Category: Herstory

A map that tracks more than 3,000 Scots women who were accused of being witches in the 16th and 17th Century has been published for the first time.

“The tragedy is that Scotland had five times the number of executions of women. The idea of being able to plot these on a map really brings it home. These places are near everyone.

“There does seem to be a growing movement that we need to be remembering these women, remembering what happened and understanding what happened.”

Source: Map of Scots women accused of witchcraft published for first time | Edinburgh News

The queen, who was deposed by a coup led by American sugar planters, died 100 years ago, but is by no means forgotten.

In January 1893, a coup led by Sanford Dole took over the Hawaiian government and pressed the U.S. government to annex the islands. Two years later, after a failed insurrection by Liliuokalani’s supporters to return power to Hawaiian royal rule, she was charged with treason and put under house arrest. In a statement, in exchange for a pardon for her and her supporters, she “yield[ed] to the superior force of the United States of America” under protest, pointing out that John L. Stevens, U.S. Minister to Hawaii, who supported the provisional government, had already “caused United States troops to be landed at Honolulu.” She continued:

“Now, to avoid any collision of armed forces and perhaps loss of life, I do, under this protest, and impelled by said forces, yield my authority until such time as the Government of the United States shall, upon the facts being presented to it, undo the action of its representative and reinstate me in the authority which I claim as the constitutional sovereign of the Hawaiian Islands.”

In exile, Liliuokalani advocated for a free Hawaii until her death in 1917 at the age of 79.

Source: Five Things To Know About Liliuokalani, the Last Queen of Hawaii | Smart News | Smithsonian

The women who created the first fairytales were far more radical than the Brothers Grimm have led us to believe.

Performed and recited in literary salons, from 1697 the fairytales of D’Aulnoy, Comtesse Henriette-Julie de Murat, Mademoiselle L’Héritier and Madame Charlotte-Rose de la Force were gathered into collections and published.

D’Aulnoy and her peers used exaggeration, parody and references to other stories to unsettle the customs and conventions that constrained women’s freedom and agency.

The conteuses created the archetypes of our classic fairytale heroines: Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Rapunzel. They were bestselling writers in their day, their popularity continuing into the 18th century, circulated throughout all levels of society by publication in the Bibliothèque Bleue, a series of cheaply printed and readily affordable chapbooks.

In the 19th century, when the Brothers Grimm began their project of collecting and publishing folktales, they dismissed the conteuses as inauthentic, as not representative of the voices of the common volk. But the Grimms’ theory that fairytales had a linear relationship to folktales has been exposed by scholars as a nationalist – and masculinist, as the teller was usually an illiterate female – bias. A furphy.

Source: The first fairytales were feminist critiques of patriarchy. We need to revive their legacy | Melissa Ashley | Books | The Guardian