Preface. This is a book review of “In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial.” The author Chollet writes that the book won’t spend much time on witchcraft today, but explore the afterlife of the witch-hunts in Europe and the US that amped up prejudices about women, repressing certain behaviors and lifestyles. Chollet shows how we have inherited these representations as forged over centuries, today producing barriers wherever we turn as well as hostility and even violence. Among those accused of witchcraft, single women and widows are the majority, women not formally bound and subordinate to a man. During the centuries of witch burning, women were driven out of roles they had been used to occupying in the world of work, expelled from businesses.
Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Women in ecology Podcasts: WGBH, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity, Index of best energyskeptic posts
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Chollet M (2022) In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial.
Carmen Maria Machado writes in the Foreword:
In Defense of Witches is a spirited account of the way the perpetrators of witch-hunts have endured, albeit in modern form and with altered tactics; so much so that the people responsible can plausibly say they have no connection to their forebears of the past.
Chollet makes the case that witch-hunts aren’t over. Sure, we don’t burn, hang, or drown as many women now, but there are myriad ways women’s lives continue to be destroyed. Women are abused, assaulted, economically disempowered, raped, shoved into the margins, pressured, silenced, ignored, treated as guinea pigs, co-opted, stolen from, misrepresented, forced into pregnancy or servitude, imprisoned, and sometimes murdered. 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.
You’d be hard-pressed to find a more enduring and potent archetype than the witch; she has served as a shorthand for women’s power and potential—and, for some, the threat of those things—for much of human history.
If we forget—even now, in an age of the consequences of hard-won political battles—that women occupy the literal margins, we will continue to lose all ground. It is not an accident that I write this foreword at a moment in US history where abortion rights are in jeopardy, and the COVID pandemic—aided by decades of misogynist policies and a nonexistent social safety net—has gutted all of the economic advances American women have made in the last half-century. The fact is, no matter how many advances societies make, they cannot help but treat women in the same predictable ways. The past, as they say, is hardly past at all.
The witch embodies woman free of all domination, all limitation; she is an ideal to aim for; she shows us the way. The word “witch” was the very worst seal of shame, the false charge which caused the torture and death of tens of thousands of women. The witch-hunts that took place in Europe, principally during the 16th and 17th centuries, based on wild accusations of night-time flights to reach sabbath meetings, of pacts and copulation with the Devil.
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.
We often make the mistake of thinking the witch-hunts part of the Middle Ages have nothing to do with us today. Yet the most extensive witch-hunts occurred during the Renaissance around 1400 and became a major phenomenon by 1560. Executions were still taking place at the end of the eighteenth century.
We often explain the persecutions as a religious fanaticism led by perverted inquisitors. Yet, the Inquisition, which was above all concerned with heretics, made very little attempt to discover witches; the vast majority of condemnations for witchcraft took place in the civil courts. The secular court judges revealed themselves to be “more cruel and more fanatical than Rome” when it came to witchcraft. And this distinction is only moderately useful in a world where there was no belief system beyond the religious. Even among the few who spoke out against the persecutions—such as the Dutch physician Johann Weyer, who, in 1563, condemned the “bloodbath of innocents”—none doubted the existence of the Devil.
As for the Protestants, despite their reputation as the greater rationalists, they hunted down witches with the same ardor as the Catholics. The return to literalist readings of the Bible, championed by the Reformation, did not favor clemency—quite the contrary. In Geneva, under Calvin, 35 “witches” were executed in accordance with one line from the Book of Exodus: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” (Exodus 22:18).
Witch-hunts demonstrate 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.
The demonization of women as witches had much in common with anti-Semitism. Terms such as witches’ “sabbath” and their “synagogue” were used; like Jews, witches were suspected of conspiring to destroy Christianity and both groups were depicted with hooked noses.
Often, far from being the work of an uncouth, poorly educated community, the choice of scapegoat came from on high, from the educated classes.
The origin of the witch myth coincides closely with that—in 1454—of the printing press, which plays a crucial role in it.
The work of two inquisitors, Heinrich Kramer (or Henricus Institor) from Alsace and Jakob Sprenger from Basel, the Malleus Maleficarum was published in 1487 and has been compared to Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Reprinted upward of 15 times, it sold around 30,000 copies throughout Europe during the great witch-hunts. Throughout this age of fire, in all the trials, the judges relied on it. They would ask the questions in the Malleus and the replies they heard came equally from the Malleus.
