Katsuro
asked:
Is it just me, or does it seem like Amanda Lovelace doesn't actually know much about the Salem trials? She mentions them in the poem at page 129, and, well, it's like she doesn't know that 30% of the people executed at Salem were men and the people who started it all were women. What I'm getting at is, doesn't this feel sorta like either history revisionism or guesswork on her part?
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The Witch Doesn't Burn in This One,
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TJL
Never mind executions- lots of people just straight up died or languished in prison for months, men and women alike.
As someone who's studied the Salem Witch Trials for a long time, it is SUPER common for people with a feminist bias to downplay female responsibility for the trials. The girls who made the accusations get made into poor little victims of societal sexism, ironically removing their autonomy and responsibility as people. Any shady behavior is brushed to the side for the 'the accuser girls are innocent victims' narrative.
Like Ari said, it's not a mistake that the first accused women were black, mentally ill, and not simply inherited property, but was considered "loose" because she'd had multiple husbands had been accused of witchcraft before.
Funny how all three women were "safe" targets for young girls to accuse, isn't it? Funny how the girls didn't start accusing "proper" and "respectable" women until they'd already gained some power?
As someone who's studied the Salem Witch Trials for a long time, it is SUPER common for people with a feminist bias to downplay female responsibility for the trials. The girls who made the accusations get made into poor little victims of societal sexism, ironically removing their autonomy and responsibility as people. Any shady behavior is brushed to the side for the 'the accuser girls are innocent victims' narrative.
Like Ari said, it's not a mistake that the first accused women were black, mentally ill, and not simply inherited property, but was considered "loose" because she'd had multiple husbands had been accused of witchcraft before.
Funny how all three women were "safe" targets for young girls to accuse, isn't it? Funny how the girls didn't start accusing "proper" and "respectable" women until they'd already gained some power?
Ari
She sees what she wants to see through misandry-colored glasses. She takes the parts of reality that fit her transmedicalist radical feminist worldview and warps the rest. You're absolutely right. Although I will say it was no coincidence the first victims of the Trials were a mentally ill girl, a woman who inherited property, and a Black woman.
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