft

00:11:21.620 accusations didn't spike during peaceful, boring decades. They surged precisely when people were

00:11:27.540 stressed, scared, and scrambling for explanations. If your grain fails or your cow dies, you can blame

00:11:33.720 God or the weather. But if your newborn child dies, if the most fragile precious thing in your

00:11:39.140 world slips away, you need something tangible to hold responsible. And the midwife, the woman who

00:11:44.840 had touched that body stood closest. Childbirth in early modern Europe wasn't just medical,

00:11:50.300 it was cosmic. Everything about it, the blood, the pain, the risk, suggested that the physical

00:11:55.040 and spiritual worlds were brushing up against each other. Because midwives were present at

00:11:59.840 this threshold, they carried a symbolic weight far beyond their actual role. They guided women

00:12:04.960 into a place that men couldn't understand or follow and couldn't control. In a patriarchal 0.81

00:12:10.500 culture, that alone, is enough to raise suspicion. Midwives occupied a strange, dangerous paradox. 1.00

00:12:17.120 They were the most respected women in the community and the most feared. They knew how to turn a 1.00

00:12:21.860 breech baby, ease a contraction, stop hemorrhage, and comfort a mother who was sure she wasn't going

00:12:26.660 to survive this. They could calm a room, assess danger, act decisively, and guide a woman through

00:12:31.960 one of the most emotionally and physically intense experiences of her life. They also saw

00:12:37.300 female nakedness. They handled bodily fluids. They lingered in that liminal space between life and 0.99

00:12:42.680 death. They used herbs, rituals, and remedies that men never understood and didn't approve of.

00:12:48.520 They made medical decisions without consulting either priest or physician. In short, they had

00:12:53.340 power, and they used it in a world that punished women for even the appearance of authority. 0.85

00:12:58.540 Roper's work is full of cases in which midwives were accused not by men, but by the very women

00:13:03.760 they served. Birth was dangerous, and grief has a long memory. A mother who lost her baby might

00:13:09.440 remember the midwife's offhand remark during labor, her sharp tone during a complication, 0.85

00:13:14.660 her earlier argument with a neighbor, or a rumor that her cow had dried up, an omen everyone took

00:13:19.720 seriously. These fragments became puzzle pieces in a story that people were desperate to make

00:13:24.740 sense of. It wasn't malice, it was desperation to make sense of an unthinkable situation.

00:13:31.140 Midwives had the fatal combination of authority, knowledge, and proximity to tragedy.

00:13:36.160 That made them the obvious target when anything went wrong, 0.97

00:13:39.180 and because early modern communities were already primed to see women's influence as unstable, unpredictable, even dangerous, 0.54

00:13:46.580 accusations escalated quickly.

00:13:48.960 The same woman who helped deliver your child could be blamed for its death.

00:13:52.660 The same woman who saved your life in childbirth could be suspected of causing your infertility.

00:13:57.240 In some regions, midwives were even accused of swapping babies with demons,

00:14:01.940 preserving pain in jars for use in spells, or causing butter to fail.

00:14:06.340 It was the Renaissance version of Murphy's Law. 1.00

00:14:08.860 Anything that can go wrong will go wrong, and it will be a woman's fault. 1.00

00:14:13.500 While ordinary families were locked in these cycles of fear and grief, 1.00

00:14:17.080 a different kind of panic was brewing in Europe's universities.

00:14:20.640 These institutions were busy training the first generations of male physicians,

00:14:24.780 men armed with the authority of degrees and the confidence of never having assisted an actual

00:14:29.480 birth. The education was theoretical, abstract, bookish. They believed deeply in their own

00:14:35.120 superiority, and they needed a way to justify why healing should belong to them and not to the

00:14:40.180 people who had been doing it for centuries. The easiest way to build a male monopoly was to

00:14:45.220 delegitimize the people who already knew what they were doing. This is where witchcraft rhetoric 1.00

00:14:50.000 found new life. Physicians didn't actually accuse midwives of witchcraft directly. They did

00:14:55.360 something subtler and more effective. They labeled women's medical knowledge as superstition, 1.00

00:15:00.680 low-class, unscientific, dangerous. They painted their own approach, heavy on the theory of humors

00:15:06.460 in the body, light on practical skill, as the rational and safe alternative. Suddenly, midwives

00:15:12.740 weren't simply women with experience. They were irresponsible, primitive, a threat to good 1.00

00:15:17.780 outcomes. The church helped reinforce this shift by declaring certain female healing practices 1.00

