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

by Mona Chollet

Centuries of hatred and obscurantism seem to have culminated in this wave of violence, born of fear in the face of the increasing space taken up by women in the social realm.

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

Nowadays, despite being legally and practically sanctioned, women’s independence continues to elicit general scepticism. Women’s bond with men and with children, carried out in the mode of selflessness, is still considered the core of their identity. The way girls are brought up and socialized teaches them to avoid isolation and leaves their faculty for independence largely undeveloped. Behind the famous figure of the ‘spinster with a cat’, left behind by her peers and the object of pity and derision, we can detect the shadow of the fearsome witch of the bad old days, flanked by her diabolical familiar.

Although occasionally freer in her behaviour and her speech, as soon as she turned into a mouth not worth feeding, the post-menopausal woman became a millstone round the neck of her community.

One way or another, old age in women remains ugly, shameful, threatening and satanic.

mothers: we celebrate them as icons of a rather sentimental ideal, but we deny them as people.

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 favour of the death penalty and, in the US, the free circulation of guns28 (there were more than 15,000 deaths by shooting in the US in 201729), 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 2015.30 ‘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.

A man who doesn’t become a father is avoiding a social function, whereas women are thought to play out the realization of their innermost identity through motherhood.

Women who refuse motherhood are also faced with the prejudice that they must therefore hate children,

There are women who are born to be mothers. There are women who are born to be aunties. And there are women who should not be allowed to be within ten feet of a child. It is very important that you figure out which one of those camps you belong in, because tragedy and sorrow results [sic] from ending up in the wrong category.

‘women who create things other than children are still considered dangerous by many’.

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.