Bitchy History

This isn’t the story you were told about girlhood in the 1950s.

It’s the story about the girls who disappeared.

In postwar America, Britain, and Ireland, “good girl” culture wasn’t just a moral vibe. It was infrastructure. If you got pregnant, you vanished. If you reported harm, you risked social death. If you disrupted the script, institutions activated.

Between 1945 and 1973, more than 1.5 million American women surrendered babies for adoption. In England and Wales, approximately 185,000 children were adopted from unmarried mothers between 1949 and 1976. In Ireland, tens of thousands of women and children passed through mother-and-baby homes, some of which later became the subject of national investigations and redress schemes.

These weren’t isolated tragedies.

They were choreographed.

Resources and Recommended Reading

* Ann Fessler, The Girls Who Went Away

Oral histories of women who surrendered children during the Baby Scoop Era.

* Clair Wills, Missing Person: Or, My Grandmother’s Secrets

Intergenerational reckoning with Irish mother-and-baby homes and institutional silence.

* Detroit News (2006) – “Author gives a voice to unwed mothers who suffered in silence”

(Marney Rich Keenan)

* Christian Science Monitor (2006) – “Mothers only in secret”

(Marjorie Kehe)

* Chicago Tribune (2006) – “Delivering up their babies”

(Maureen N. McLane)

Official Reports & Inquiries

* UK Parliament – Joint Committee on Human Rights

* Irish Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes (2020 Final Report)

* Ryan Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (Ireland)

* Magdalene Laundries Report (2013)

* Title IX Pregnancy Regulations (45 C.F.R. § 86.40, 1975)

Historical & Academic Context

* Rickie Solinger, Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race before Roe v. Wade

* Barbara Melosh, Strangers and Kin: The American Way of Adoption

* Rebecca Sharpless, Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices

* Research on adultification bias: Georgetown Law Center on Poverty & Inequality

Modern Reporting & Institutional Echoes

* CNN Health (2024) – Investigation into maternity homes

* Ms. Magazine (2025) – Liberty University maternity home reporting

* CBC News – No apology for unwed mothers (Canada)

Marriage is sold to women as safety.

Not just emotional safety. Structural safety. Safety from poverty. Safety from suspicion. Safety from being treated like a free-floating problem in a world that prefers women attached to something male and respectable.

But historically? Marriage wasn’t just romance.

It was paperwork.

In this episode of Bitchy History, we break down the legal architecture underneath “happily ever after” and ask a simple question:

If marriage is voluntary… why has leaving it been so dangerous?

We cover:

* Coverture and the legal disappearance of married women under English common law

* Why Roman and Spanish law handled marriage differently

* Parliamentary divorces that required Acts of Parliament

* American divorce scandals and “divorce tourism”

* Custody law as leverage

* Why no-fault divorce changed bargaining power inside marriage

* And why modern political movements are suddenly very concerned about “family stability”

Because divorce wasn’t controversial because it undermined love.

It was controversial because it undermined control.

From Blackstone to no-fault reform to today’s policy debates, this episode traces how marriage became a governance tool, how it shaped women’s citizenship, property rights, and parental authority—and why every time exit becomes easier, backlash follows.

The cage is beautiful.

The door is conditional.

And when the door opens even a crack, tradition gets loud.

Sources

Core Legal & Historical Foundations

* William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–69)

Primary articulation of coverture doctrine in English common law.

* Nancy F. Cott, “Marriage and Women’s Citizenship in the United States, 1830–1934” (1998) Essential for understanding marriage as a civic and political status.

* Chester G. Vernier, American Family Laws (early 20th c.)

Foundational compilation of U.S. marriage and divorce statutes.

* Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law

Context for how divorce law evolved administratively.

* Mary Lyndon Shanley, Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England

* Rebecca Probert, Marriage Law and Practice in the Long Eighteenth Century

* Roderick Phillips, Putting Asunder: A History of Divorce in Western Society

Case Studies Mentioned

* Jane Addison (1801 parliamentary divorce)

* Forrest v. Forrest (1852)

* Clarissa Wren litigation

* Williams v. North Carolina (1942)

* Alva Vanderbilt divorce (1895)

* Divorce colony phenomenon (South Dakota, Nevada)

Recommended Reading

Start Here

* Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage (2005) Accessible, sweeping global history of how marriage shifted from economic contract to romantic ideal.

* Roderick Phillips, Putting Asunder: A History of Divorce in Western Society Comprehensive history of divorce law and practice from antiquity through the modern West.

