Bechtel’s point of view is a stark contrast to the very different views of Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, who describe not only individual tragedies—the quashed aspirations and broken spirits of the hunts’ victims—but also all that society denied itself by outlawing them, all that these women were prevented from developing and passing to future generations. Ehrenreich and English speak of “the sheer waste of talent and knowledge” represented by the witch-hunts, and urge us to undertake the “important task […] of recovering, or at least pointing out, what was lost.”
