Women at the top are the ones chosen to be there by men and not eliminated by women, a dual filter that excludes most witches: those with brilliance and originality and those capable of disturbing the status quo.

The Great Men create a clearly defined caste system of who are the saviours and who are the saved and the gates to ever escaping assigned status are carefully guarded.

Whoever maintains authority over the work of others maintains the hierarchical system and prevents workers from having autonomy, mastery and control over their own work.

Nothing happens till a Great Man says it happened.

A weed is a strong plant thriving where those in power do not want it. A witch is a strong person thriving where those in power do not want them.

The church and capitalists responded to the rising egalitarian threat by creating a hierarchy which demonized women to divide the previously united peasants. Where all had previously worked together in a society, waged labour created class warfare and a new master-servant relationship between men and women.

Men had autonomy through land replaced by autonomy through wages and women were now unpaid slaves or, sometimes thanks to new abolition of laws against rape of the lower classes, prey.

A heretic who recanted was made to embroider a bundle of sticks (a faggot) to their sleeve in reminder of the fire they had escaped and may yet suffer. The term once used against argumentative women is now used as a pejorative against homosexuals, the other targeted practitioners of non-reproductive sex.

Institutionalization and professionalization allowed control of the sources of knowledge by the men of the dominant social classes, a situation still true today. What is billed as The Birth of Modern Medicine was really the death of all women’s knowledge and most importantly, the death of women’s control over their own reproductive destinies.