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

by Mona Chollet

When, chatting to a writer who had three children and traveled a lot, she asked him how he managed, he replied that he was “very lucky.” She comments: ““Very lucky” is, I suspect, a modern way to say, “I have a fantastic wife.”” And Appanah tots them up: “Flannery O’Connor, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Simone de Beauvoir: no children. Toni Morrison: two children, published her first novel at thirty-nine. Penelope Fitzgerald: three children, published her first novel at sixty. Saul Bellow: four children, many books. John Updike: four children, many books.”

children or force them to witness their parents’ suffering.28 In our own time, nothing is more deceitful than the “pro-life” label assumed by militant anti-abortionists, a large proportion of whom are also in favor of the death penalty and, in the US, the free circulation of guns29 (there were more than 15,000 deaths by shooting in the US in 201730), and there is no sign of their marshalling such ardour to protest against wars, nor against pollution, which it is estimated was responsible for one death in six around the world in 2015.

We cannot exclude the possibility that we may sometimes be having children in order to prove that we are having sex (a high price to pay for a bit of grandstanding, if you ask me). Or, otherwise, to prove we are not gay, thereby revealing ourselves as quietly homophobic.

The term “biological clock” was first used to refer to women’s fertility in 1978, in a Washington Post article titled “The Clock is Ticking for the Career Woman.”64 In other words, this expression was an early harbinger of the imminent anti-feminist backlash, and its dazzlingly successful integration into the female anatomy makes it a unique phenomenon in the history of evolution—it would have given Darwin pause for thought. Since women’s bodies give them the option of carrying a child, of course Nature would prefer that women also change the resulting infant’s nappies, once born, that they attend all meetings with pediatricians and, while we’re on the subject, that they mop the kitchen floor, do the washing-up and remember to buy loo roll for the next twenty-five years. This is known as “maternal instinct.” Yes, Nature orders precisely this, and not, for example, that, in order to thank women for taking on the major task required for perpetuation of the species, society do its best to compensate them for the inconveniences they thereby suffer; nothing of the sort. If you thought that might make sense, you haven’t really understood Nature.

And yet, on encountering voluntarily childless women, people still regularly threaten, “You’ll regret it one day!” They are betraying some very weird thinking. Can we force ourselves to do something we haven’t the least wish to do solely in order to head off a hypothetical regret hovering in the distant future?

If the witch-hunts particularly targeted older women, it is likely because they displayed an unbearable degree of confidence. Confronted by their neighbors, by priests or pastors, even before judges and torturers, these women talked back; as Anne Barstow writes, they “talked back in a time when they were increasingly expected to be submissive.”69 They were better able to do so, being unconstrained by a father, husband or children. These were women “given to speaking out, to a bold tongue and independent spirit.”70 It is no surprise that such unwelcome, even feared speech could be taken for wicked enchantment.