One emerges from these accounts chilled to the bone, and especially as a woman. Of course, many men were executed for witchcraft, but misogyny was at the heart of the persecutions. “Male witches are of small concern,” as one author of the Malleus confirmed. Its authors feel that “if the evil of women did not in fact exist—not to mention their acts of sorcery—the world would remain unburdened of countless dangers.” Weak in body and mind, spurred on by insatiable licentious drives, women were thought to make easy prey for the Devil. In the trials in most areas, women represented on average 80% of those accused and 85% of those condemned. Women were also at a disadvantage when it came to the judicial machine: in France, men made up 20% of those accused, but they originated 50% of the appeal cases brought to the French parliament.
The campaign led between 1587 and 1593 in 22 villages in the region of Trier, in Germany—the starting point and also the epicenter, along with Switzerland, of the witch-hunts—was so relentless that, in two of the villages, only one woman was left alive; in total, 368 women were burned. Entire family lines were wiped out: the charges were not very clear against Magdelaine Denas, who at 77 was burned as a witch in the Cambrésis region of Northern France in 1670, but her aunt, mother and daughter had already been executed because it was thought that witchcraft was hereditary.
For some time, the accusations tended to spare the upper classes, and when they in turn came under scrutiny from accusers, the trials rapidly fizzled out. The political enemies of certain high-born figures would occasionally denounce the latter’s daughters or wives as witches; this was easier than attacking their enemies directly. However, the great majority of victims belonged to the lower classes. They were at the mercy of entirely male institutions: interrogators, priests or pastors, torturers, guards, judges and executioners—all were men.
We can imagine the panic and distress of these women, exacerbated for most by having to face their ordeal entirely alone. The men of their families rarely attempted to support them—sometimes even adding their voices to those of the accusers. For some, this reticence can be explained by fear: men accused of witchcraft were for the most part accused due to their intimacy with “witches.” Others took advantage of the climate of general suspicion “to free themselves from unwanted wives and lovers, or to blunt the revenge of women they had raped or seduced.
Some of the women accused were both sorceresses and healers, a combination that reads strangely to us now, but was seen as natural and obvious at the time. They cast or lifted spells, they brewed philters and potions, but they also cared for the sick and injured, and helped women to give birth. They were the only option available to most people suffering from ill health and had always been respected members of their communities, until their activities became associated with the workings of the Devil. More generally, however, any woman who stepped out of line risked arousing the interest of a witch-hunter. Talking back to a neighbor, speaking loudly, having a strong character or showing a bit too much awareness of your own sexual appeal: being a nuisance of any kind would put you in danger.
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
There are also many contemporary references to a “rejection of alms” routine: wealthy people who disdained the outstretched hand of a beggar and then fell ill or suffered some misfortune would rush to accuse her of putting a spell on them, thus displacing their guilty obligation back on the beggar. In other cases, we find the logic of the scapegoat in its purest form: “Ships are in trouble out at sea? Digna Robert, in Belgium, is arrested, burned, displayed upon a wheel (1565). A windmill outside Bordeaux has broken down? It is claimed that Jeanne Nichols, known as Gache, has ‘blocked’ it (1619).
Having a woman’s body could be enough to make you suspect. After their arrest, accused women were stripped naked, shaved and handed to a witch pricker, who would carry out a meticulous search for the Devil’s mark, on the surface or within their body, by pricking them with needles. Any birthmark, scar or irregularity could serve as proof—which explains why older women were condemned in such great numbers.
In Scotland, witch prickers even traveled through towns and villages offering to unmask the witches hidden among their inhabitants. In 1649, the city of Newcastle hired one with the incentive of twenty shillings’ payment per condemned witch. Thirty women were taken to the town hall and undressed. And—what a surprise—most were pronounced guilty.
Witch-hunters are revealed as both obsessed with and terrified by female sexuality. Their interrogations included asking, tirelessly, what the Devil’s penis looked like. The Malleus Malleficarum confirms that witches have the power to make men’s genitals disappear and that they keep whole collections of them in chests or in birds’ nests, where they go on desperately wiggling
In addition to being a household symbol turned upside down, the phallic form of the broom that witches sit astride bears witness to their sexual freedom. The sabbath is understood as an occasion of wild, untrammeled sexual exhibition.
