Older women’s sexuality also gave rise to particular fears around the time of the witch-hunts. No longer having the formal right to a sex life—since they could no longer have children and were, in many cases, widowed—yet experienced and still interested in sex, these women appeared as immoral and threatening forces in the social order. They were assumed to be bitter—for they had lost the respected status that went with the role of the mother—and envious of younger women. In the fifteenth century, as Lynn Botelho writes, a direct connection is established of “post-menopausal women with witches
...more