* Nancy F. Cott, “Marriage and Women’s Citizenship in the United States, 1830–1934” (1998), The American Historical Review Essential article on how marriage shaped women’s political and civic identity in the U.S.

Academic Deep Dive

* Mary Lyndon Shanley, Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England (1989) Foundational work on how marriage reform, feminism, and legal identity collided in 19th-century Britain.

* Hendrik Hartog, Man and Wife in America: A History (2000) Deep dive into marriage as lived legal experience in the United States, including coverture, divorce, and everyday disputes.

* Scott Coltrane, “The Social Construction of the Divorce ‘Problem’” (2003), Family Relations Examines how divorce becomes framed as moral crisis rather than structural phenomenon.

This week on the podcast, I’m joined by Dr. Gigi Berardi — professor, journalist, and now historical novelist — to talk about her forthcoming book Bianca’s Cure, a Renaissance-set novel about women’s knowledge, early science, and what happens when a woman refuses to stay in the role history assigns her.

The conversation fits perfectly with the arc we recently wrapped up on the podcast, which has focused on how women across history are punished for stepping out of line.

Why Bianca Capello?

Berardi’s entry point into the story begins not in an archive, but in Florence itself — with a local legend about an open window that must never be closed, or else a woman’s scream will echo through the piazza. That woman is often said to be Bianca Capello, a 16th-century Venetian noblewoman turned Medici consort.

Historically, Bianca is remembered as a scandal. The record of her inner life, her work, and her intellect is thin. Her death is suspicious. Her remains were never conclusively identified.

Bianca’s Cure asks the obvious question history never bothered to: what if she was more than the story told about her?

Science, Alchemy, and Who Gets Taken Seriously

One of the most interesting parts of the interview is Berardi’s discussion of Renaissance science. Alchemy, chemistry, medicine, and the occult weren’t separate worlds — they overlapped constantly. The difference wasn’t what knowledge was being produced, but who was producing it.

In the novel, Bianca is deeply engaged with experimentation, herbal medicine, and systematic observation. Her work is serious. Her methods are deliberate. And that, more than anything, makes her dangerous.

As Berardi notes, the road women in science travel today isn’t fundamentally different from the one Bianca navigates five centuries earlier.

“She’s Not Nice” — and That’s the Point

One thing that’s already coming up in reader reactions is discomfort with Bianca herself. She’s ambitious. She’s focused. She doesn’t soften herself for the people around her.

Some readers don’t like that.

Berardi is clear about why she leaned into this: “nice” has long been a way to discipline women’s ambition. Bianca’s Cure pushes back on the idea that female characters need to be likable in order to be worthy of attention.

About the Book

Bianca’s Cure

Out February 10

Published by She Writes Press, distributed by Simon & Schuster

The book is available through major retailers and many independent bookstores. If your local shop doesn’t have it in stock, they can usually order it.

Here at Bitchy History we love a good independent bookstore, but we recognize book deserts exist, so the big retailers are fine too if it’s all you’ve got.

Where to Find Gigi Berardi

Gigi Berardi can be found through her professional website, where she’s launching a blog focused on science, history, and storytelling. You can also download the first two chapters of Bianca’s Cure by subscribing there. Links are in the show notes.

Listen to the Episode

In the full episode, we talk about:

* Writing historical fiction with thin archives

* Women’s erased contributions to science

* Alchemy, malaria, and Renaissance medicine

* Why being “nice” is not the same as being good

The Victorian “Angel in the House” was supposed to be gentle, pure, domestic, and self-sacrificing. She was praised endlessly for her virtue, placed on a pedestal, and told she was the moral center of the family and the nation.

She was also legally erased by marriage, economically dependent, sexually policed, medically controlled, and blamed for everyone else’s bad behavior.

In this episode of Bitchy History, we rip the lace off the Cult of Domesticity and examine how it functioned as a full-blown system of social control. We trace how “separate spheres” ideology assigned women responsibility without authority, how magazines and advice manuals sold unpaid labor as fulfillment, and how class, race, and empire determined who was allowed to be an “angel” in the first place.

We look at how Victorian law turned marriage into legal disappearance, how “protective” policies restricted women’s work, and how medicine pathologized female resistance through diagnoses like hysteria. Along the way, we meet women who refused to play the role quietly—from Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman, to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, to Nora slamming the door in A Doll’s House.

Because the Angel in the House was never a compliment.

She was a leash made of lace.

And her ghost is still very much with us.

