It’s no secret that men have held much more power than women throughout history. For thousands of years, historians didn’t even acknowledge that misogyny a) existed and b) was unjust and in need of overthrow. As absurd as it sounds, early scholarship on the witchcraze didn’t acknowledge misogyny at all:

“The implication… is that of course women would be attacked—and that it must somehow have been their fault.” [1]

This view is incongruent with the facts of the witchcraze. An estimated 80% of those accused and 85% of those killed in the witch hunts were women[2]. In Essex and the English Home Counties, that figure is closer to 92%. To understand the witchcraze, it is crucial to place misogyny and gender analysis at the center of our view of this history. A general loathing of women was the central powerful force driving the organized persecution and execution of witches.

"Having a female body was the factor most likely to render one vulnerable to being called a witch." [3]

Women’s sexuality, class, position in the community, and especially their age made them particularly vulnerable to all kinds of abuse during the witchcraze. The witchcraze and hunt was a tool used by men of religious, state, and judicial power to violently control women’s bodies.

(Read excerpts about misogyny and more during the witchcraze here.)

[1] Barstow, 4 (emphasis mine).

[2] Barstow, 23.

[3] Barstow, 16.

Critique of capitalism is prominent in Jen Silverman’s Witch. The capitalist system became widespread in the sixteenth century and furthered existing patriarchal structures:

“Early capitalism made the poor poorer because, in seeking the large pool of cheap labor that it required, it displaced farm families from their smallholdings, forcing them to become wage laborers. But it was men who had previously been the chief occasional wage earners; though they lost their land and independence to wealthy capitalist farmers, poor men still found work for wages. But women, who had supported themselves (and often their families) from their gardens and dairies, lost their main source of income, and they could not compete with men for paid jobs. These were the conditions that plunged many single women, formerly self-supporting, into poverty in the period 1550 to 1700. The economic situation accounts for the alarming increase in female beggars in western Europe, who so discomfited their better-off neighbors that the neighbors accused them of witchcraft in order to get rid of them."

In addition to the financial crisis, women’s role in the market economy was suffering. This was a major adjustment from women’s essential and active prior involvement. 

Rural European women:

• Kept gardens

• Cared for domestic animals

• Preserved food

• Chopped and carried wood

• Transported water

• Cared for AND educated children

• Nursed sick family members

• Prepared the dead for burial

They also made income as:

• Brewers

• Fortune-tellers

• Healers

• Midwives

• Pharmacists

• Milliners

• Seamstresses

• Spinners

• Tavern keepers

• Thatchers

• Road workers

• Lace makers

• Receivers of stolen goods

• Victualers (caterers)

• Wet nurses

• Weavers

• Sellers of their surplus at market

Urban women were skilled at:

• Manufacture

• Weaving

• Tailoring

• Skinning leather

• Candle making

• Other crafts

• Tavern-keeping

and worked as

• Pawnbrokers

• Moneylenders

• Launderers [1]

The move from feudal to capitalist systems meant that women could no longer make a living doing this work. Women were left behind economically, which reinforced class dynamics. The gender gap meant women “were growing poor at a faster rate than men, just at the time that they faced more intolerance toward the folk magic and folk medicine that had long since been their stock-in-trade."[2] Women, especially older women and widows, were financially vulnerable and were often unhoused. These elderly female beggars were the most defenseless against witchcraft accusations.

[1] Barstow, 101.

[2] Barstow, 107.

The growing power of the state contributed to the violent persecution during the witchcraze:

“Royal agents asserted their influence in parts of Europe never before interfered with. They demanded not only taxes and military levies but also a new ideological conformity: nationalism as we know it first reached rural western Europe in the seventeenth century." [1]

In 1604 King James I’s parliament passed a strict witchcraft law invoking the death penalty for witches persecuted for causing or even intending to cause harm. Before, witches in England were only put to death if a death had occurred.[2] This loosening of the law allowed for the deaths of thousands of witches. 

