More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
December 4 - December 8, 2021
Accusations of witchcraft were a way for societies to control what they viewed as ‘disruptive’ female behaviour. What often started as an opportunistic way of getting a woman out of the way became a cultural contagion with little or no rational explanation.
The rider looking over the bristles of this domestic item suggested an inversion of power, a world turned upside down, women all-powerful over men. Depicted in this way, they symbolised everything that men then feared.
The woman is beautiful, quite the opposite of the haggard and ugly cliché of a witch – a representation often used as a means to humiliate and control women who were perceived as unruly.
