Women and butchery : some cultural taboos

The original starting point for this paper was a comparison of women butchers and surgeons. Though surgeons mark the glamorous top end of the professional hierarchy and butchers the decidedly unglamorous bottom of the trades, there are some commonalities between the two occupations. Both have systematically excluded women, who make up less than one per cent of either group. The physical strength required to lift heavy weights and cut through bone has in each case been offered as a main rationalisation for exclusion. Our macabre sense of humour was drawn to the cultural taboos around women wielding knives, shedding blood and slicing into flesh; as well as a mythology about menstruating women and the pollution of food.