Resources and Additional Reading

* The Angel in the House – Coventry Patmore

The poem that gave the ideal its most famous name, and helped romanticize female self-erasure as virtue.

* Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman – Mary Wollstonecraft

A pre-Victorian indictment of marriage, coercion, and the use of asylums to silence women who resist male authority.

* The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman

A chilling critique of medical paternalism, the “rest cure,” and the psychological violence of enforced domesticity.

* A Doll’s House – Henrik Ibsen

The play that detonated Victorian respectability by letting a wife choose herself over the domestic shrine.

* The Importance of Being Earnest – Oscar Wilde

A sharp satire of marriage, respectability, and moral branding in late Victorian society.

* Woman in the Nineteenth Century – Margaret Fuller

Early feminist critique of women’s intellectual and social confinement.

* Beeton’s Book of Household Management – Isabella Beeton

A cornerstone of domestic instruction that framed housekeeping as women’s moral duty.

* Godey’s Lady’s Book

The most influential women’s magazine of the era, promoting domesticity, fashion, and “true womanhood.”

* Muller v. Oregon

Landmark case using maternal and biological arguments to limit women’s labor rights “for the good of all.”

* Marriage and Women’s Property – Lee Holcombe

A clear overview of coverture and the slow dismantling of women’s legal erasure.

* The Female Malady – Elaine Showalter

Essential feminist analysis of hysteria, asylums, and gendered psychiatry.

* Hysteria: The Biography – Andrew Scull

Explores hysteria as both medical diagnosis and cultural narrative.

* The Cult of True Womanhood – Barbara Welter

The foundational framework for understanding domestic virtue as ideology.

People love to say “chivalry is dead.”

In this episode, we pull apart what “chivalry” actually is—and why it keeps coming back every time gender roles get uncomfortable. Because chivalry was never just about manners. It was a system. A story that turned hierarchy into romance, control into care, and women’s safety into something conditional.

We start in the present, where “chivalry is dead” gets used to complain about modern dating, workplace dynamics, and public etiquette. Then we go back to the medieval world where chivalry was invented—not as a spontaneous outbreak of honor, but as a branding strategy for a violent elite. Knights weren’t made respectable by kindness. They were made respectable by stories.

Those stories mattered. They taught men how to perform virtue and taught women how to embody honor. Women were elevated, praised, “served”—and turned into symbols that carried male reputation. And once honor lives in women’s bodies, women’s behavior becomes something to police.

From courtly love and tournaments to guardianship law and legal standing, this episode traces how “protection” worked in practice. Not as freedom, but as supervision. Not as safety, but as management. We look at medieval legal structures where women couldn’t even bring criminal complaints in their own name—and why that logic still echoes today.

Because once protection is something men give women, it can also be taken away.

Welcome to Arc Three: Pretty Cages—where admiration builds the bars, and the cage looks like love.

Resources & Additional Reading

Medieval Chivalry, Law, and Gender

* Nigel Saul, Chivalry in Medieval England

A foundational study of chivalry as a cultural system shaped by aristocratic performance, ritual, and power—not just battlefield behavior.

* Geoffroi de Charny, Livre de Chevalerie

A primary text outlining knightly ideals, emphasizing prowess, honor, and disciplined violence.

* Ramon Llull, Libre del ordre de cavalleria

A didactic work defining what knighthood should be, illustrating how chivalry was constructed and taught.

* Anonymous, Ordene de chevalerie

A romance that dramatizes chivalric ritual and ideology through instruction and performance.

* Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi, History of the Italian Republics

A classic critique warning against confusing romantic chivalry with the brutal realities of feudal life.

* David Herlihy, Women, Family, and Society in Medieval Europe

Essential for understanding women’s roles in households, property transmission, and family structure—and the limits of their autonomy.

Medieval Law & Guardianship

* Edict of Rothari (Lombard Law, 7th century)

A key legal text illustrating lifelong guardianship (mundium) and the absence of legal autonomy for free women.

* Oxford Academic entries on Lombard Law and mundium

Clear summaries of how “protection” functioned as permanent supervision in early medieval legal systems.

Modern Theory & Cultural Analysis

* Peter Glick & Susan Fiske, “Ambivalent Sexism”

Foundational research on hostile vs. benevolent sexism, including “protective paternalism.”

Film & Popular Media

* The Last Duel, dir. Ridley Scott

A dramatization of the 1386 rape trial of Marguerite de Carrouges, illustrating how women’s legal standing—and even survival—was mediated through male authority.