00:15:22.940 improper or spiritually suspect. Maxwell Stewart documents clerical texts that warned against

00:15:28.800 women who heal by unauthorized means, a phrase that in one swoop condemned everything from

00:15:34.840 herbalism to pain relief in childbirth. Witch beliefs didn't just happen, they were cultivated, 1.00

00:15:40.940 encouraged, and weaponized. And once that groundwork was laid, childbirth itself became

00:15:46.360 a battleground. Infant mortality was so common, sometimes affecting a third of all babies,

00:15:51.460 that every birth felt like a roll of loaded dice. Women died in childbirth at horrifying rates too,

00:15:57.900 often from hemorrhage or obstructed labor. In a world without germ theory, without understanding

00:16:02.760 infection, and without consistent access to professional help, everything seemed to hang

00:16:07.600 on luck. And when luck failed, people looked for someone to blame. Early modern courts were full

00:16:13.740 of the same grim logic. If a woman could help bring life into the world, she could also take 1.00

00:16:18.780 it out. If she could ease pain, she could cause it. If she could encourage fertility, 1.00

00:16:23.660 she could sabotage it. A midwife's skills, interpreted through fear, became proof of 1.00

00:16:28.820 hidden power. And hidden power had only one explanation in this world. Witchcraft.

00:16:35.300 Roper's trial examples show exactly how this played out. A stillbirth became a sign of malice.

00:16:41.140 a difficult laborer became evidence of tampering. A midwife's social conflicts took on supernatural

00:16:46.700 weight. A mother remembered every small moment differently after the fact, reconstructing a 0.55

00:16:52.100 pattern she couldn't have seen while she was in agony. Grief filled in the blanks. Gossip confirmed

00:16:57.900 her suspicions, and the community, already terrified by famine, disease, and God's apparent silence,

00:17:03.540 was ready to listen. Once an accusation took hold, the rest followed a catastrophically

00:17:09.340 predictable script. Torture produced elaborate confessions filled with nightmarish imagery,

00:17:15.300 women stealing breast milk, eating fetuses, corrupting wombs. They were not real memories,

00:17:20.280 but fantasies extracted under unbearable pain, echoes of misogynistic fears about women's

00:17:25.600 bodies. Roper notes how these gendered fantasies revealed far more about male anxieties than about

00:17:31.560 women's actual behavior. And through these confessions, the male imagination projected

00:17:36.360 everything at fear about women. Their knowledge, their autonomy, their proximity to life's most

00:17:41.460 powerful moments. Midwives weren't terrifying because they were evil, they were terrifying 0.83

00:17:46.740 because they knew things that men didn't. It's this fear, the long simmering distrust of women's 0.91

00:17:52.680 authority over reproduction and healing, that paved the way for what came next, the medicalization of

00:17:58.080 childbirth under male authority. The transition from midwives to man midwives wasn't a natural

00:18:04.000 evolution. It was the result of centuries of conditioning that taught society to see women's 0.64

00:18:08.960 expertise as dangerous and men's ignorance as professionalism. Before we go any further,

00:18:15.420 I want to pause the historical reenactment here and make something very clear once more in this

00:18:20.120 episode. Nothing in this episode is an argument against seeking medical care today, especially

00:18:26.320 not during pregnancy or birth. The fact that early modern male physicians were sometimes

00:18:31.460 incompetent, arrogant, or actively harmful does not mean that modern medicine is entirely the

00:18:37.440 enemy. It just means that the road to safe, evidence-based care was built on centuries

00:18:42.360 of sexist bullshit, and we're still cleaning up the debris today. The existence of misogyny 0.99

00:18:48.060 in medical history does not mean that childbirth is safer without trained providers. It doesn't

00:18:53.460 make obstetrics optional. It doesn't make unassisted birth empowering. It doesn't turn

00:18:59.040 free-birth influencers into revolutionaries. What it does mean is that understanding this

00:19:04.240 history helps us demand better from the systems we have, not abandon them. Because here's the

00:19:09.800 truth. Where early modern midwives relied on generational experience, today's certified

00:19:16.120 midwives, OBGYNs, nurses, and doulas operate with a wealth of medical science behind them.

