Home

To be a woman is to exist in a world that wasn’t designed for you. Like being queer, it’s to exist in a world that has spent decades, millennia, trying to erase you from the face of it, and to get up every day despite that.

It’s to be all of the things that men tell you that you shouldn’t be, sensual, sexual beings, not merely objects of a man’s desire.

It’s to be successful, not despite you being a woman but precisely because you are a woman, with a body that is capable of creating lives, a mind that is capable of changing lives, and a heart that is someone’s reason to stay alive…

I have just finished reading ‘Bright I Burn’, a novel of gripping historical fiction by Molly Aitken, and despite knowing how women have historically been treated owing to the patriarchy I, perhaps naively, wasn’t aware of the full extent of the treatment that women had to endure, particularly surrounding the witch trials in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Aitken, however, shines a light on this, giving a voice to Alice Kyteler, the first recorded person to be accused of witchcraft in Ireland.

Dame Alice Kyteler was born in County Kilkenny, a ‘town built upon the church’, where religion held a stronger power over its people than anything else, in 1280. The only child of wealthy parents, her father, Jose de Kyteler was a banker, a career path that Alice herself would embark upon along with her first husband, merchant and moneylender, William Outlaw, whom she wed in 1299.

Three years after their marriage, William Outlaw died suddenly under mysterious circumstances, and so Alice remarried Adam le Blund of Callan who was also a moneylender. Like an unfortunate bout of Deja Vu, eight years after her first marriage, le Blund also died, leaving Alice a widow once again. But not for long. In 1311, Alice met landowner Richard de Valle who became husband number three.

Upon meeting his death in 1316, he left his entire estate to Alice, thus making her one of the wealthiest people in Kilkenny. Only the church was wealthier, in fact. Widowed once again and still only in her forties, Alice soon married her fourth (and final, as far as records show) husband, Sir John le Poer.

It was when John le Poer was on his deathbed that Alice was accused of witchcraft.

As le Poer lay dying, his children, along with the remaining children from her husband’s previous marriages, banded together to make the accusation of witchcraft against Alice, perhaps in an attempt to recover their fathers’ fortunes which they believed Alice had wrongly stolen from them.

Her stepchildren, joined by the local bishop of Ossory, alleged that Alice had murdered her husbands and had acquired her wealth through magic. She and a band of “devil-worshipping” co-accused were persecuted, but in 1325, Alice managed to escape. There is no record of her following this.

Despite Alice managing to get away, (it is believed that she fled to England), her maid, Petronella de Meath, wasn’t so lucky (there has to be someone to be made an example of), and she became the first Irish victim of the witch hunts. She was tortured and whipped in place of Alice before being burned at the stake in front of a crowd who relished the opportunity to watch the fall (or rather, the shove) of a successful woman.

This is just the story of one place, Kilkenny, and a few of its inhabitants who were accused of witchcraft. But when for almost four hundred years tens of thousands of people in Europe and North America were executed for witchcraft, and witch hunts still exist today in some regions, there are countless stories just like Alice’s that highlight how people are willing to do anything to discredit a successful woman.

Alice Kyteler broke boundaries when it came to gender norms. A successful businesswoman, she wasn’t just a ‘nepo’ baby living off her father’s wealth.

In 1299, shortly after the birth of her son with William Outlaw, William Junior, Alice expanded her house and founded Kytelers Inn, something that was unheard of in the male-dominated world of business (or rather, in the male-dominated world full stop)…

Alice wasn’t a ‘witch’, she was a woman in power. And when this is a man’s greatest fear, ‘stay in line, woman’, there was only one solution: she had to go.

As Robert Bowes said in writing about the witch trials taking place in 1597, the accused were ‘not only of the meanest sort but also of the best’ (Calendar of State Papers relating to Scotland and Mary Queen of Scots, volume 13, Sept 5, 1597). This is a statement that is supported by official statistics.

According to research conducted at the University of Edinburgh’s Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, where social background was recorded, 70% of witches came from middle or upper-class backgrounds.

If witchcraft were real, if it were based on anything legitimate, then what explanation is there for old women being persecuted by their neighbours for no reason other than that they ‘weren’t very attractive.’