To all this was added rape by the women’s guards.
Jean Delumeau sees Alvarus Pelagius’s De Planctu Ecclesiae, which was written in about 1330 at the request of Pope John XXII, as the major document of clerical hostility toward women, a “call to take up holy war against the Devil’s female allies” and the precursor of the Malleus Maleficarum. In this text, the Spanish Franciscan states, notably, that women, “beneath a humble exterior, hide a proud and wayward temperament, in which they resemble the Jews. The Church fathers and their successors were building on Greek and Roman traditions. Before Eve ate the forbidden fruit, Greek mythology’s Pandora had already opened the urn that held all the ills of humanity. Fledgling Christianity borrowed much from Stoicism, which was already opposed to pleasure and therefore to women.
Karlsen rejects the portraits often drawn of New England’s accused women, which, by dwelling on their “bad character” or “deviant personality,” adopted the accusers’ point of view. She discerns here a manifestation of the “deeply embedded tendency in our society to hold women ultimately responsible for the violence committed against them.
The witch-hunts’ toll of human lives remains deeply disputed and will probably never be established with certainty. In the 1970s, there was talk of a million victims, or possibly many more. These days, we talk instead of between 50,000 and 100,000. These figures exclude those who were lynched, who committed suicide or who died in prison—whether from the effects of torture or due to the poor conditions of their imprisonment. Others who did not lose their lives were banished instead or saw their reputation and that of their family ruined. Yet all women, even those who were never accused, felt the effects of the witch-hunts. The public staging of the tortures, a powerful source of terror and collective discipline, induced all women to be discreet, docile and submissive—not to make any waves. What’s more, one way or another, they were compelled to assume the conviction that they were the incarnation of evil; they were forcibly persuaded of their own guilt and fundamental wickedness.
By reclaiming the story of the women accused of witchcraft, Western feminists have—whether deliberately or not—both perpetuated their subversive effect and defiantly reasserted the terrifying powers accorded them by their judges.
The first feminist to disinter the witches’ story and to claim this title for herself was the American Matilda Joslyn Gage, who fought for women’s right to vote and also for the rights of Native Americans and the abolition of slavery—she was given a prison sentence for helping slaves to escape. In Woman, Church and State (1893), she offered a feminist reading of the witch-hunts: “When for ‘witches’ we read ‘women,’ we gain fuller comprehension of the cruelties inflicted by the church upon this portion of humanity.” Gage inspired the character of Glinda, the good witch in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which was written by her son-in-law, L. Frank Baum.
These days, witches are everywhere. In the US, they take part in the Black Lives Matter movement, put spells on Donald Trump, protest against white supremacists and against those who question a woman’s right to abortion. [My note: and in San Francisco, invented a new goddess: the goddess of Parking]
Misogynists too, as ever, appear to be obsessed with the figure of the witch. “Feminism encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians,” the American televangelist Pat Robertson railed as recently as 1992.
During the 2016 US presidential campaign, the hatred shown toward Hillary Clinton far outstripped even the most virulent criticisms that could legitimately be pinned on her. She was linked with “evil” and widely compared to a witch, which is to say that she was attacked as a woman, not as a political leader.
After her defeat, some of those critics dug out the song “Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead,” sung in The Wizard of Oz to celebrate the Witch of the East’s death brandished not only by Donald Trump’s electors, but also by supporters of Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s main rival in the primaries. On Sanders’ official site, a fundraising initiative was announced under the punning title “Bern the Witch”—an announcement that the Vermont senator’s campaign team took down as soon as it was brought to his attention. Continuing this series of limp quips, the conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh quipped, “She’s a witch with a capital B”—he can’t have known that, at the Salem witch trials in the 17th century, a key figure had already exploited this consonance by calling his servant, Sarah Churchill, who was one of his accusers, “bitch witch.” In reaction, female Democrat voters started sporting badges calling themselves “Witches for Hillary” or “Hags for Hillary.
“As witchcraft is a practice, it has no need of organized religious worship, although it can easily be combined with one,” explains Mæl, a French witch. “There is no fundamental incompatibility, here. Indeed, we find witches coming from the big monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) as well as atheist and agnostic witches, but also witches adhering to pagan and neopagan religions (polytheists, Wiccans, Hellenists, etc.).