00:19:22.280 We have antibiotics, oxygen, sterile techniques, ultrasounds, blood transfusions, C-sections,

00:19:27.660 NICUs, and evidence-based protocols that save lives. Modern prenatal care is one of the biggest

00:19:33.480 reasons that maternal and infant mortality plummeted in the 20th century. The problem

00:19:38.380 isn't that medicine is evil. It's that medicine, like every human institution, still carries

00:19:43.880 patriarchal residue that we're having to scrub off. So when I talk about the historical takeover

00:19:49.220 of childbirth and healthcare by male physicians, or the misogyny baked into the professionalization

00:19:54.840 of medicine, I'm not saying reject all doctors or reject Western medicine or trust no medical

00:20:01.160 system. I'm saying that this history explains why some women, especially women of color, 0.64

00:20:06.580 queer patients, and disabled patients, still struggle to have their pain believed or their

00:20:11.500 autonomy respected. It doesn't justify unassisted birth. It helps explain why some people are drawn

00:20:17.180 to it in the first place, though. And to be extremely painfully clear, birth is still

00:20:22.660 dangerous. It has always been dangerous. Modern medical support does save lives. In other words,

00:20:28.260 the appropriate modern takeaway from the witch trials isn't ditch your prenatal care. It's demand 0.95

00:20:34.060 respectful, safe, evidence-based care, and know your history so you can recognize when the system

00:20:39.900 is failing you. Okay, back to the witch hunts. By the late 1600s, witch hunts were beginning to

00:20:47.180 taper off, but the consequences of those centuries of fear were only just kicking in.

00:20:52.240 This is the part of the story where you might hope that women healers finally caught a break.

00:20:56.860 Fewer trials, fewer pyres, and maybe a little less paranoia.

00:21:01.040 But history isn't that generous.

00:21:03.160 Because just as the flames of the witch hunts were dying down,

00:21:06.420 something else was catching fire.

00:21:08.260 The rise of male-dominated medicine.

00:21:11.000 And this wasn't a coincidence.

00:21:13.300 Sylvia Federici in Caliban and the Witch argues that the witch hunts weren't an embarrassing superstition.

00:21:18.720 They were a political project. 0.99

00:21:21.460 Economically, Europe needed women's labor, bodies, and reproductive capacities to be strictly controlled. 1.00

00:21:27.340 The old world, where women had community power, economic independence, and deep experiential knowledge of healing, 0.99

00:21:34.200 that world, it had to go. 0.94

00:21:36.260 And the witch hunts cleared the ground for something new, 1.00

00:21:38.640 a medical system run by men, built on women's subordination. 0.81

00:21:42.500 This is the moment where male physicians see an opportunity. 1.00

00:21:45.720 For centuries, childbirth had been the domain of women. 0.98

00:21:49.000 Learned physicians mostly avoided it, preferring to diagnose imbalanced humors from a safe distance. 0.95

00:21:54.780 But as universities expanded and rational medicine gained prestige,

00:21:59.180 men realized that the biggest, most consistent medical event of human life, birth,

00:22:03.440 was happening entirely outside of their control, and they wanted it back.

00:22:08.160 They didn't just wander in.

00:22:09.380 They arrived with instruments, degrees, and a deeply held belief that their knowledge was superior to the lived experience of midwives.

00:22:15.680 The early man midwives came from elite families and universities carrying forceps, like sacred relics.

00:22:22.820 They talked about science and reason, though much of their training was more astrology than anatomy even then.

00:22:28.920 They arrived with confidence, if not competence, which, again, hasn't really changed much for men in these days, has it?

00:22:36.300 And crucially, they arrived at a moment when women's independent authority had been shattered.

00:22:41.580 Federici points out that the witch hunts had violently destroyed the networks of women who 0.97

00:22:45.800 once controlled reproductive knowledge. Midwives, herbalists, and healers had been imprisoned,

00:22:50.840 tortured, executed, or frightened into silence. Their traditions were disrupted, their communities

00:22:55.980 destabilized, and their reputations smeared as both dangerous or demonic. By the late 17th century,

00:23:02.400 even without ongoing trials, women healers lived in a world that had been taught,

00:23:06.920 through fire, law, and fear to distrust them.

00:23:10.560 So the man-midwife stepped into a vacuum he didn't create, but happily benefited from.

00:23:15.760 He described himself as calmer, more rational, more reliable, 0.66

00:23:19.460 the same stereotypes that had justified the destruction of women's healing knowledge in the first place.

00:23:24.500 Medicine began to standardize, regulate, and medicalize childbirth, 0.94

00:23:28.400 not because these interventions were safer, but because safer wasn't the point.

00:23:32.980 Control was. 1.00

00:23:34.380 This is why, even as the witch trials ended, laws restricting midwifery expanded. 0.51

00:23:39.340 Women who had spent decades delivering babies now had to be licensed by the same institutions that had always barred them.

