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January 21 - January 23, 2019
Though no evidence remains about who accused her or of what crimes, the then forty-year-old Mehitabel Downing’s name appears, along with the widow Penney, as one of ten witches petitioning for their release from the Ipswich jail in the fall of 1692.91
generally portrayed in the literature as disagreeable women, at best aggressive and abrasive, at worst ill-tempered, quarrelsome, and spiteful. They are almost always described as deviants—disorderly women who failed to, or refused to, abide by the behavioral norms of their society. In two accounts, at least some of the accused were witches:
They were two types of dangerous trespass: challenges to the supremacy of God and challenges to prescribed gender arrangements.
No other Quaker was tried as a witch, yet the informal connection between witchcraft and Quaker belief persisted.
“The stories Recorded by my Father,” he said, “(plainly enough) demonstrate, That Diabolical Possession was the Thing which did dispose and encline Men unto Quakerism.” Claiming that their “quaking” was a symptom of possession, he suggested that the first Quaker was a female oracle of Delphi who, when possessed by a demon, “was immediately taken with an extraordinary trembling of her whole body.” Her “prophesies,” Mather added, “… enchanted all the world into a veneration of them.”
Even the word “scold,” practically a synonym for “witch” in the European witchcraft tradition, was defined as an angry woman. No comparable word for an angry man existed in the language.
Did Elizabeth Godman “cast a fierce looke upon” Stephen Goodyear with the intention of causing him to fall into a “swonding fitt”—or did she merely look at him fiercely?
In colonial New England, the many connections between “women” and “witchcraft” were implicitly understood. In Europe, several generations before, the connections had still been explicit.
Two works stand out for stating the wisdom of the older European tradition on why women were more prone than men to witchcraft. These are the influential Malleus Maleficarum (1486) by Heinrich Institoris and Jakob Sprenger of Germany and the less well-known Tratado de las Supersticiones y Hechicherias (1529) by Spain’s Fray Martin de Castanega.
anger, jealousy, and greed, and did not hesitate to seek demonic power to deceive others, to entice them to evil, and to destroy their souls, their bodies, and their possessions. In sum, women became witches because they were born female, not male, because they were dissatisfied with their natural inadequacies and limitations, and because they wanted revenge and retribution badly enough to sell their souls for it.3
“because once they are old, and men pay no attention to them, the women have recourse to the devil to satisfy their appetites.
because men were less carnal: Christ “was willing to be born and to suffer” to preserve “the male sex from so great a crime.”5
“a necessary evil.” If a man did not marry, he was not only lonely, but his “family dies out, and a stranger inherits.” On the other hand, if a man did marry, he was subject among other abuses to a woman’s discontent and anger—including her “reproaches concerning the marriage portion.”
Despite their greed and malice, women were essential to the orderly transmission of property from father to son.
women who failed to serve men failed to serve God.
a husband should love his wife as “his second self” and as “the weaker Vessel.” The feelings of a wife, on the other hand, were to spring from submission, reverence, and fear—not a “slavish Fear,” he warned, “which is nourished with hatred or aversion: but a noble and generous Fear, which proceeds from Love.”
A symbol used to describe the model wife was the snail: “that little creature, that goes no further than it can carry its house on its head.” Woman served economic ends but was not an economic creature.
it allowed men the time to “meditate of heavenly things, without distraction of mind.
The tendency of men to deny that women had souls worthy of being saved had to be confronted first.
and the courts did not prosecute the woman involved if she subsequently married the father of the child.
a 1650 letter to Connecticut governor John Winthrop, Jr., minister Roger Williams condemned adultery as “that filthy devill of whorish practices.”43 Williams’s words suggest that the idea that women led men to sexual sin was too deeply embedded to be eradicated easily by the Puritans’ more enlightened ideas about women.
This suggests that by the mid-1640s, signs of female independence had also become objectionable to the larger community.
by 1692, with no more than a quarter of his congregation male, even Cotton Mather was forced to speculate that women might be more religious than men.46
the evidence shows that by the 1680s at least 60 percent of the prosecutions were against women.
They added that in the absence of other proof, if a woman persevered in her identification of the father throughout the labor of childbirth, then that man would be held responsible “notwithstanding his denial.
After 1670, so few women were in that position that only one intestate record shows the disposition of a woman’s property.
When men were disputing women directly, the court usually decided against women’s right to property ownership, even when that right had been spelled out in their husbands’ or fathers’ wills.
Edmund Faulkner wrote his will in 1684, he bequeathed his daughters very little of his £388 estate. To one of his sons-in-law he left a pillow, “being willing,” he said, “would my Estate have reacht it, to have manifested my love towards him in a larger manner.
Court in its 1692–93 session indicates the extent of this crisis. Reaffirming the necessity for single people to live “under some orderly family government,” it also affirmed that single women “of good repute” should be able to practice “any lawful trade or employment for a livelihood … any law, usage or custom to the contrary notwithstanding.
Ironically, much of the credit for this sudden and dramatic change of events goes to the possessed. Perhaps imperfectly understanding their culture’s unspoken witchcraft assumptions, the possessed had never limited their accusations to people their society designated as likely witches.
Most recently, the military has taken their turn, demonizing the women who spoke out about the Navy’s Tailhook scandal or brought charges of sexual harassment or rape against Army men. If witches really are a thing of the past, why, we must ask, are their simultaneously alluring and demonic shapes still so viciously tormenting men today?
