Illustration © Kaitlynn Copithorne
‘We are the daughters of the witches you couldn’t burn,’ reads a t-shirt in a crowd. In a woman’s circle, the facilitator at some point announces, ‘men hated women so much, they burnt us.’
There are several problems with these kinds of statements: 1. Most people executed for alleged witchcraft were hung, not burnt. 2. These people were not witches, but scapegoats. 3. While around three-quarters of alleged witches were women in the UK, another one quarter were men. 4. The statement erroneously assumes that the accusers were mainly male, and the victims female. It’s true that most witch finders were men. The 15th-century treatise on witchcraft, the Malleus Maleficarum, was penned by a man (Heinrich Kramer). The following century, James I outlined his fears of witches in his Daemonologie. Such tomes would become the textbooks of the inquisition. But the witch trials were more complicated.
‘Radical feminist interpretations of witchcraft break down when we look closely at the people who accused women of practising sorcery,’ argues Dr Thomas Waters, in his 2019 book Cursed Britain, ‘Half of the imputers were female.’ He notes that some of these were close family – and that females made up almost half of the witnesses at court. Why did women accuse women of something that could get them killed?
Historian Thomas Waters is a regular Cunning Folk contributor and one of the foremost experts on witchcraft. I don’t disagree that our popular understanding of the witch trials is lacking nuance. I don’t think the facts, however, discount a feminist interpretation of this shadow history.
First, let’s be clear: women, globally, still suffer at the hands of men. According to WHO, in 2019, there were around 475,000 victims of homicide worldwide. Human violence is often gendered, with men more likely to kill or inflict violence on women, most commonly women they know. Men, on the other hand, are more likely to be attacked by a male stranger. Femicide occurs in all continents – though it is most frequent in South Africa and Latin America – notably, regions which have, until recently, been under colonial rule – undergoing the same primitive accumulation processes Silvia Federici outlines were integral to the development of capitalism in Europe. I have seen several historians specifically opine that Federici’s work set back our knowledge of the witch trials – a problem is that these critics view her seminal Caliban and the Witch as a history book rather than a political book.
Women suffer at the hands of men. But there is no denying women also had a role in the witch trials, not as passive bystanders but as agents in the destruction of other women. How might this fit with a feminist interpretation of the witch trials? Interviewing Kristen J. Solleé, author of Witches, Sluts, Feminists, in the Fire issue of Cunning Folk back in 2021, the answer, she said, is ‘internalised misogyny.’
I have this tendency to forever imagine what it is to be in minds very different to my own. Imagining I am in the mind of someone tired of these liberal discourses, I think they might think it very tenuous, the way feminists try, always, to make facts fit their worldview. Can’t we admit, they might say, that feminism is no longer relevant – that the role of misogyny in the witch trials was grossly overblown? But Sollée was not grappling with straws. Ample research backs her claims.
For instance, in 2014, sociologists at the University of Michigan looked at slut-shaming among female college students. What they found was that calling a woman a ‘slut’ – a socially stigmatising label – had little to do with that woman’s promiscuity, but that it was directed at people in different social classes, and that it had more to do with asserting one’s own moral ‘purity’ (and presumably, thus desirability?) via ostracising another woman.
What’s interesting (and tragic) is that women weaponise (and often fabricate) against one another, a trait long held as undesirable by men, who have idolised virgins and sought chaste wives. For a long time, a woman’s foremost role was to be a good wife and a mother. During the witch trials, petty neighbourly grievances aside, fears of the natural world and uncertainty presumably intertwined – at least unconsciously – with a scarcity mindset, where other women were rivals. This was, after all, a world of diminishing resources and dwindling common land. The need to become a wife and bear children was often a means of survival – and in many ways it still is.
In spite of progress made in women’s and human rights, there is still a gender pay gap in most regions. Anecdotally, I notice among my peers that most of the women who have ‘made it’ have spouses who work in finance, or otherwise have inherited money. Though women remain at risk of violence and sexual assault, for many of us, gendered discrimination is more likely to look like being patronised or paid less than our male colleagues. There are still gendered inequalities in healthcare, too, with illnesses that impact women like endometriosis and PCOS routinely ignored and their research underfunded. There are still significant hurdles for mothers in the workforce: poor maternity leave payments, in particular for freelance women, who make up a growing proportion of (other-than-maternal) labour. There is the difficulty in returning to ‘professional’ work after the very undervalued labour that is child-rearing. In some parts of the world, people, mostly women, are still accused of witchcraft and violently killed for it.