Matilda Joslyn Gage should be one of the most recognizable names in the history of American women’s rights. Instead, she’s often treated like an optional footnote.

In this arc finale, we take Gage seriously on her own terms: not just as a suffrage leader, but as a political thinker and historian who refused to make women’s freedom small or respectable. Gage didn’t want the vote as a polite reform. She wanted structural change — especially an end to the church–state logic that had justified women’s subordination for centuries.

This episode focuses on Gage’s work, including Woman, Church & State and Woman as Inventor, where she argues that women’s oppression is not natural but institutional, maintained through law, culture, and memory. Her most famous insight — reading “witches” as women — becomes a way to understand how societies label, punish, and erase women who step out of line.

We also look at how Gage was treated by her own movement as suffrage politics shifted toward respectability and religious alliances. Her punishment wasn’t dramatic expulsion, but something quieter: sidelining, distancing, and eventual omission.

Gage is the capstone of this arc not just because she fits the pattern, but because she explains it. She didn’t only challenge power — she taught us how to recognize it.

Resources & Recommended Reading

Primary sources by Matilda Joslyn Gage

* Matilda Joslyn Gage, Woman, Church & State (1893). Project Gutenberg edition.

* Matilda Joslyn Gage, “Woman as an Inventor” (1883). Originally published in The North American Review (Vol. 136).

* Matilda Joslyn Gage (with Stanton & Anthony), History of Woman Suffrage (Volumes I–III). She’s not just “in” this history, she helped make the archive that later minimized her.

Essential scholarship on Gage and her “erasure”

* Margaret W. Rossiter, “The Matthew/Matilda Effect in Science” (1993). Foundational piece naming the recognition bias that under-credits women and credits their work away; Rossiter explicitly names the phenomenon after Gage.

Gage as archivist and witness

* Peter Svenson (ed.), The “War Scrap Book” of Matilda Joslyn Gage: Witness to Rebellion (Lehigh University Press, 2018). Publisher page describing the scrapbook project and its framing of Gage as a historical witness.

When pundits complain that “identity politics is ruining everything,” they’re accidentally name-dropping a group of Black lesbian feminists in 1970s Boston.

This episode tells the history behind the buzzword: the Combahee River Collective. We follow their journey from the National Black Feminist Organization to forming their own Boston-based collective; their work on welfare, housing, reproductive injustice, and racist violence; the murders of Black women in Boston that pushed them to write; and the creation of the Combahee River Collective Statement in 1977.

We break down what they actually meant by “interlocking oppressions” and “identity politics,” how they called out white feminism, Black nationalism, and the straight left all at once, and why their insistence on showing up as whole people was so threatening. Then we trace the afterlives of their ideas in intersectionality, reproductive justice, and movements like Black Lives Matter and #SayHerName.

If you want the receipts for why Black feminist politics are not “extra” but foundational, this one’s for you.

Sources & recommended reading

* Combahee River Collective, “The Combahee River Collective Statement” (1977).

The foundational Black feminist manifesto that lays out interlocking oppressions and coins “identity politics.” Widely reprinted; easily accessible in PDF via multiple archives and as part of anthologies.

* Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, ed., How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective (Haymarket, 2017).

Includes the full Statement plus extended interviews with Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, Demita Frazier, Alicia Garza, and Barbara Ransby. Essential for the history of the Collective and how members understand their own legacy.

* Barbara Smith, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism”

A key essay where Smith argues for Black lesbian feminist literary criticism and explains how Black women’s writing has been ignored and misread. Originally in The Radical Teacher, and widely anthologized.

* Barbara Smith, The Truth That Never Hurts: Writings on Race, Gender, and Freedom (1998).

Includes “Doing It from Scratch: The Challenge of Black Lesbian Organizing,” which gives an insider’s account of organizing in and beyond Combahee.

* Alicia Garza, “A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement” (2014).

Short but crucial piece tracing Black Lives Matter’s origins and explicitly positioning it within Black feminist and queer-of-color traditions that descend from Combahee.

Black feminist thought & historical context

* Beverly Guy-Sheftall, ed., Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought (1995).

* Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (1990; 2nd ed. 2000).

* Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” (1989) and “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color” (1991).