00:23:46.160 Exams were written in Latin. Instruction was male-led.

00:23:49.500 Everything about the new system was designed to exclude women. 0.65

00:23:53.100 And while midwives struggled through gatekeeping,

00:23:55.520 male physicians were rewriting the rules of childbirth, sometimes disastrously.

00:24:00.180 As the 18th century unfolded, male obstetrics often increased infant and maternal mortality.

00:24:07.100 Forceps were overused. Interventions were chosen for spectacle rather than safety.

00:24:12.000 Hospitals became breeding grounds for infection. Male physicians migrated from autopsies to labor 0.60

00:24:17.640 wards and back again without washing their hands, dismissing sanitation as woman's superstition.

00:24:24.000 In some regions, maternal mortality doubled after male midwives replaced traditional midwives.

00:24:29.340 But socially, culturally, legally, the man-midwife was still celebrated.

00:24:34.920 And this is where Federici's analysis hits hardest.

00:24:37.880 The shift to male medicine was not about improving outcomes.

00:24:41.720 It was about transforming women's reproductive labor from communal authority to state-managed infrastructure.

00:24:48.340 Childbirth moved from the hands of local women to male professionals who were backed by universities, guilds, medical boards, and the emerging modern state.

00:24:57.480 Even the image of the good medical woman changed. 0.85

00:25:00.460 The independent midwife became the dangerous relic of a superstitious past, 0.96

00:25:04.500 and the newly created nurse became the ideal, obedient, self-sacrificing, morally pure, 0.98

00:25:10.420 and always under the supervision of a male doctor. 0.83

00:25:13.520 Women were welcome in medicine only as assistants, never as authorities.

00:25:17.820 This wasn't an accident. 1.00

00:25:19.280 It was the logical next step in a long project of undermining women's autonomy. 1.00

00:25:24.240 The witch hunts had weakened the power of female healers. 1.00

00:25:27.480 The rise of professional medicine finished the job.

00:25:30.380 And that's the devastating insight that Federici brings to this part of the story.

00:25:34.640 Male medical authority didn't replace midwives because it was better.

00:25:38.300 It replaced them because the world had been violently rearranged to make women's knowledge impossible. 0.55

00:25:43.960 This isn't the story of scientific progress. 0.92

00:25:46.740 This is the story of a hostile takeover.

00:25:49.160 So here we are at the end of the episode.

00:25:51.480 And if you're a man, you might be thinking,

00:25:53.620 Wow, we've really evolved since the 17th century. 1.00

00:25:57.100 If you're a woman, you know that's a bunch of bullshit. 0.99

00:26:00.020 Federici's later work, Witches, Witch Hunting, and Women, opens with a blunt truth. 0.99

00:26:04.840 Societies are still policing women's bodies, labor, sexuality, and autonomy

00:26:09.700 using the same logic that drove the witch hunts.

00:26:12.420 The targets may look different, but the underlying fears haven't changed at all. 0.85

00:26:17.180 In early Mar in Europe, the witch was a woman who stood outside the reproductive and economic roles 1.00

00:26:22.200 that patriarchy had assigned her. She might have been unmarried, childless, sexually independent, 0.99

00:26:27.820 or simply inconvenient. She was the woman with knowledge men didn't control, the woman who 0.52

00:26:32.880 survived without male protection, the woman who lived too loudly or too freely. She was dangerous 0.99

00:26:38.540 not because of magic, but because of autonomy. Today, we don't accuse women of flying to Sabbath 0.96

00:26:44.000 or copulating with the devil. We accuse them of being irresponsible, unfit, selfish, unnatural, 1.00

00:26:49.980 immoral, emotional. But the pattern is the same. A woman who chooses not to marry? Suspicious. A 0.79

00:26:56.380 woman who chooses not to have children? Selfish. A woman who demands reproductive freedom? A threat. 1.00

00:27:02.020 A woman who expects her pain to be treated seriously? Overdramatic. A woman who wants to 1.00

00:27:07.200 control her own body? Political enemy number one. Any woman who has ever tried to be diagnosed for 1.00

00:27:13.700 endometriosis, tried to schedule a hysterectomy or a tubal ligation, or begged a doctor to actually

00:27:19.460 diagnose her rather than just tell her to go home and lose some weight, knows this all too well.

