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

by Mona Chollet

Every possible decision modern women make or role they occupy, outside of the most rigorous and regressive, can be tied back to the very symptoms of witchcraft: refusal of motherhood, rejection of marriage, ignoring traditional beauty standards, bodily and sexual autonomy, homosexuality, aging, anger, even a general sense of self-determination.

And yet, nowadays, witches have become a neo-liberal girlboss-style icon. That is to say, capitalism has gotten ahold of her; and, like so many things capitalism touches, she is in danger of dissociating from her radical roots.

By wiping out entire families, by inducing a reign of terror and by pitilessly repressing certain behaviors and practices that had come to be seen as unacceptable, the witch-hunts contributed to shaping the world we live in now. Had they not occurred, we would probably be living in very different societies.

The witch-hunts demonstrate, first, the stubborn tendency of all societies to find a scapegoat for their misfortunes and to lock themselves into a spiral of irrationality, cut off from all reasonable challenge, until the accumulation of hate-filled discourse and obsessional hostility justify a turn to physical violence, perceived as the legitimate defense of a beleaguered society.

According to a paradoxical dynamic familiar to women in all eras, every behavior and its opposite could be used against you: it was suspicious to miss Sunday Mass too frequently, but it was also suspicious never to miss it; it was suspicious to gather regularly with friends, but also to have too solitary a lifestyle …

“deeply embedded tendency in our society to hold women ultimately responsible for the violence committed against them.”

What if this Devil were in fact independence?

the dismantling of the special dispensation given to the beguines can be seen as a harbinger of what was to follow. These communities of women were principally to be found in France, Germany and Belgium. Neither wives nor nuns, though often widows, free of all male authority, they lived communally in rows of small individual houses, with medicinal and kitchen gardens, free to come and go as they pleased.

The only occasions—in France, at least—on which the murder of women is treated appropriately, and the gravity of the crime is recognized, are when the murderer is black or of Arab origin, but then it’s a case of fanning the flames of racism, not defending the cause of women.

The Renaissance demonologists couldn’t even imagine women’s absolute autonomy; for them, the freedom of those they accused of witchcraft had to be understood as part of a further subordination: they were necessarily under the Devil’s sway and therefore still subject to a masculine authority.

“the Witch is arguably the only female archetype that has power on its own terms. She is not defined by anyone else. Wife, sister, mother, virgin, whore—these archetypes draw meaning based on relationships with others. The Witch, however, is a woman who stands entirely on her own.”

To age is to awaken the fear that a woman always inspires when she exists “not only to create and nurture others but to create and nurture her Self,” as Cynthia Rich writes.46 The aging female body acts like “a clear reminder that women have a self that exists not only for others.”

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.”

“Men have no bodies”—so says Virginie Despentes, who, in my opinion, we should be taking at her word.80 Men’s dominant position in economics and politics, in love and family relationships, but also in the artistic and literary worlds allows them to be absolute subjects and to make women into absolute objects.

Society assigns women and men very different and differently valued realms of competence, such that women more often find themselves feeling stupid. It is women who run the greater risk of appearing deficient in the more prestigious fields, the ones considered to really count, whereas the fields in which women are more likely to have developed some skill are neglected, disdained or are sometimes altogether invisible.

These assumptions also show why women continue to have “things explained” to them by supremely arrogant men

A female patient is seen as more likely to be making things up, exaggerating, or to be ignorant, emotional and irrational.

These days, it suspects all women’s ailments of being “psychosomatic.” In short, women have gone from being “physically sick” to being “mentally ill.”