[1] Barstow, 39.

[2] Barstow, 39.

“The great European witch-hunt was essentially a judicial operation.”[1] Around the thirteenth century, European courts shifted from accusatorial procedural systems (which relied on victim testimony) to inquisitorial systems (which allowed torture in pursuit of confession). The new system made it possible for tens of thousands of accused witches to suffer torture in court. England was the only country whose courts did not use interrogational torture to “confirm their suspicions and to realize their fantasies.”[2] Though these facts set England’s treatment of witches apart from most other countries in Europe, the country’s unique court system still made it easy for witches to be persecuted. In England, lay jurymen (not trained in law) initiated and oversaw the criminal process. “The trial remained public and oral and still resembled a contest between two adversaries, not a secret judicial investigation to establish the truth.”[3] This meant that male oppressors could easily convict vulnerable women in England, as judges remained impartial in theory, though rarely in practice. The court became a stage where the social/domestic power men exercised over women could play out legally. Abuse abounded therein. 

[1] Brian Levak, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (1987), 63 (emphasis mine).

[2] Levak, 76.

[3] Levak, 68.

The power of the church was intertwined with the structures of patriarchy, state, and capitalism. Any opposition to the church was seen as a threat to be extinguished: Most Europeans believed in magic and the existence of witches before and during the seventeenth century. In fact, many women made their living selling magical favors and providing healthcare: "Along with this went a major attack on midwives and female healers. The church thus undermined women's mastery of folk healing, adding to the parish priest’s control over the laity's lives at every point possible.”[1] Because of the witch’s perceived role as a threat to Christianity via work with the Devil and magic, witchcraft became punishable by death. 

[1] Barstow, 69.

Misogyny and ageism amplified taboos around a woman’s body. In patriarchal societies across time and place, the AFAB (“Assigned female at birth/AFAB: Someone whose assigned sex at birth was female”[1]) body has been regarded as alien and therefore fear-inducing and punishable. Men felt that women’s bodies were foreign and dangerous, but also felt great sexual desire towards them. The psychological combination of bodily desire and disgust was one factor that drove them to violent oppression. This is evident in the violently sexual nature of the torture and killing of so many European women. Some persecuted witches were accused of sodomy/ homosexuality, which the church equated with demonism.[2] These accusations and the torturous extraction of confession revealed the sexual fears and fantasies of the accusers.

“It is important to review the many ways that having a woman’s body made a difference during the witch hunt. First, the distinctively female external parts of the body—breasts and labia—were the model for the devil’s teat, a sure sign of guilt, and the female function of nursing was the basis for the myth of imps and familiars, who sucked on witches. Some of the most basic and negative imagery of witch lore was thus taken from female anatomy.”[3]

[1]  “Glossary of Sexual Health Terms.” Planned Parenthood. https://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/glossary.

[2] Barstow, 140.

[3] Barstow, 141.

While women of all ages were accused of witchcraft, most European victims were over fifty years old. Their age was associated with ugliness, and therefore their loss of youth (associated with beauty) was equated with evil and subsequently witchery. Their bodies no longer young, they were feared by men for their undesirability—though that did not stop them from being sexually abused by these men.

Additionally, many elderly women had disabilities. Elizabeth Sawyer for instance had a bent back and a missing eye. An ableist, patriarchal society demanded that they make up for the perceived incompleteness of their bodies, and thus they were subjected to accusations of supernatural activity. Their disability was equated with evil, and thus the Devil.

“One aspect of the witchcraze, undeniably, was an uneasiness with and hostility toward dependent older women. Witch charges may have been used to get rid of indigent elderly women, past childbearing and too enfeebled to do productive work. As Barbara Walker has put it, these women ‘could be called witches and destroyed, like domestic animals past their usefulness… The old woman was an ideal scapegoat: too expendable to be missed, too weak to fight back, too poor to matter.’” [1]

[1] Barstow, 29 (emphasis mine).