In this episode, I start with a guy in my YouTube comments insisting I “teach feminism, not history” and then take him on a little field trip to 17th-century Boston. Quaker women like Margaret Fell and Mary Dyer weren’t marching under a “feminist” banner, but they were doing something genuinely explosive for their time: preaching, publishing, and claiming spiritual authority in public while female. We’ll look at the theology that made that possible, the Puritan panic that tried to shut it down, and the long afterlives of these “disorderly” women in everything from suffrage to modern church fights over women in the pulpit. If you’ve ever been told that bringing patriarchy into women’s history is “too political,” this one’s for you.

Sources & additional reading

On Quaker women, preaching, and authority

* Amanda E. Herbert, “Companions in Preaching and Suffering: Itinerant Female Quakers in the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World,” Early American Studies 9, no. 1 (2011).

* Mary Maples Dunn, “Saints and Sisters: Congregational and Quaker Women in the Early Colonial Period,” originally in American Quarterly 30, no. 5 (1978), reprinted in Women in American Religion, ed. Janet Wilson James.

* Jean R. Soderlund, “Women’s Authority in Pennsylvania and New Jersey Quaker Meetings, 1680–1760,” William and Mary Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1987).

* M. D. Speizman and Jane C. Kronick, “A Seventeenth-Century Quaker Women’s Declaration,” Signs 1, no. 1 (1975).

* Judith Rose, “Prophesying Daughters: Testimony, Censorship, and Literacy among Early Quaker Women,” Critical Survey 14, no. 1 (2002).

* Gerda Lerner, “Women’s Rights in American History” (1971) – classic essay on why you literally can’t do women’s history without talking about feminism and patriarchy.

On Margaret Fell, women’s preaching, and feminist theology

* Margaret Fell, Women’s Speaking Justified (1666). Modern-English editions and online annotated versions are widely available.

* Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (University of California Press, 1992).

On Mary Dyer, Boston, and the politics of memory

* Antonia Myles, “From Monster to Martyr: Re-Presenting Mary Dyer” (2001) – on how Dyer’s image shifts from dangerous heretic to safe Protestant heroine.

* Stella Setka, “A Picture of Piety: The Remaking of Mary Dyer as a True Woman in Arthur’s Home Magazine,” American Periodicals 24, no. 1 (2014).

Every few years, the Girl Scouts accidentally start a culture war.

You’d think an organization best known for cookies and camping would be safely boring. Instead, they keep ending up at the center of national freakouts: heavy metal lawsuits over Thin Mints, boycotts over “woke” cookies, outrage over letting trans girls join, hand-wringing because some troops show up at marches or dare to talk about things like civil rights and bodily autonomy.

On paper, it looks absurd. In practice, it tells us a lot about how terrified people are of girls with power.

A few threads we pull on

Without spoiling the whole thing, here’s the kind of territory we cover:

Girl Scouts as a quiet jailbreak

When Juliette Gordon Low started the Girl Scouts in 1912, she wasn’t waving a big political banner. She was doing something more subversive: telling girls they could be competent. They could learn skills, make decisions, and be useful outside the living room.

In a world that still largely treated girls as decorative future wives, even that was a problem.

When world friendship became suspicious

Fast-forward to the early Cold War: the Girl Scouts are teaching international friendship, letter-writing to girls abroad, learning about other cultures, normal “let’s be good humans” stuff.

Then the Red Scare hits, and suddenly:

* global awareness looks like treason,

* maps and folk songs get labeled “propaganda,” and

* someone publishes a rant asking if even the Girl Scouts have been infiltrated.

Politicians actually spent time worrying about whether girls’ badges were secretly preparing them for world government. Because obviously the real threat to the nation is twelve-year-olds who know where Belgium is.

Without spoiling the whole thing, here’s the kind of territory we cover:

Girl Scouts as a quiet jailbreak

When Juliette Gordon Low started the Girl Scouts in 1912, she wasn’t waving a big political banner. She was doing something more subversive: telling girls they could be competent. They could learn skills, make decisions, and be useful outside the living room.

In a world that still largely treated girls as decorative future wives, even that was a problem.

When world friendship became suspicious

Fast-forward to the early Cold War: the Girl Scouts are teaching international friendship, letter-writing to girls abroad, learning about other cultures—normal “let’s be good humans” stuff.

Then the Red Scare hits, and suddenly:

* global awareness looks like treason,

* maps and folk songs get labeled “propaganda,” and

* someone publishes a rant asking if even the Girl Scouts have been infiltrated.

Politicians actually spent time worrying about whether girls’ badges were secretly preparing them for world government. Because obviously the real threat to the nation is twelve-year-olds who know where Belgium is.

