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

by Mona Chollet

capitalism is always engaged in

selling back to us in product form all that it has first destroyed.

“Damned clever, I thought, how men had made life so intolerable for single women that most would gladly embrace even bad marriages instead,”

Then, in 1484, Pope Innocent VIII ordered that all cats seen in the company of women be considered their familiars; these witches were to be burned along with their animals. The cats’ extermination contributed to the growth of the rat population, so aggravating subsequent outbreaks of disease—which were blamed on witches … 43 In

Sure; but we also don’t have children with the intention of remaining glued permanently to their sides, nor with the intention of giving up our cultivation of all other aspects of our lives. And part of bringing them up can include presenting them with a model of a well-balanced adult, rather than one who is unstable or frustrated.

“Life” does not inspire them to action except when it comes to wrecking women’s lives. A pro-birth policy is about wielding power, not about care for humanity.

Writer Laura Kipnis predicts that the birth rate will continue to drop “until there is a better social deal for women—not just fathers doing more childcare but vastly more social resources directed at the situation, including teams of well-paid professionals on standby (not low-wage-earning women with their own children at home).”

It may be that our parents sometimes pass on passions so deeply felt that they leave room for nothing else—especially when they haven’t been able to pursue them as they would have wished.

They are betraying some very weird thinking.

intelligence is not an absolute quality, but can include enormous variations depending on the contexts in which we exercise it and the people we have before us.

A few years ago, researchers from the University of Provence asked two groups of primary-school students to recreate from memory a fairly complicated geometric design. For one group, they called it a “geometry” exercise; for the other group, it was a “drawing” exercise. In the first group, the girls did less well than the boys. In the second, free of the terrifying shadow of maths—and working, therefore, without prior expectation of failure—the girls did better than the boys.

But the point of the institution, whether annual or more frequent, appears to be ideological more than anything else: it’s about maintaining surveillance of women’s bodies.

Bechtel shows, once again, that historians of the witch-hunts are themselves products of the world that hunted the witches, and that they remain locked inside the frame of reference that the witch-hunts created.

All humanitarian feeling was lost in the effort to secure heaven at the expense of others,