Why are women always society’s scapegoats?

In 1643, Agnes Finnie, a shopkeeper and money lender in Edinburgh, was accused of having witched several people who became ill after she argued with them. Agnes was found guilty of witchcraft and executed in March 1645.

Why can men argue and they’re ‘strong-willed’, yet when a woman does what a man is celebrated for doing, she is struck down, or in the case of Agnes Finnie, killed?…

What men are overwhelmingly celebrated for being, women are struck down for. They’re not ‘strong-willed’ like men, they’re ‘bossy’, and ‘brash.’ They think they’re ‘it.’

Although it’s true that men were accused of witchcraft too (between 20–25% of those accused were men, they were mostly charged in connection to female witches, ‘guilt by association’ (e.g. the husbands or brothers of the accused), or because they defended a woman accused of witchcraft.

This doesn’t come as a shock, and while it should, (such blatant oppression and misogyny should be shocking to everyone), when it’s so commonplace it’s become ‘just one of those things.’ What is shocking, however, is that the majority of the accusers of witchcraft, i.e. the people making accusations against women, were also women…

Women against women, this is a commonality that we still see happening today, unfortunately. Why? Because it works in men’s favour to pit us against each other since when we are arguing amongst ourselves for a place at the table, we turn a blind eye to the real injustices/the real source of our oppression- men.

By making us compete with each other, whether it be based on the way we look or our job roles, we lack the energy or the headspace to do anything about what really needs changing in our society… What can only be described as systematic misogyny.

It’s where the ‘I’m not like other girls’ trope comes from because God Forbid a woman is like a woman…

‘Too female.’

No woman is a ‘witch’, but every woman is the casualty of a society created and controlled by power-hungry men…

There’s a reason why God is portrayed to be a man, and it’s because of religion’s purpose… To control and oppress. Having been founded based on the need to control society, it was always going to be men controlling women.

Girls are born with the awareness that it is their ‘privilege’ as the lesser sex to have no privilege.

From what they wear on their feet to what name graces their birth certificate, many women find themselves on the receiving end of condescending remarks, time and time again, by misogynistic men who try to discredit their right to be there…

‘There must have been a mistake.’

Because of the cards that they are dealt at birth, the innocence of lost youth brings with it a starkness that no girl can escape, try as she might, when whatever she does in life/ however hard she works she is almost always guaranteed to be several steps behind her male counterparts, the ‘superior’ sex.

With reduced life experiences and a reduced lifespan, even, based entirely on what is contained between their legs, girls are poised to fly but destined to fall, the patriarchy underpinning their whole existence.

Getting sent home from school for wearing ‘inappropriate’ clothing (See also: skirts that sit above the knee), girls have been treated like they are just a body and not anything or anybody for generations, a theme that unfortunately persists throughout most women’s lives.

Walking down the street, keys sandwiched between knuckles ‘just in case’, necks straining over shoulders with every step, a woman never knows when (or how, or why) a man will strike…

Will it be at eighteen when you’re leaving a nightclub on the arm of a man who promised your mum that he’d get you home safe?

(He did, this time. One of the good ‘uns).

Will it be at nineteen when you’re walking home from college and a man pulls up alongside you and asks you if you want a ride? It’s only 5 pm but the clocks went back last week so it’s dark already. You say no because you’ve never seen this man before in your life, and you might be nineteen now but you still remember what your mother used to say, and your mother’s mother, and your mother’s mother’s mother.

Will it be at twenty?

Twenty-one?

Will it be today?

Will today be the day that they all stand at your graveside asking why…couldn’t she have just…covered up?…

The question that persists in my mind, however, is:

Why is it always the responsibility of girls to resolve the responsibility of men?

Baby tries to take what’s not theirs = Bad baby. Baby punished.
Learn. Do better. Try again.

Man tries to take what’s not his = ‘Here, let me help you with the rest.’
Uphold. The system. Of the patriarchy.
(& repeat)

Virginity has, throughout history, been hailed as the ‘be-all and end-all.’ Something sacred, it is the ultimate decider of a woman’s worth, with marriage itself, what should be a celebration of love, having its origins in the continued oppression of women via the patriarchy.

