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

by Mona Chollet

The human being emerges here “as a decisively separate entity, no longer continuous with the universe with which it had once shared a soul.”

“The witch, symbol of the violence of nature, raised storms, caused illness, destroyed crops, obstructed generation and killed infants. Disorderly women, like chaotic nature, needed to be controlled.”29 Once curbed and domesticated, both women and nature could be reduced to their decorative function, to become “psychological and recreational resources for the harried entrepreneur-husband.”

Another problematic ritual: the parade of medical personnel who show up when a woman is in the midst of giving birth and each in turn insert two fingers into her vagina to assess her cervical dilation, without requesting consent nor even informing her beforehand, and sometimes without being overly gentle either. Lahaye invites us to imagine the equivalent for other body parts: you are at the dentist and, at regular intervals, unfamiliar people come into the room and insert their fingers into your mouth; or you are seeing a specialist for a rectal exam and a dozen people take turns putting their finger into your anus … “Such a practice,” Lahaye concludes, “is inconceivable in any of the medical disciplines except obstetrics, the one that’s all about access to women’s genitals.”50 We see here, in an extreme form, the assumption that women’s bodies belong to everyone but themselves, which is found to differing degrees throughout society and explains why we are not expected to kick up a fuss over the odd pat on the bottom.

Great argument here. Every patient should be asked for consent if anyone besides their assigned physician is going to participate in an exam. Every patient should have the right to refuse.

Similarly, many women suffer excessively painful menstruation in silence for years before anyone starts to suspect endometriosis. This disease affects one in ten women of childbearing age and is only now becoming better understood.

We may think regretfully of what Western medicine could have been today had that power grab—from the female healers, from women in general, and in opposition to all the values associated with them—not happened. Driven out of the medical profession, as we have seen, women were first allowed to return as nurses.

Whereas, as Ehrenreich and English note, “Healing, in its fullest sense, consists of both curing and caring, doctoring and nursing. The old lay healers of an earlier time had combined both functions, and were valued for both.”

By perpetuating the separation of body and spirit, the latter approach allows for abuse because it dehumanizes the sick person. It is this, in tandem with the controlling mindset described above, which explains how the patient may be manipulated quite casually by a doctor—like a mere mechanical system—and spoken of as if he or she is not there.

“ill humors” thought to dwell in the body: for the Puritans, these humors “became the visible sign of the corruption of human nature, a sort of original sin that had to be combated, subjugated, exorcized. Hence the use of purges, emetics and enemas that were administered to children or the ‘possessed’ to make them expel their devilries.”

1797, puerperal fever killed the English feminist intellectual Mary Wollstonecraft after the birth of her second daughter (Mary

Shelley, future author of Frankenstein). In the mid-nineteenth

Systematic handwashing was only instigated twenty years after Semmelweis’s death.90

Associating witches with the Devil indicated that they had reached beyond the realm to which men had tried to confine them, and were now impinging on male privileges.

He stresses that, at the root of all intellectual discipline, even the most rigorous and solidly grounded, there is an emotional preference—even if only that which makes us

prefer “the organized to the chaotic, the clear to the muddled, the complete over the incomplete, the coherent over what is contradictory.”

He writes, “More fundamentally, our emotional life, along with its inevitable dimension of bias, sits at the very center of the act of understanding, in the sense that a consciousness that is perfectly neutral and impervious to all consideration of value would merely be content to leave things in the state in which they are presented to it.” And he concludes that, “It is upon the shifting sands of emotional p...

“Killing the women of the past to create the men of the future.”

also all that society denied itself by outlawing them, all that these women were prevented from developing and passing to future generations.

All reverence for length of years was lost. The sorrows and sufferings of a long life appealed to no sympathetic cord in the heart.118