Witch Hunts, Feminist History and Power of Language

There is an old saying which says ‘the early bird catches the worm’, and it’s an ironic statement that this is true in the power of language.  It works like a pyramid effect with an ever increasing vocabulary being based on a pre-existing vocabulary and, grammar.  It’s this language that has a strong influence on the way that we think and, behave and linguist have been discovering this in observations of how differing languages affect our opinion.  It’s fair to say that we therefore see much of the power in society actually belonging to our forefathers of language with

much of this belonging to era’s where we have little knowledge of it’s morality.  This interests me as we have this modern debate of who influences power with this being most illustrative between males and females, but we also see it in relation to mental states.  If we look back at history at the balance of power between males and females, it’s easy to see the correlation between the period in the middle ages where early writing took place after Chaucer and, the emergence of ‘witch hunts’.  These ‘witch hunts’, specifically targeted freethinking women of that period, and this cut of the influence throughout history of female intellectuals.  Instead we had fabled stories of freethinking females being something to be scared of, and free thinking women were to be avoided which meant females were never a source of inspiration.  This trickles into the modern era where a feminist is slightly scary for some men, and sports headlines and, politics is male dominated all in the places where we look for inspiration.  However those freethinkers still existed, and we need to discover who those freethinkers were to redress balance of power in modern society.

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This post was written by colin