Starhawk—who operates within the very broad church of the neopagan religion, Wicca—also advocates the invention of new rituals as the need arises. She describes, for instance, how the ritual with which she and her friends now celebrate the winter solstice began when they decided to light a great fire on the beach and then plunged together into the ocean, hands in the air, chanting and making jubilant cries.
The confrontation between those who defend the rights of women and sexual minorities and those who adhere to reactionary ideologies is increasingly fraught. On 6 September 2017, in Louisville, Kentucky, the local WITCH group demonstrated in support of the state’s last abortion clinic, which was threatened with closure, claiming that American religious fanatics [have been] crucifying women’s rights since the 1600s.
in February 2017, a group of witches—among them, the singer Lana Del Rey—agreed to meet at the foot of Trump Tower in New York to try to bring about the President’s impeachment. The organizers asked members to bring a black thread, sulfur, feathers, salt, an orange candle and a white one, and an “unflattering” photo of Donald Trump. In reaction, Christian nationalists invited their adherents to counteract this spiritual offensive by reciting a psalm from the Book of David. They spread the word on Twitter with the hashtag #PrayerResistance.
The pages that follow will not spend much time on contemporary witchcraft. What I’m interested in is to explore the afterlife of the witch-hunts in Europe and the US. The hunts both translated and amped up prejudices about women, especially the stigma that attaches to some women. The hunts effectively repressed certain behaviors and lifestyles. We have inherited these representations as they have been forged and perpetuated over centuries. The negative associations continue to produce, at best, censorship and self-censorship, and barriers wherever we turn; at worst, hostility and even violence.
Among those accused of witchcraft, we will note the over-representation of single women and widows—that is, of women not formally bound and subordinate to a man. In this period, women were driven out of roles they had been used to occupying in the world of work. They were expelled from businesses; professional apprenticeship was formalized and women were thereby denied access. Women living alone, in particular, were subjected to “unbearable economic pressure.” In Germany, the widows of master craftsmen were no longer permitted to continue their husbands’ work.
As for married women, the reintroduction of Roman law in Europe from the eleventh century formalized their juridical ineligibility; a small margin of autonomy remained to them, but this was finally formally closed off in the sixteenth century.
Nowadays, despite being legally and practically sanctioned, women’s independence continues to elicit general skepticism. 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.
Over the same period as the witch-hunts, we also see the criminalization of contraception and abortion. In France, a law issued in 1556 obliged all pregnant women to declare their pregnancy and to ensure a witness at the birth. Infanticide in France became “an exceptional crime that was not subject to regular judicial procedures or standards of proof”—a status even witchcraft was not accorded there. Among the accusations made against “witches,” murder of infants came up frequently; it was often said that witches consumed children’s cadavers at their sabbaths [my note: which is what QANON followers say about liberals]. The witch becomes the “antimother.” Many of the accused were healers who played the role of midwife—but who also used to help women wishing to prevent or terminate a pregnancy.
Witch-hunts paved the way for the gendered labor division required by capitalism, reserving remunerated work for men and assigning to women the birthing and education of the future labor-force. This division has endured into the present day: women are free to have children or not … on condition they choose to have them. Those who choose not to are often likened to heartless creatures, obscurely evil and malevolent toward the children of others. The witch-hunts also branded a very negative image of old women deep into the collective consciousness. Very young “witches” were burned, and even children of seven or eight, girls and boys, but older women, considered both repugnant to look at and especially dangerous due to their experience, became the “favored victims of the witch-hunts.” Gage wrote: “Instead of the tenderness and care due to aged women, they were so frequently accused of witchcraft that for years it was an unusual thing for an old woman in the north of Europe to die in her bed.”
The hate-filled obsession with old women shown by painters (Quentin Metsys, Hans Baldung, Niklaus Manuel Deutsch) and poets (Ronsard, Du Bellay) can be explained by the cult of youth that flourished at this time and by the simple fact that women were now beginning to live longer. Moreover, the privatization of land that had been common space—known in the UK as “enclosure,” part of the early amassing of property that prepared the ground for capitalism—was especially damaging for women. Men were more easily able to access remunerated work, which became the sole means of subsistence. Women depended disproportionately on common land, on areas where it was possible to graze cows, to gather firewood or herbs.
