Witch Hunts: Then

Published on June 25, 2005 By Ionolast In History

A few years ago in chat, a visitor called one of the women a slut. One guy said a slut is just a term that some men use for women when the men can't control the women's sexuality. I said, "That's probably the kind of thing the witch hunts were about." The guy who defended sluts said I had guessed correctly; that women were the first healers and men didn't like the power the women had.

Yesterday there was a show on the History Channel titled "Witch Hunt." It focused entirely on the trials and executions in Salem in the 17th century. There was no mention of misogynism. So I thought, "Well, maybe it was the reason behind the European trials. I Googled "witch hunts" and found this. Link
(There's more background on this page.)

The medieval witch-hunts have long been depicted as part of a "war against women" conducted exclusively or overwhelmingly by men, especially those in positions of central authority. Deborah Willis notes that "more polemical" feminist accounts "are likely to portray the witch as a heroic protofeminist resisting patriarchal oppression and a wholly innocent victim of a male-authored reign of terror designed to keep women in their place." (Willis, Malevolent Nurture, p. 12.)

In fact, the stigmatizing, victimizing, and murdering of accused "witches" is more accurately seen as a collaborative enterprise between men and women at the local level. "The historical record suggests that both men and women found it easiest to fix these fantasies [of witchcraft], and turn them into horrible reality, when they were attached to women. It is really crucial to understand that misogyny in this sense was not reserved to men alone, but could be just as intense among women." Most of the accusations originated in "conflicts [that] normally opposed one woman to another, with men liable to become involved only at a later stage as ancillaries to the original dispute." Briggs adds that "most informal accusations were made by women against other women, ... [and only] leaked slowly across to the men who controlled the political structures of local society." At the trial level, his research on the French province of Lorraine found that
women did testify in large numbers against other women, making up 43 per cent of witnesses in these cases on average, and predominating in 30 per cent of them. ... A more sophisticated count for the English Home Circuit by Clive Holmes shows that the proportion of women witnesses rose from around 38 per cent in the last years of Queen Elizabeth to 53 per cent after the Restoration. ... It appears that women were active in building up reputations by gossip, deploying counter-magic and accusing suspects; crystallization into formal prosecution, however, needed the intervention of men, preferably of fairly high status in the community." (Briggs, Witches & Neighbours, pp. 264-65, 270, 273, 282.)
By following this link, Link I found this

In 1973, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English suggested that most witches were mid-wives and female healers. Their book Witches, Midwives, and Nurses convinced many feminists and Pagans that the Great Hunt was a pogrom aimed at traditional women healers. The Church and State sought to break the power of these women by accusing them of witchcraft, driving a wedge of fear between the wise-woman and her clients.

The evidence for this theory was -- and is -- completely anecdotal. Authors cited a number of cases involving healers, then simply assumed that this was what the "average" trial was like. However a mere decade after Witches, Midwives, and Nurses was published, we knew that this was not true. Healers made up a small percentage of the accused, usually between 2% and 20%, depending on the country. There was never a time or a place where the majority of accused witches were healers. In 1990, D. Harley's article, "Historians as demonologists: the myth of the midwife-witch" (in Social History of Medicine 3 (1990), pp. 1-26.) demonstrated that being a licensed midwife actually decreased a woman's changes of being charged.

And there was worse to come. Feminist and Pagan writers presented the healer-witch as the innocent, enlightened victim of the evil male witch hunters. Trials showed that as often as not, the "white" witch was an avid supporter of the "Burning Times." Diane Purkiss (The Witch in History) pointed out that "midwives were more likely to be found helping witch-hunters" than as victims of their inquiries. How did witches become witch-hunters? By blaming illnesses on their rivals. Feminist authors rightly lambasted male doctors who blamed unexplained illnesses on witches. Trial records suggest that this did happen, though not terribly often. If you look at doctors' case books you find that in most cases doctors found natural causes when people thought they were bewitched. When they did diagnose witchcraft, doctors almost never blamed a particular healer or witch. They were trying to explain their failure, not to destroy some individual.

Traditional healers and "white" witches routinely blamed diseases on witchcraft. For a doctor, diagnosing "witchcraft" was admitting failure. Medicine could do nothing against magick, and doctors were loathe to admit that they were powerless against a disease. However baneful magick was the forte of the helpful (or "white" witch). Folk healers regularly blamed illnesses on magick and offered counter-spells to cure their patients. Many were even willing to divine the name of the cursing witch, for a fee.

Overall, approximately 75% -80% of the accused were women. However this percentage varied dramatically. In several of the Scandinavian countries, equal numbers of men and women were accused. In Iceland over 90% of the accused were men. Central Europe killed the most witches, and it killed many more women than men -- this is why the overall percentages are so badly skewed.

Proponents of the misogyny theory generally ignore these variations. Many simply do not discuss male witches. One of the most egregious examples comes from Anne Llewellyn Barstow's Witchcraze. Barstow says that Iceland did not have a "real" witch hunt. Now, Iceland killed more witches than Ireland, Russia, and Portugal combined. Barstow claims that all these countries had "real" hunts, and offers no explanation of what made Iceland's deaths "unreal." The only thing I can see is that almost all Icelandic witches were men, and Barstow's theory cannot handle that.

Given the sexism of the times, it's not difficult to find shockingly misogynist witch trials. But misogyny does not explain the trial patterns we see. The beginning and end of the persecution don't correlate to any notable shifts in women's rights. Trials clustered around borders -- are borders more misogynist than interior regions? Ireland killed four witches, Scotland a couple thousand -- are the Scots that much more sexist? Barstow admits that Russia was every bit as misogynist as Germany, yet it killed only ten witches. Her theory can't explain why, and so she simply insists that there were probably lots of other Russian witches killed and they were probably mostly women. We've just lost all the evidence that would support her theory.

There's a lot more interesting reading on those pages, including how the numbers of "witches" executed was exaggerated.

Comments

Ionolast

on Jun 25, 2005

kingbee

on Jun 26, 2005

perhaps the most insidious consequence of a racist culture is the kinda self-hatred which drives victims to victimize each other. it doesn't surprise me at all that women were deeply involved in witch hunts. women also do mosta the work in enforcing sexual conformity that works to their own disadvantage while bolstering the double standards which favors only men.

rather than eliminating or minimizing misogynism's role in witchhunts, i believe they've helped to bolster their opponents' case.

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