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.

If news requires no action, it is probably not the news we require in order to govern ourselves. If activism requires no analysis, it is probably not informed or effective.

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.

The creation of officially sanctioned knowledge removed ownership of knowledge from women and indigenous societies and placed it all under rigid capitalist control. Practices which had been used and tested for centuries were not considered official or tested until the Great Men approved and claimed ownership of them.

The first step to creating a patriarchal society was removing matrilineal power from women.