The enclosure process both dissolved their independence and, for all who could not count on their children’s support, reduced the oldest among them to begging. Although occasionally freer in her behavior 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. These women were believed to be subject to even stronger sexual urges than in their youth, hence they were driven to seek copulation with the Devil; in them, desire was considered grotesque and repulsive. Nowadays, given that women are considered to wither with time, whereas men age attractively, and given that age exacts penalties on women’s sexual and married lives, and that, for women, the competition for youthfulness has taken on an ever more desperate tone, we may assume that the representations of old women during the witch-hunts continue to haunt us,
The subjugation of women required by capitalist systems occurred in parallel with that of peoples branded “inferior,” who, enslaved and colonized, became providers of free resources and free labor. But capitalism also entailed the systematic plundering of natural resources and the establishment of a new conception of knowledge. The emerging new science was arrogant and imbued with contempt for femininity, which was associated with irrationality, sentimentality and hysteria, as well as with a natural world requiring domination. Modern medicine, in particular, was built on this model, and the witch-hunts enabled the official doctors of the period to eliminate competition from female healers—despite their being broadly more competent than the doctors. The legacy for healthcare today includes a systematically aggressive stance toward patients, and especially toward female patients, as shown by the mistreatment and violence exposed over recent years, particularly through social media.
Whether or not they define themselves as feminists, these women refuse to give up the full exercise of their abilities and their liberty, the exploration of their desires and potential; they will not sacrifice the full enjoyment of their own lives. They thereby lay themselves open to social punishment, which may happen simply through the unthinking reactions and condemnations of those around them, so deep-rooted is the narrow definition of what a woman should be.
The single woman embodies female independence in its most obvious and visible form. This makes her a magnet for reactionary hate, but it also makes her an intimidating figure for a substantial number of other women. The gender-divided labor model that still constrains us has significant psychological consequences. Nothing in the way most girls are educated encourages them to believe in their own strength and abilities, nor to cultivate and value their independence. They are taught not only to consider partnership and family the foundations of their personal achievements, but also to look on themselves as delicate and helpless, and to seek emotional security at all costs, such that their admiration for intrepid female adventurers remains purely notional and without impact on their own lives.
Boys are encouraged to map out their adult trajectory in the most adventurous manner possible. Conquering the world all alone is the most romantic path possible for a guy, and he can only pray that some lady doesn’t slow him down along the way, thereby ruining everything. But for women, the romance of forging out into the world is painted as pathetic and dreary if there’s no dude there. […] And Jesus, does it take hard work to reinvent the world outside those narrow conventions!
In male culture there is no Princess Charming, no fabulous wedding with glorious suits. Whereas women learn to dream of “romance” rather than “love,” in line with a distinction established by Steinem. She writes: “The more patriarchal and gender-polarized a culture is, the more addicted to romance. And this substantially disadvantages women: “Since most human qualities are labeled ‘masculine,’ and only a few are ‘feminine’
The pity reserved for single women may well conceal a bid to ward off the threat they represent. Witness the cliché of the “cat lady.
In her show Je parle toute seule (“Talking to myself”), comedian Blanche Gardin describes how her friends advised her to get a cat—a sign, as she read it, that her situation was really desperate: “No one says, ‘Get a hamster, they live two or three years, by then you’ll have found someone.’ No, what they propose is a 20-year-long solution. I ask you!” Cats are, in fact, witches’ favorite choice of “familiar spirit”—usually simply called their “familiar”—a supernatural creature who assists in their magical practice and allows them sometimes to change their appearance. In the original animated opening credits for the series Bewitched, Samantha turns into a cat and rubs against her husband’s legs, before jumping into his arms and becoming her human self again.
In 1233, a bull issued by Pope Gregory IX declared cats to be “the Devil’s servants.” 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 …
When women have the audacity to strike out for independence, they are met by a war machine that’s unafraid to use blackmail, intimidation and threats in order to make them give up. According to journalist Susan Faludi, throughout history, each step forward in women’s emancipation, however small, has brought its counteroffensive. After the Second World War, American sociologist Willard Waller proposed that “independent-minded women had gotten ‘out of hand,’” thanks to the transformations wrought by the conflict—as if echoing the Malleus Maleficarum: “When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil.” Men, it seems, experience the merest breeze of equality as something like a catastrophic hurricane—there’s a similar exaggeration involved when majority groups feel under attack and consider themselves practically overwhelmed as soon as victims of racism show the least sign of standing up for themselves.
