Thanks that cleared it all up for me :rolleyes:

moving right along....

Agree with the bunny rabbit. This place has been awfully slow lately. That's one reason I wander off from time to time and stop checking in here. Then when I return, it never fails that the Politics Forum lures me to doom, and I find myself up on a soap box ranting about pleasantly plump cats.

Plus, I need to be doing about a thousand other things than posting on Internet forums. Plus, I miss Bruce - and Cicero. It's all the same old, same old. Maybe the summer doldrums are just getting to me.

A good troll might be entertaining. I vote for tw to assume the persona. Or maybe we just all need to have a Cellar Meet at a nice beach somewhere. Road trip, everyone!

He did that years ago....;)

Let the old women who start the flame wars fight the flame wars.

While I understand how this could be your impression...I reject it as a general assumption about old women.

I wrote an entire paper on how the only decent people in all of Willie's MacBeth were the three crones. They worked together, they encouraged each other, they wished each other well in their endevours. They co-operated! They were like lovely socialists! *witch smilie here*

Nice argument Bri.

said the lovely socialist witch.

;)

In my lexicon, being called a witch is a good thing!

I name anyone (i.e. she/he/it) who starts a flame war an old woman.

Oh.

Sorry, then.

Sexobon bon bon bon sexo bon.

I seriously hear that in my head when I read your name. It has a distinct tune and beat. :)

Well, most 'witches' were just female practitioners of medicine, midwives, inconvenient neighbours, or handy blamehounds for whatever blight was affecting crops or livestock.

Each step towards medicine becoming a respectable (rather than arcane) male calling, and each step towards it becoming science, shoved women further away from it. Since they were precluded by their feminity from acquiring formal 'skill' they weren't able to follow the medical world as it emerged and tromped off into the scientific dawn. So they remained on the edges. They were the ones who helped poor women give birth, or knew the remedies for childhood sickness.

As the skilled world of the physician began to encroach on the women's world, they were pushed further away, and we start to get a slew of very negative images of 'crones' and old women and witches.

The movement of a 'task' to a 'skilled' trade is quite often a masculinising process. There's a brilliant study I read, ages ago, that tracks the changes in brewing, from a ubiquitous female task in the early medieval era, to an all-male skilled trade in the early modern era. From 'brewsters' to 'brewers'. Fascinating stuff.

I'm learning stuff today!

Punky brewsters. :lol:

DanaC turned me into a NEWT!

You got better.

I've mentioned before the origins of the word 'gossip', which is always used as a negative term and usually referencing female social conversation? It's derived from the term 'God's siblings', or 'God's sibs'.

They were the mothers, sisters, midwives and village women who gathered at a house when a woman was giving birth.