The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England

by Carol F. Karlsen

In a culture where female dissatisfaction and anger were linked with witchcraft, and where women were pressured to search their consciences for evidence of their own evil, not surprisingly some women were persuaded—albeit temporarily—that the Devil was in them.

Despite their greed and malice, women were essential to the orderly transmission of property from father to son. Yet their pivotal position allowed women to disrupt this process so central to male conceptions of social continuity.10

It is by now a familiar list: pride, discontent, envy, malice, lying, blasphemy, seduction, and murder. Some were explicitly Eve’s, others implicitly hers; none were attributed to Adam.