In her 1991 book Backlash, Faludi sets out in minute detail the many manifestations of what she calls the “revenge” or “backlash”: a veritable propaganda campaign which gathered momentum in the US throughout the 1980s—in the press and through television, cinema and psychology books—to counteract the feminist advances of the preceding decade.
A popular scholarly book entitled The Cost of Loving warned of the “myth of independence.” Newsweek shrieked that single women over 40 are “more likely to be killed by a terrorist” than marry. From all sides, women are warned to beware the rapid decline in their fertility, to abandon their absurd castles in the air and to have children as early as possible. Wives who have not been able to make their husbands “the focus of their life” are singled out for opprobrium. “Experts” point to a supposed increase in the number of heart attacks and suicides among working women. The press published endless doom-laden articles about nursery schools, with sober headlines such as: “MOMMY, DON’T LEAVE ME HERE!
Films and magazines were filled with glowing housewives and mothers, and also with pallid single women whose problem was they expected “too much from life.
Just as, at the time of the witch-hunts, women who wished to work as men did were often prevented on multiple fronts—finding their access to education blocked or themselves expelled from the family business—so, in recent decades, women have met with merciless hostility. Witness the story of Betty Riggs and her colleagues, employees of American Cyanamid (it has since become Cytec Industries), in West Virginia. In 1974, the management were obliged by the state to hire women on their production lines. Spotting a rare opportunity to escape the round of dollar-an-hour jobs in which she’d been stuck—to support her parents and son, and, eventually, to leave her violent husband—Betty Riggs waged a determined campaign to be hired. After a year, she was eventually hired, along with 35 other women. She was placed in the pigments workshop, where, during her first year, the production showed considerable improvement. But the women were harassed by their male colleagues. And then, toward the decade’s end, the company suddenly showed an interest in the effects of the substances they were handling on the reproductive health of their female employees.
While refusing to put additional protective measures in place, and knowing the same substances posed a similar risk to their male employees, the company decided that fertile women under 50 years old could no longer work in that department … unless they were sterilized. The 7 affected employees were devastated. Because they absolutely depended on these jobs, five of them decided to have the operation, among them Betty Riggs, who was only 26 at the time. Less than two years later, at the end of 1979, at daggers drawn with the Occupation Safety and Health Administration authority, Cyanamid’s management reacted by closing the pigments department altogether: “The jobs the five women had sacrificed their wombs to keep were gone. The women went on to lose the legal action they pursued against the company: a federal judge ultimately ruled that they had had “the option” of sterilization. Riggs was obliged to go back to “women’s work” and earn her living cleaning houses.
Who is this Devil who, from the fourteenth century onward, in the eyes of powerful European men, began to loom behind the figure of every female healer, every sorceress, every woman who was slightly too forward or too much of a stirrer, to the point that they became a mortal threat to society? What if this Devil were in fact independence?
For me, the history of witchcraft could equally be called the history of independence.
Today, in Ghana, among the women reduced to living in “witch camps,” 70% were accused of witchcraft following their husband’s death.
In Europe, in the fifteenth century, before the major wave of witchcraft trials, 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. Some of the beguines even lived and worked outside the beguinage—for example, Jeanne du Faut, who kept a flourishing silk business. They were used to a physical, intellectual and spiritual prosperity that was quite the opposite of the withering to which so many thousands of women locked up in convents were condemned.
The execution of Marguerite Porete—a beguine from Hainaut who, in 1310, was burned for heresy in the Place de Grève, in front of Paris’s town hall—rang the death knell of the tolerance these women had enjoyed, for they were increasingly ill appreciated due to their “double rejection of obedience, to both Church and husband.
The state no longer organizes public executions for alleged witches, but the death penalty for women who wish to be free has, in a sense, been privatized: when a woman is killed by her partner or ex-partner (which, in France, occurs every three days, on average), it is often because she has left the partner or announced her intention to do so. 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.
