Did European witch-hunting kill 9 million?

I've been under the impression that was the real number, ever since I read Gyn/Ecology about 15 years ago. But I see here, that number is entirely wrong:

"For witchcraft and sorcery between 1400 and 1800, all in all, we estimate something like 50,000 legal death penalties," writes Wolfgang Behringer in "Witches and Witch-Hunts" (Polity, 2004). He estimates that perhaps twice as many received other penalties, "like banishment, fines or church penance."

Other recent estimates range from 40,000 to 100,000 executions over those early modern centuries. These remain appalling numbers, even when put in the context of the far greater numbers killed in religious wars and the fact that resort to capital punishment was at one of its high points in European history.

No one should underestimate the cruelty these numbers represent. "Witchfinders," Malcolm Gaskill's full-blooded account, just published by Harvard University Press, of the most notorious witch hunt in English history, makes that clear in engrossing detail.

But contemporary historians bridle at the huge numbers that have become part of the witch hunt mythology-and the implicit or explicit comparisons to the Nazi campaign of genocide. Professor Behringer traced the estimate of nine million victims back to wild projections made by an 18th-century anticlerical from 20 files of witch trials. The figure worked its way into 19th-century texts, was taken up by Protestant polemicists during the anti-Catholic Kulturkampf in Germany, then adopted by the early 20th-century German neopagan movement and, eventually, by anti-Christian Nazi propagandists.

In the United States, the nine million figure appeared in the 1978 book "Gyn/Ecology" by the influential feminist theoretician Mary Daly, who picked it up from a 19th-century American feminist, Matilda Gage.

Do such unfounded myths do anyone any good? Certainly many feminists, including some identifying themselves as neopagans, agree with contemporary historians about the answer: No.

Have any of you folks read "Gyn/Ecology"? Oh, that is a rousing book!

UPDATE: Cathy Young (who also participates in the comments) expresses shock at my "rousing book" compliment to "Gyn/Ecology." (She and I also had some debate about the writings of Andrea Dworkin.) I wrote this in the comments:

I just said it was rousing, not that it was good or right. I went through a period when I read a lot of Dworkin and Daly's books. They were very stimulating, but also ultimately stimulated me into wanting to distance myself from them. There are plenty of things in the treatment of women to be outraged about, but polemical works that demand that you reach and maintain a permanent state of anger just seem sad after a while (or dangerous, if they are actually effective).

Have I been too kind to the late Andrea Dworkin?

Cathy Young, who wrote in the comments section of my post on Andrea Dworkin, has this post on Dworkin over at Hit & Run. Young doesn't think anything positive should be said about the recently departed feminist, and is especially distressed that I said something positive:

I was especially taken aback when the usually reasonable Ann Althouse, University of Wisconsin law professor and blogger, decided to "honor" Dworkin with this tribute. Althouse notes that in contrast to the "blatantly partisan" feminists who flocked to Bill Clinton's defense when he was accused of sexual misconduct, "Dworkin, for all her overstatements and wackiness, was truly devoted to feminism as an end." All right, so Dworkin was nonpartisan in her demonization of men and male sexuality ("What needs to be asked," she notoriously told a British writer on Clinton's dalliance with Monica Lewinsky, "is, Was the cigar lit?"). That's a good thing? And what is this "feminism" she was dedicated to, anyway? It certainly wasn't liberal feminism, anti-censorship feminism, or pro-sex feminism, all of which she despised.

I've read a lot of Dworkin's books, but I read them a long time ago, and I really can't remember the extent of "her demonization of men and male sexuality," which I don't agree with. I remember finding a lot of rousing and provocative ideas in those books and a real passion about harms done to women. I think I was careful about what I wrote; my honoring of this woman who had just died was not unqualified. I'm glad Young thinks I'm "usually reasonable" but I'm going to defend myself and say that this was another example of my being reasonable.

Here's what Young wrote in the comments section to my original post (linked above):

As a semi-regular reader of your blog, I am extremely disappointed by your positive comments about Andrea Dworkin.... Dworkin was a psychopath -- a pitiful woman to some extent, because she was so obviously sick; but unfortunately she acted out her sickness on a public stage, by demonizing not only men (and male sexuality) but women who have the temerity to enjoy heterosexual sex.

(Yes, Dworkin spent the last 20 years of her life living with a man, and she wrote warmly about her father and her brother. But it's possible to be a bigot and to make a few personal exemptions. By the way, Dworkin's companion, John Stoltenberg, was an avid follower of her anti-male views; he wrote a book called Refusing to Be a Man, and in his own writings described the penis as "an instrument of oppression.")

By the way, let's please not get into the tiresome discussion of whether or not Dworkin actually uttered or wrote the words "all sexual intercourse is rape." Read this chapter from Intercourse and see for yourself:

"Physically, the woman in intercourse is a space inhabited, a literal territory occupied literally: occupied even if there has been no resistance, no force; even if the occupied person said yes please, yes hurry, yes more."

"Intercourse remains a means or the means of physiologically making a woman inferior."

"Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men’s contempt for women."

I showed some of these passages to a friend who had never even heard of Dworkin before. Her immediate response: "She's writing about rape, not sex."

Here's a thought experiment. Suppose a man -- a very troubled men who had had horrible experiences with women -- wrote book after book arguing that women are evil sirens and parasites whose sole purpose in life is to sexually manipulate and destroy men.

