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- While modern witchcraft is inclusive of many different genders and identities, witches in ancient myth and literature were almost exclusively women. Their stories were in part about navigating gender roles and power in a patriarchal system.
theconversation.com/what-greek-myth-tells-us-about-modern-witchcraft-193696
Witchcraft in colonial North America is the history of gender more broadly, among white settlers, but also in their gendered encounter with Native North Americans and their oppressive relationship with enslaved Africans and African Americans.
Oct 19, 2018 · Flying through the skies on a broomstick, the popular image of a witch is as a predominantly female figure – so much so that the costume has become the go-to Halloween outfit for women and girls...
- Too Rich, Too Poor, Too Female
- Powerless People
- Stay in Line, Woman
- Woman V Woman
- Systematic Oppression
In my scholarship on the darker aspects of U.S. culture, I’ve researched and written about numerous witch trials. I teach a college course here in Massachusetts that explores this perennially popular but frequently misinterpreted period in New England history. Perhaps the most salient point about witch trials, students quickly come to see, is gende...
As magistrates, judges and clergy, men enforced the rules of this early American society. When women stepped outside their prescribed roles, they became targets. Too much wealth might reflect sinful gains. Too little money demonstrated bad character. Too many children could indicate a deal with a devil. Having too few children was suspicious, too. ...
Prior to Salem, most witchcraft trials in New England resulted in acquittal. According to Demos, of the 93 documented witch trials that happened before Salem, 16 “witches” were executed. But the accused rarely went unpunished. In his 2005 book “Escaping Salem,” Richard Godbeer examines the case of two Connecticut women – Elizabeth Clawson of Stamfo...
Most Puritans who claimed to be victims of witchcraft were also female. In the famed Salem witch trials, the people “afflicted” by an unexplained “distemper” in 1692 were all teenaged girls. Initially, two girls from the Reverend Samuel Parris’ household claimed they were being bitten, pinched and pricked by invisible specters. Soon other girls rep...
Other Salem stories blame Tituba, an enslaved woman in the household of the Reverend Samuel Parris, for teaching witchcraft to the local girls. Tituba confessed to “signing the devil’s book” in 1692, confirming Puritans’ worst fears that the devil was actively recruiting. But given her position as an enslaved person and a woman of color, it’s almos...
- Bridget Marshall
Aug 14, 2015 · Witchcraft entered the feminist consciousness spiritually, though traditions like Wicca, and politically, as groups like WITCH—the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell ...
- Moira Donovan
Yet Nider himself does not gender witches consistently, and his most fully described maleficus, the arch-witch Staedelin, is a man. It is likely, however, that here we glimpse a contradiction between Nider’s own conception of witchcraft, and the beliefs and experiences of his informant, Peter Gruyères of Bern.
Nov 15, 2022 · Ancient witches: gender and power. While modern witchcraft is inclusive of many different genders and identities, witches in ancient myth and literature were almost exclusively women.
Male Witches, Witchcraft, and Masculinities in Early Modern Europe. Historical analysis of the gendering of early modern witch-trials has been dominated by the complex question of why the majority of people who faced trial for witchcraft were women.