From communists to feminists to “woke”

Once you decide that girls doing things is dangerous, you can keep rebranding the danger forever.

We walk through how:

* In the 1950s, the fear was “communism” and “internationalism.”

* By the 1970s–80s, it shifts to “sexual agendas” and feminism.

* In the 90s and 2000s, it’s “family values” vs. “girl power.”

* Now it’s “gender ideology,” trans inclusion, and DEI.

The details change. The anxiety doesn’t: adults panicking that girls might become people who think for themselves.

So what’s the big picture?

Underneath all the congressional pearl-clutching, boycotts, Facebook rants, and thinkpieces, the story is actually pretty simple:

* The Girl Scouts aren’t radical in the way their loudest critics imagine.

* They are consistently in the business of giving girls skills, confidence, and practice being in charge.

* That alone is enough to set off repeated moral panics in a society that still isn’t comfortable with girls having real agency.

Every time a troop sets up a cookie booth, negotiates prices, learns how to manage money, or plans a service project, they’re doing something that hits patriarchy where it hurts: they’re rehearsing power.

That’s the through-line of this episode:

the Girl Scouts as an accidental case study in what happens when you treat girls like future adults instead of future wives and mothers, and how threatened people get when you do.

Additional Reading:

* Emily Swafford, “The Challenge and Promise of Girl Scout Internationalism: From Progressive-Era Roots to Cold War Fruit.”

Excellent on how world friendship, maps, and pen pals went from wholesome to “suspicious” in a Cold War climate.

* Susan H. Swetnam, “Look Wider Still: The Subversive Nature of Girl Scouting in the 1950s.”

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 37, no. 1 (2016).

Traces the 1953–54 handbook controversy, the “un-American” accusations, and what conservatives thought Girl Scouts were really up to.

* Jennifer Helgren, American Girls and Global Responsibility: A New Relation to the World during the Early Cold War (Rutgers University Press, 2017).

Broader than just Girl Scouts, but great for situating them within U.S. projects of “global responsibility” and youth citizenship.

* “When the Girl Scouts Were Accused of Being Commies,” JSTOR Daily.

Short, accessible summary that ties together Swetnam’s research, LeFevre, and the Red Scare backlash.

* Amy Erdman Farrell, Intrepid Girls: The Complicated History of the Girl Scouts of the USA (Ferris & Ferris / UNC Press, 2025)

Farrell—an American studies and women’s and gender studies scholar and former Scout—offers a full institutional history of GSUSA from 1912 to the early 21st century. It’s more academic than nostalgic, but if you want a single, up-to-date, critical-yet-affectionate history of the Girl Scouts that sits perfectly with a “culture wars over girlhood” episode, this is it.

Buy Me A Coffee

This episode is about witch hunts, but not the Halloween kind. We’re talking about how early modern Europe went from relying on women healers and midwives for everything to torturing and killing them as witches, and how that panic helped clear the way for male-dominated, professional medicine.

I walk through how climate crisis, war, plague, and sky-high infant mortality created a pressure cooker where someone had to be blamed, and the woman who literally had her hands on the body, your midwife, became the obvious target. Then we zoom out with Silvia Federici, Barbara Ehrenreich & Deirdre English, Lyndal Roper, and others to look at the bigger picture: witch hunts as a way to break women’s communal power over healing and reproduction so their bodies and labor could be folded into a new patriarchal, capitalist order.

And just to be crystal clear: this is a critique of the history of medicine, not an argument against modern medical or prenatal care. Birth has always been dangerous; today’s doctors, midwives, and nurses save lives every day. The point isn’t “reject medicine,” it’s “understand how misogyny got baked into the system so we can demand better.”

Recommended Reading

Primary Historical Works

* Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear

A sweeping global analysis of witch beliefs and why societies became terrified of women’s power.

* Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany

Essential for understanding the psychology of witchcraft accusations and gendered fear.

* Owen Davies, The Oxford History of Witchcraft and Magic

Excellent overview of European witch beliefs and cultural shifts.

* P.G. Maxwell-Stuart, Witch Beliefs and Witch Trials in the Middle Ages

Great for primary source material and early Church anxieties about women healers.

Feminist Analyses

* Barbara Ehrenreich & Deirdre English, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses

Classic feminist history on how women healers were pushed out of medicine.

* Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch

A groundbreaking argument connecting witch hunts to capitalism and reproductive control.

* Silvia Federici, Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women

Short, sharp essays connecting early modern persecutions to contemporary gendered violence.