In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial

by Mona Chollet

Self-sacrifice remains the only fate imaginable for women. More precisely, it is a self-sacrifice that operates by way of abandoning one’s own creative potential rather than by its realization. Fortunately, we can also nurture those around us, whether they are from our innermost or wider circle, by developing our own particular strengths and giving free rein to our personal aspirations. This may even be the only form of self-sacrifice that we should seek to achieve, sharing out as best we can the portion of irreducible sacrifice that is inevitable, if there is some. Meanwhile, women’s potential continues to be largely wasted. “A ‘real woman’ is a graveyard of desires, of dreams unfulfilled, of delusions,” the Chimères collective wrote.109 It is time that women—so often lacking in confidence, so uncertain of their capabilities, of the pertinence of what they can bring, of their right to a life of their own—learn to defend themselves against accusations inducing guilt and against intimidation, that they take their own aspirations seriously and preserve them without bending when faced by male authority figures who may try to deflect their energy for their own benefit. “Always choose yourself first,” advises Aminatou Sow, a writer who spoke to Rebecca Traister. “If you put yourself first, it’s this incredible path you can forge for yourself […] If you choose yourself, people will say you’re selfish. But no. You have agency. You have dreams.”