But independence is not the sole preserve of widows and singles. It can also occur in the home itself, right under a husband’s nose. This is indeed the symbolism of the witch’s nocturnal flights, which lead her to desert the marital bed, escaping the sleeping man’s vigilance, to straddle her broomstick and take off for the sabbath. In the demonologists’ tirades, which betray the masculine obsessions of their times, the witch’s flight represents a freedom to come and go, not only without the husband’s permission but generally without his knowledge (unless he is a witch himself) and even to his disadvantage. By picking up a broomstick or chair leg and placing it between her legs, the witch awards herself a simulacrum of the virile member that she lacks. And by artificially stepping outside her sex and giving herself that of a man, she is also stepping outside her female gender: the witch is able to accord herself the ease of movement that, within the standard social order, is the unique privilege of men.
Granting herself this autonomy, and thereby escaping the man whose principal freedom is manifest through his dominance over her, the witch spirits a portion of the man’s power away from him: her liberation is also a larceny.
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. Whereas the example promulgated over the period of the witch-hunts, imposed first by violence and then, later, with the nineteenth-century invention of the housewife ideal, by a clever mix of flattery, seduction and menace, locks women into their role as reproducers and disenfranchises them from participation in the world of work. Thus, women are positioned in such a way that their own identity is constantly at risk of being muddled with others,’ of atrophying, of being swallowed up altogether.
The “conservation of energy” theory was developed by doctors in the 19th century, who thought the body’s organs and functions were in competition for the limited amount of energy circulating among them. From that point on, knowing their lives’ ultimate goal to be reproduction, women were obliged to concentrate their physical energy internally, toward the womb. When pregnant, they were expected to remain horizontal for most of the day and avoid all other activity, especially anything intellectual: Doctors and educators were quick to draw the obvious conclusion that, for women, higher education could be physically dangerous. Too much development of the brain, they counseled, would atrophy the uterus. Reproductive development was totally antagonistic to mental development.
Tracy McMillan’s recommended that women suppress their anger in order to increase the chances that a man will deign to marry them. Female anger threatens the institution of motherhood. In Little Women, Marmee replies to daughter Jo: “I am angry nearly every day of my life, Jo; but I have learned not to show it; and I still hope to learn not to feel it, though it may take me another 40 years to do so.” Since the mother’s “job” is to guarantee the peace and serenity of her home, to look after the well-being, both mental and material, of all the other members of her household, her own anger becomes illegitimate.
At work, too, we run the risk of “dissolving” away. The same subjection, the same reduction to stereotype also occurs here. The oppression of female medical workers—whether lay healers or officially recognized practitioners—and the establishment of a male monopoly in medicine, which happened in Europe during the Renaissance and in the United States toward the end of the nineteenth century, provides a perfect illustration of this. When women were allowed to return to the medical profession, it was as nurses; that is, in the subordinate position of assistants to the Great Men of Science, a position that was assigned them in recognition of their “natural” qualities. In France, these days, not only are a substantial proportion of women employed part-time (a third of women work part-time, compared with 8% of men) and therefore not financially independent—which is to say they aren’t independent at all—but women are also siloed off into professions focused on education, on caring for children and older people, or into assistant roles: Almost half of women (47%) are concentrated in a dozen professions, such as nursing (87.7% of nurses are women), care work and nursery assistant roles (97.7% are women), cleaning, secretarial and school teaching.
Whereas, in the Middle Ages, like their male counterparts, European women could access a great range of professions. In the medieval towns, women worked as smiths, butchers, bakers, candlestick makers, hat-makers, ale-brewers, wool-carders and retailers. In England, 72 out of 85 guilds counted women among their members and some were dominated by them. So it was a re-conquest that women began to attempt in the 20th century.
The history of science and art is filled with men who have appropriated the work of a female partner—F. Scott Fitzgerald, for example, who studded his books with his wife Zelda’s writing.
If you’re rebelling at home, amid family—for example, by refusing to organize your entire life around your offspring—you will be called a virago and a bad mother. Here too you will be invited to look beyond the concerns of your own little interests. You will inevitably be reminded that “no one has forced you to have children,” so effectively have the rights to contraception and abortion been co-opted to reinforce the norms of “good” mothering. Curiously, “good” fathering has been much less of a target, despite men theoretically being equally involved in the decision to procreate. It is almost always mothers on the receiving end of those little quips apparently born of simple common sense, such as: “You don’t have children just for someone else to bring them up.” 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.
If they wish simultaneously to pursue family, personal and professional lives, there is a high chance that motherhood will exact penalties along the way, whereas fatherhood has no deleterious effects on careers or vocation—the opposite, in fact. In short, if we want to be consistent, we should either be easing off on girls’ education or building into it some serious guerrilla-style training in opposing the patriarchy, all the while ourselves working actively to change the situation.
