Nicol’s Reviews > Monstrous Bitch: A History of Terrifying Women > Status Update

“I want us to see her for what she is: a paradigm for demonizing women, and a slowly evolving cultural mechanism for silencing them, persecuting them, and, when necessary, killing them.”

“This mythos—of the oversexed, baby-slaying, blood-drinking, loudmouthed Monstrous Bitch—is perhaps the oldest and most consistently represented ideology in Western culture.”

“I’ve grown up in a world in which women have been demonized for thousands of years, and in which they have been demonized in particular for three things: their voices, their sexuality, and their relationship to reproduction.”

“Sexual violence is always also an act of silencing someone’s voice.”

“There is a very real chance that though I was born a human citizen with extensive rights, I will die a semihuman partial citizen with heavily restricted rights.”

“Correlatively, public discourse around women’s rights in general appears to be in a nearly vertical backslide: American politicians are unironically suggesting that women’s proper place is in the home—and only in the home.”

”Lamashtu wasn’t a doctor; she was a guy in a back alley with a coat hanger and some vodka. Long ago, when Lamashtu killed women, fetuses, babies, and children, it was because medical care didn’t exist. Now, it’s because our governments are deciding that women don’t deserve access to that medical care.”

“To control the land, you have to control the women—or, more precisely, you have to control their uteruses. If Patriarchy can’t control the wombs, it’s got to demonize and kill the women who contain them, as well as those women who have the temerity to try to control wombs in a way that Patriarchy doesn’t approve of.”

“the systematic persecution of witches is intimately tied to the consolidation of private property during the same period.”

“The church and state used the public execution of accused witches to inflict abject terror and trauma on helpless young girls, on the brink of losing their own mothers, who were told that their mothers had been too loud, too sexy, or violent toward unborn children.”