{"id":5637,"date":"2019-10-31T22:01:47","date_gmt":"2019-10-31T22:01:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/?p=5637"},"modified":"2019-10-31T22:01:52","modified_gmt":"2019-10-31T22:01:52","slug":"how-many-witches-were-men","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/?p=5637","title":{"rendered":"How Many ‘Witches’ Were Men?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Today it is Samhaim, I spotted an off-the-cuff remark on Twitter about women being executed for ‘witchcraft’ in the past, and I also knew that many men were executed for ‘witchcraft’ in the past, so I decided to see if I could get some half-reasonably accurate data on the genders of executed witches.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I got rather rough lists of names from both Wikipedia<\/a> and here<\/a>. Processing the two lists was not fun :-<\/p>\n\n\n\n

  1. First I removed duplicates where possible.<\/li>
  2. I flagged as M(ale) all the names that were obviously (to me) male. Or where there were other clues (“husband”).<\/li>
  3. I flagged as F(email) all names that were obviously women, those where there was some doubt, and those where there was a hint (“daughter”).<\/li>
  4. I flagged as F(emale) all surname-only names.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    This quite possibly over-estimates the number of women executed for witchcraft, and is nowhere near accurate (a list of 477 names out of tens of thousands is a hopelessly small sample).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Out of that list of names, 384 were women (approximately 75%) and 113 were men (approximately 25%). This is nowhere near equal, but neither were male executions so rare that you can honestly say “women were executed for witchcraft”; it has to be “women and men were executed for witchcraft” (or some variation of that).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Having said that, it would be nice to see some proper historical statistical work done to see if a more accurate ratio could be determined.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \"\"
    The Red Door<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Today it is Samhaim, I spotted an off-the-cuff remark on Twitter about women being executed for ‘witchcraft’ in the past, and I also knew that many men were executed for ‘witchcraft’ in the past, so I decided to see if I could get some half-reasonably accurate data on the genders of executed witches. I got […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[7,6],"tags":[39,1898,1897,1900,1899],"class_list":["post-5637","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-history","tag-execution","tag-halloween","tag-samhaim","tag-witchcraft","tag-witches","category-7-id","category-6-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1f2KI-1sV","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5637","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5637"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5637\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5638,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5637\/revisions\/5638"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5637"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5637"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}