00:27:25.500 Federici makes it clear that modern witch hunts often occur in places experiencing rapid economic

00:27:30.840 upheaval, land privatization, resource extraction, or shifts in labor patterns. In India, Sub-Saharan

00:27:37.420 Africa, and Papua New Guinea, women who are widowed, childless, or economically independent

00:27:42.280 are still beaten, exiled, and murdered after being labeled witches. The justification shifts,

00:27:47.680 but the function remains the same, policing women's labor and property in moments of social

00:27:52.260 instability. And in the West, the methods are different, but chillingly recognizable.

00:27:57.340 We criminalize miscarriage. We surveil pregnancy. We legislate uterus after uterus. We force women

00:28:03.460 to carry non-viable pregnancies to term. We deny their medical experiences. We treat their autonomy 0.86

00:28:09.340 as politically dangerous. The witch hunts were not just about belief. They were about discipline,

00:28:14.920 discipline of women's bodies, minds, and labor. 0.97

00:28:18.060 That logic still runs under our laws, 0.99

00:28:20.120 our healthcare system, our workplaces,

00:28:22.340 and our culture,

00:28:23.340 like an underground current we pretend not to notice.

00:28:26.340 And that brings us to the final uncomfortable truth of this episode.

00:28:30.060 Modern medicine is still built on the same structures

00:28:32.500 that replaced midwives with male authority.

00:28:35.140 We see it every time a doctor dismisses a woman's symptoms.

00:28:38.140 Every time black women face higher maternal mortality rates

00:28:41.660 because their pain is ignored.

00:28:43.620 Every time we see a new graduating class of doctors 0.83

00:28:46.260 who inexplicably believe that black people have thicker skin

00:28:49.420 and higher pain tolerances. 0.93

00:28:51.640 Every time a woman is denied reproductive care 0.97

00:28:54.140 because someone in power believes her body belongs to the state.

00:28:58.220 Every time the law treats pregnancy as a moral test

00:29:01.060 rather than a medical condition.

00:29:03.180 Every time women's knowledge, instinct, pain, expertise, tradition 1.00

00:29:07.280 is treated as inferior to institutional authority. 0.94

00:29:11.840 Federici calls the witch the figure of female autonomy that had to be destroyed, 0.99

00:29:16.380 and she argues that female autonomy is still being destroyed, 0.81

00:29:19.980 slowly, bureaucratically, legally, to keep a deeply unequal system running. 1.00

00:29:25.220 The witch is a threat because she is able to choose, 0.87

00:29:28.060 because she knows, because she doesn't apologize, and she doesn't obey. 1.00

00:29:32.260 This is why the witch has become a feminist icon, 1.00

00:29:34.660 not because of broomsticks or crystals, 1.00

00:29:36.920 but because she represents everything society still punishes women for being, 1.00

00:29:40.840 independent, unruly, wise, and unwilling to be controlled. 1.00

00:29:45.420 So while we don't burn witches anymore, we make their lives smaller, we limit their choices,

00:29:51.480 we legislate their bodies, we doubt their voices, we erase their histories,

00:29:55.820 but the witch survives. The witch was never the problem.

00:30:00.120 Thank you for tuning in to Bitchy History. 1.00

00:30:01.960 As we step away from the bonfires of the witch hunts, it's worth noticing what happens next. 1.00

00:30:07.000 Once societies finish terrorizing women who know too much,

00:30:10.100 they turned their energy towards stopping girls from ever becoming those women in the first place. 0.86

00:30:15.520 The witch was the cautionary tale. Girlhood became the prevention strategy. 0.99

00:30:20.320 In the next episode, we're going to follow that thread forward into the 20th century, 0.95

00:30:24.980 where we'll look at the absolute terror that is engendered by girls being taught that they are full human beings, 1.00

00:30:32.200 using the Girl Scouts as our case study in how America absolutely loses its fucking mind 0.99

00:30:37.260 when 12-year-olds start learning leadership, citizenship, and global awareness, 0.99

00:30:41.680 at least when they're girls. 0.96

00:30:43.200 We'll look at why a movement built on campfires, service projects, and cookie sales 0.73

00:30:47.280 has spent over a century being treated as a political threat, 0.99

00:30:51.280 and what that reveals about a culture that still sees empowered girls 1.00

00:30:54.960 as more dangerous than the systems that contain them. 1.00

00:31:00.940 That's it for this episode of Bitchy History. 0.97

00:31:03.240 If you enjoyed the show, don't keep it to yourself.

00:31:05.540 Subscribe, review, and share it with someone who loves history as much as we do.

00:31:10.040 Until next time, stay curious and keep questioning the world around you.

Bitchy History - November 30, 2025

A Brief History of Setting Women on Fire

Episode Stats

Transcript