From fathers giving their daughters away to waiting husbands, as though all a woman can ever be is a man’s property, to mothers and older sisters giving warnings because they know what is coming, ‘make sure you save yourself for ‘the one’, when a woman’s virginity is taken, so too is her respect.

‘You’re so promiscuous.’

To the moralist, prostitution does not consist so much in the fact that the woman sells her body, but rather that she sells it out of wedlock.
– Emma Goldman

When women are told that to be a virgin is to be pure and innocent (everything a man wants), yet women are also told that to be unwed is to be unwanted, what greater proof is there of the prevalence of the patriarchy than this?

Being told that they should remain virgins in one breath, and then being asked when they’re going to settle down and have children in the next, the contradictions are stark.

When to take means to have means to own a part of her forever, men relish the idea of ‘taking’ a woman’s virginity.

Primal, medieval, making our lives political, a woman who has ‘lost’* her virginity is a slag, a slut, a whore, she is told, unless she has lost it to you. Unless you are the one who gets to control and subjugate her, she is worthless.

*(Note: I write lost in inverted commas because virginity is not something that can be lost since it is not a physical thing. What it is, in fact, is merely a social construct designed to uphold the patriarchy).

(Notice how you never hear men being asked if they’re virgins, it’s always women)…

Dear Men: Pleaser stop slut shaming women for doing the same things that you smack each other on the back and shake hands with each other about.

Conflating sexuality with morality, why are promiscuous men seen as ‘lads’, something to be celebrated, while promiscuous women are seen as ‘sluts’, something to be shamed?

Why does the shame always lie with women?

When a baby is crying on public transport, the mum is given looks- headshakes and tuts of dismay, while the dad is given looks of sympathy. Why are women expected to carry the load of the family’s emotional wellbeing?

Who gives the therapist therapy?

Who is going to mother the mother?

When girls are sent home from school because their skirts are too short and it’s too much of a ‘temptation’ for the boys. Girls shouldn’t be taught not to wear certain items of clothing to school, boys should be taught not to rape.

Alas, turning women into property for men to invade, bailiffs coming to evict them from their own homes, the concept (construct) of virginity is all about control. It’s all about policing and gatekeeping women’s bodies.

It’s all a lie.

‘If Eve ate that apple, then why do men have Adam’s apple still stuck in their lyin ass throats?’

The fact is that it is impossible for a woman to remain a virgin when she has ‘wife’ and ‘mother’ sewn into her seams as a marker of her identity from the day she is born… When she is nameless, faceless, shameless if she doesn’t have a ring on her finger and a baby in her arms…

Wanting everything all ways, always, like throwing a baby’s dummy in the bin and then screaming at them when they start crying because of your actions, men want to take what they deem to be a woman’s ‘innocence’, and then berate, degrade, and humiliate them when they are no longer, in their eyes, ‘pure.’

This is why lesbians are, in one instance demonised by men, and in the next, sexualised, because men only accept a woman’s sexuality when it is on their terms…

‘A woman is only sexually active if a cis man and his penis are involved.’

This, of course, discredits anyone who isn’t in a heterosexual relationship, because God forbid a relationship that has, not only no man in it, but also no man observing it. 

What a (beautiful) concept.

And where penis in vagina sex is involved, sex finishes when the man finishes, because only his orgasm matters…

Despite less than 20% of women reaching orgasm from penetration alone, penetrative sex has long been considered to be the only sex that is ‘real’, with everything else denoting ‘foreplay.’ This emphasis on male pleasure is very telling in how women are viewed in society: unequal.

It doesn’t help the matter either when in schools, sex education is almost entirely focused on male pleasure.

What will it take to get men and women to be viewed as equal? To have sex education spend less time demonstrating how to put a condom on a banana and more time focusing on female pleasure.

In order to make progress going forward then, first, we must go backward. We must look at the systems that contribute to the patriarchy and hold the institutions that feed into the rhetoric that male pleasure always comes before female pleasure accountable.

We must destroy the harmful narrative that women exist to appease and satiate men’s desires once and for all. Only then will women be free.