Women across history have faced an impossible task – please, but don’t take up the space, fulfill a role but not one you get to choose, and become the ideal… by any means possible. In fact, fulfilling the demands on women from society at any given time has been a dangerous task. Maybe you’re a woman in 10th-century China, maybe you hear how all the women of the nobility have tiny three-inch feet – making your own that small becomes an agonizing life’s work. Maybe you’re a woman of Victorian England – chasing the hourglass means day after day in organ-crushing corsets.

Though you can forget beauty ideals, maybe you’re a woman of the medieval period, making your way as a respected and regarded healer, before the church, then the world turns on you, declaring what once served them so well, are only the workings of the devil. The world's positioning of women has been littered with pitfalls and punishment from antiquity to now. In today’s video we look at the unspeakable punishments befalling women.