For women unconcerned by their reproductive value, interwomen rivalry still exists – but now it’s more often about sabotaging another person’s personhood for fear their personal value diminishes one’s own.
Consciously, many of us are supportive of fellow humans, and even more vehemently supporters of fellow women – of ‘sisterhood’. Many of us buy books by women and support women-owned businesses, rallying against centuries of leadership roles belonging to men. Unconsciously, however, many of us still veer into the territory of toxic femininity, devaluing other women socially through gossip, often for their presumed promiscuity or strong opinion. Anecdotally, any woman who has tasted anything that (at least outwardly) looks like success, knows this: under capitalism, people are threatened by another woman’s success: it boils down to questions like Why have they got it, not me? In different professions and situations, the symptoms of toxic femininity can look very different. The age-old fear of the evil eye has endured into the so-called age of rationalism.
These concerns play out in Molly Wise’s directorial debut short film, Trust Thy Sister: rehearsing for a show about the 17th-century witch trials, a group of women fling accusations at each other on and off the stage, the witch trials dynamics seeping between two eras, pre and post enlightenment. The film, which has screened at various film festivals, features Cunning Folk contributor Gabriella Tavini in a lead role. ’The label of “witch” drove people apart in the 17th century,’ Wise tells me, ‘It caused women to turn on each other to save themselves … I want the film to show that toxic competition ultimately leads to downfall, and we can’t make progress until we address it. Community and friendship are powerful tools to make the world a better place.’
Indeed, real progress cannot be made unless we swap a scarcity mindset for an abundance mindset; unless we turn away from self-focus and re-value community. I am not talking about a false community, itself based on neoliberal extraction – what can other powerful women do for me? – but a real one based on community care – how can I help people who do not have what I have? This too can become twisted with ego and performance; it can become twisted with the myth of meritocracy and the now ubiquitous American dream.
Economically and socially excluded from this dream are the poorest and most poorly connected in society – often the working class and marginalised – people who lack the network, resources, and confidence of their peers who went to public schools. Who you know remains more important than talents and skills – rather ubiquitous in the population but seldom given the space or resources to grow.
Practically translating a more liberal value system to life isn’t as simple as it seems. A less toxic breed of sisterhood is not just some woolly sentiment to sloganise, all the while maintaining the status quo, or privileging our own social mobility. Rather, it should be about supporting the people who do not have the same freedoms we have.
Of course, the witch trials weren’t all about toxic sisterhood – sometimes they derived from straight up fear and uncertainty. Today the same forces of scapegoating play out both on the small scale, in families, and on the large scale, in xenophobia and colonial land disputes. What we need is to really cultivate care and trust for others – not an optical solidarity but one rooted in real action.
Toppling down other women is not the answer for improving our own status – nor is it the answer to bridging social inequality. We are more likely to find long-term, satisfying freedom in actively striving to generate abundance, in turn lifting up the people who don’t have things as good as we do, and challenging the systems which make life hard.
But what kind of abundance? And what kind of equality? I could say that we can add more seats to the table, that we can sit together, rise together, and challenge anyone who says we cannot. The problem with this thinking is it implies that our measure of a good life is the very capitalist notion of success as productivity – that the myth of meritocracy is true – that everyone at the table earned their place there – as if the very bottom echelons of the workforce aren’t working extremely hard.
Perhaps we need to rewire our thinking about what constitutes a life well-lived. This is hard for anyone who has tasted the promised fruits of this capitalist age. Under capitalism, we care about the arbitrary flow of symbolic wealth and about individual ‘success’ – fame and wealth promise to bring us closer to the most real earthly paradise. There are other models: for a long time, in so many of our stories and value systems, the highest spire we could achieve was love, a rather ubiquitous resource, and one which cannot be bought or sold.