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

by Mona Chollet

In this period, we see a phenomenon that Susan Bordo calls a “drama of parturition”: a forced rupture from the organic and maternal world of the Middle Ages in order to step forward into a new world where “precision, clarity and detachment” rule.20 The human being emerges here “as a decisively separate entity, no longer continuous with the universe with which it had once shared a soul.” Bordo sees in this a “flight from the feminine, from the memory of union with the maternal world, and a rejection of all values associated with it,” replaced by an obsession with maintaining distance and demarcation.21 Guy Bechtel expressed it in other terms: the “machine for creating man anew” was just as much a “machine for killing women as they once were.”22 With this arises a “super-masculinization of rational thought,” a cold and impersonal “distinctively male cognitive style.”23 This interpretation, Bordo stresses, should in no way be dismissed as a twentieth-century feminist fantasy: “the founders of modern science consciously and explicitly proclaimed the ‘masculinity’ of science as inaugurating a new era. And they associated that masculinity with a cleaner, purer, more objective and more disciplined epistemological relation to the world.”24 The English scholar Francis Bacon proclaimed it “a masculine birth of time.”25