More broadly, what seems most problematic about women’s aging is their experience. This is what led so many old women to the pyres: “Spellcraft was an art. [Witches] had had to work at their lessons, to learn their knowledge, to gain experience: older women therefore naturally appeared more suspect than younger ones,” Guy Bechtel explains.71 Disney classics such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Sleeping Beauty “depict generational clashes between old witches and young beauties, pegging a woman’s worth on fertility and youth—never hard-won wisdom,