Would anyone be hailing him for his "challenging" and "provocative" ideas? Would there be a lot of quibbling over whether he actually ever used the words "All women are whores"?

Yet you, Prof. Althouse, seem to embrace the left-wing double standard with regard to hate speech -- it's not really so bad if directed at "the oppressor" and motivated by concern for the oppressed.

I prefer to agree with Daphne Patai, a former women's studies professor who has written: "Cultivating hatred for another human group ought to be no more acceptable when it issues from the mouths of women than when it comes from men, no more tolerable from feminists than from the Ku Klux Klan."

The accusation that I "embrace the left-wing double standard" was a response to something I wrote in the comments: "People who speak out on behalf of the oppressed can be admired -- with qualifications -- despite their anger-driven overstatements and misjudgment." And I wrote a comment later explaining this:

My phrase "people who speak out on behalf of the oppressed" refers to Dworkin's writing, which is concerned with rape victims, pornography workers, prostitutes, etc. I think women have been oppressed throughout history, around the world, and that there is scarcely a more important concern, but it doesn't justify hate speech and it's not even helpfully dealt with by vilifying men. I'm just trying to explain why I don't vilify Dworkin.

I'm sorry I just don't have the heart to point out the shortcomings of the woman's work. She just died! I alluded to some disagreements I have, and I don't have a problem with the substantive content of Young's post other than that I obviously don't think I departed from my usual reasonableness.

Young points out this op-ed in the NYT by Catharine MacKinnon, which I somehow missed yesterday. MacKinnon's point is that Dworkin was mistreated and that "[h]ow she was treated is how women are treated who tell the truth about male power without compromise or apology." It's not surprising that people reacted strongly to the very harsh things Dworkin said, and it's simplistic to call what she said "truth" and leave it at that. It was dramatic overstatement for effect. She provoked a big argument -- as did MacKinnon -- and I don't see how you can blame people for fighting back on the important subject of sex.

And much of the mistreatment MacKinnon describes is the typical lot of the writer. People talk about writers' work without taking the trouble to read it all the time. People misstate and twist the meaning of what people say all the time. And people mercilessly ridicule public figures for the way they look -- though surely Andrea Dworkin got a particularly harsh version of that treatment. Dworkin made people really angry, and even if there was a good measure of sexism in that response, a lot of the nastiness was returning in kind what she dished out. That is part of being taken seriously.

Andrea Dworkin has died.

She was 58. The staunch feminist won widespread fame seeking anti-pornography legislation, on the theory that pornography caused rape: "Pornography is used in rape - to plan it, to execute it, to choreograph it, to engender the excitement to commit the act." She was a major cultural figure in the late 80s and early 90s, who wrote some amazing books that were quite readable if you didn't get too angry at some of the connections she made.

UPDATE: Susie Bright has a lot to say about Andrea Dworkin here:

It was Andrea’s take-no-prisoners attitude toward patriarchy that I always liked the best. Bourgeois feminists were so BORING. They wanted to keep their maiden name and have it listed in the white pages; they wanted to get a nice corner office in the skyscraper. When I was a teenager in the 70s I couldn't relate to those concerns. It was Dworkin's heyday....

I loved that she dared attack the very notion of intercourse. It was the pie aimed right in the crotch of Mr. Big Stuff. It was an impossible theory, but it wasn’t absurd. There is something about literally being f**ked that colors your world, pretty or ugly, and it was about time someone said so.

And here:

The contradictions between Dworkin's brilliance and her lunacy have always gotten under my skin. ... Every time I put down one of her books, I was impressed by her passion, and by the risks she could take with her imagination--- and yet I was also convinced that she was cracked. The more she attacked sexism, the more I felt imprisoned by her concept of sex itself. Her arguments for liberation folded in on themselves, in a victimized dervish dance; they became just another bar and stripe in the code of the double standard.

ANOTHER UPDATE: There are some interesting comments to this post, including one with the phrase "Shame on you, Prof. Althouse." The third comment says "Nice to see another Susie Bright fan," which made me stop and ask myself whether I am a Susie Bright fan, which made me remember I love Susie Bright's contributions to the commentary track of this DVD.

AND MORE: Dworkin said she liked George Washington, and that was enough for Richard Brookhiser. But there's more:

Later on, when NR twitted feminists for supporting a later president, Bill Clinton, I got a note from Dworkin pointing out that she didn't. I wrote a paragraph for "The Week," beginning with the old New Yorker lead-in, "A friend writes..."

Dworkin's prose was unrelenting, hard, clean and compelling. Florence King praised it (while disagreeing with many of her conclusions). She really meant it. R.I.P.

Ah, how that resonates! Feminism was only a means to an end for a lot of people who positioned themselves as the voices of feminism. Their abjectly partisan goals came to light when they supported Clinton and (especially) smeared Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky. It was an appalling spectacle. I care a lot about feminism, but I have not trusted the self-appointed voices of feminism since then. Dworkin, for all her overstatements and wackiness, was truly devoted to feminism as an end. She didn't care enough about free speech and she was over-the-top in her aversion to heterosexual sex, but I mean to honor her with this post.

YET MORE: Cathy Young has comments inside and on Hit & Run. I respond to the Hit & Run piece and ask if I've been too kind to Andrea Dworkin here.