You want equality between men and women? Start by not having children. Wombs on strike: this great fear was at the heart of the debates (among men) that preceded the legalization of contraception, which amounts to a peculiar admission—for, really, if motherhood is such a universally wonderful experience in our society, why would women choose anything else?
In Europe, governing politicians became obsessed with contraception, abortion and infanticide from the time of the witch-hunts onward. Although I would never put the third item on a par with the first two, it’s safe to say that all three have often been weaponized in protests against women’s situation in particular and against the social order more broadly.
Improving one’s lot, or simply making one’s life livable, includes the option to have as many children as one would like, or not to have any at all.
The serf became “exceedingly afraid of worsening his lot by multiplying children whom he could not support,” while women lived in fear of pregnancies. Throughout the sixteenth century, “the desire, the need for barrenness grew more and more.” On the other hand, the priest and lord would have been keen to increase the number of their serfs.
In the real world, it is female healers who are most closely engaged in practices intended to limit births, and this is one key reason for the ferocity of the opposition they encounter.
Before the great plague of 1348, which killed around a third of Europe’s population, the Church had stayed relatively indifferent to the question of birth rate; ideally, it would even have preferred to convert the masses to abstinence. This was soon to change. At the end of the 16th century, Franciscan theologian Jean Benedicti advocated an unlimited birth rate, assuring families that, as for the birds, “God would provide.” The population of Europe was set to explode over the course of the 18th century, but this did not hold back the campaigns of pro-birth advocates, despite their less than glorious motivation.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, in France—where the fertility rate had plateaued a century earlier, bucking the general European trend—pro-birth advocates agitated “‘in the name of social peace, national interest and the protection of the race’: competition for jobs obliged working families to keep their mouths shut; a plentiful supply of soldiers was needed for the war; and immigration from the colonies presented a real threat to national identity.
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 guns (there were more than 15,000 deaths by shooting in the US in 2017), and there is no sign of their marshalling such ardor to protest against wars, nor against pollution, which it is estimated was responsible for one death in six around the world in 2015. “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.
In 1905, an anonymous American social worker who called herself “A Childless Wife” wrote: “Whenever I learned the reason of woman’s submission it was always based upon the fact that she had children and no money, the existence of the one precluding the obtaining of the other. […] I discovered that enough money, rightly earned, can buy freedom, independence, self-respect and the power to live one’s own life. Procreation represents the deadlock at the heart of the current system, to the degree that it induces us to perpetuate a way of living which leads directly to ecological catastrophe and which guarantees our compliance (because we have children to feed, bills to pay, etc.).
By my logic, not giving life to others allows us to enjoy our own lives fully.
In France, only 4.3% of women and 6.3% of men say they do not want a child. Contrary to what we may imagine, the number of childless women decreased consistently throughout the twentieth century, with “permanent non-reproduction” (whatever the reason) now at 13%.
The proportion of American women between 40 and 44 who have never given birth went from 10% in 1976 to 18% in 2008, across all communities. 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).
For myself, without even going into the debates over the ecological impact of a drop in the birth rate, I could not add another member to a society that has so spectacularly failed to establish a harmonious relationship with its natural environment and that seems so determinedly set on destroying the latter completely. With 8 billion human beings on the planet, any danger of extinction looks far from imminent—or, at least, any danger of extinction for lack of births. As actor and comedian Betsy Salkind points out, “When God said be fruitful and multiply, there were only two people.” In the West, at least, contraception is widely available, and a child can no longer be considered an indispensable economic advantage—quite the opposite. What is more, we are living in an era characterized by loss of faith in a better future (or even in a future at all), on an overpopulated planet that is poisoned with a wide range of pollutants, where exploitation is rife, and, in the West, we are under serious threat from fascism.
American feminist essayist Rebecca Solnit notes, “The idea that a life should seek meaning seldom emerges since marriage and children are assumed to be inherently meaningful, indeed, treated as the only meaningful options.” Solnit deplores the herd mentality that locks so many people into lives that conform entirely to social prescription and yet “are still miserable.” She reminds us, “There are so many things to love besides one’s own offspring, so many things that need love, so much other work love has to do in the world.”