The Persecution of Women as Witches

by Ruth Wildes Schuler

Women were revered as Earth Mother figures in ancient times. In Greece which was considered the intellectual civilization of the world at that time, crucial political decisions were made by consulting the simple peasant girls who were Apollo's oracles at Delphi.

It was the Judea-Christian culture that severely altered women's place in the scheme of things. In the book of Genesis, Eve was given the blame for man's fall and her legacy was written:

"Unto the woman, I will greatly multiply thy pain and thy travail, in pain thou shall bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee." Woman was given the menstrual cycle and the agony of childbirth, but these did not compromise her full punishment. Patriarchy was the other half of that ancient curse, and the Christian civilization continued with the highly developed Jewish tradition of misogyny and sexual repression.

The Bible set sex out as the source of knowledge, civilization and death. For the sin of Eden, Adam must go to work and Eve must bear children. Thus, the human family and work-ethic sprung up from roots of sexual repression and guilt.

The Catholic Church has maintained an objection to abortion, thus continuing the ancient biblical curse which made childbearing a painful punishment for that original sin in the Garden of Eden. The church has retained this historical dimension of the myth of feminine evil.

By the Middle Ages men's earlier awe of woman altered from the point of viewing her as the personification of Mother Nature to that of viewing her as an avaricious and wicked soul. The fact that women produced living humans from their bodies was supernatural itself.

Women were then even blamed for storms and droughts. Men feared that women might gain power, so they dominated them with brute strength and used them as scapegoats. Joan of Arc was tried for heresy, but political power was the real issue involved.

The Judea-Christian concept of women as the original criminal has resulted in the slaughter of millions of people in a period of three hundred years. Since the late 1400's it has been estimated that at least nine million people have been executed for the sin of witchcraft. The majority of these victims have been women, for witchcraft seems to have been a female crime. Men were generally protected from such accusations because they were considered to be of superior intellect and virtue in both the Judean and Christian cultures.

Little is known about these women who were murdered, for the historians were male and felt that the massacre of witches was too unimportant to chronicle, except as mere footnotes. Three centuries of burning women at the stake in agony was passed over lightly, the genocide ignored because of an acceptance of the Bible's proclamation that females were evil.

Some of these witches were labeled poisoners, for they used drugs like aconite, amanita, hashish, laudanum, belladonna and organic amphetamines. Forgotten were their pioneer development of analgesics and medical treatments using herbs. During these trials, what women said in their own defense was ignored because the only records were written by their enemies-- men. The trials became a way of disposing of unwanted women, those that were old, different and non-conforming. In A Room Of One's Own, Virginia Woolf wrote:

"When one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet or some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor crazed with the torment that her gift had given her."

Perhaps we can better understand this phenomenon if we zero in on the witch trials of Massachusetts in the 1690's, even though the number executed there was microscopic compared to the millions put to death in England and on the European continent during the late Middle Ages. We have accurate records from Salem and the statistics show that more women than men were persecuted as witches. Of the 141 accused, 104 were women, of the 31 people convicted, 25 were women, and of the 20 executed, 14 were women.

We should look first at the young girls involved in these trials, for in Salem during the late 1600's young girls were ignored for the most part. Their spirits were as repressed by the society in which they lived as their legs were restricted by the long gowns that they were forced to wear. The Puritan Church hammered away at them with lusty tales of the Devil, continually painting him as the arch-criminal. He was the everlasting antagonist and proved to be a fascination in this never-ending detective story of crime.

When winter closed in on Salem Village, females were shut off from all outside activities. In contrast, men were relieved now from the heavier, chores and they could take their muskets into the forest and shoot deer, wild turkey, or a marauding fox or wolf. They could fetch a line, cut through the ice and fish or they could turn to odd jobs of carpentry or other secondary trades.

There were no diversions for females in winter time though, and they rarely got out of the house except to go to church. In summer they could pick berries or carry beer to the men working in the fields, but with the snow came the monotonous round of chores without any outlet for physical activity or childish mischief.

It was Tituba, the half-savage slave from Barbados who entertained these young girls during these winter months. She showed them tricks, spells, and fragments of Voodoo that she remembered from her own childhood. She told them tales, murmured nonsense rhymes, and gave these girls more attention than their own kinfolk.

Many theories have been offered for the young girls' possession in Salem. The most popular thesis has been that they were afflicted with hysteria due to the stress and repression in their lives, and that they used these fits to avail themselves of an opportunity to rebel against the restrictions placed upon them by the pious adult society in which they lived. Some psychologists have felt that some of these girls had paranoid tendencies which were hereditary. Linda Caporael, a graduate student in psychology at the University of California at Santa Barbara theorizes that the girls' madness was due to a fungus in grain rye called "ergot," which contains a hallucinogenic similar to LSD. Ergot could have caused the convulsions, mental disturbances and perceptual distortions. But for lack of a better explanation of the phenomena, the New England Puritans seized upon witchcraft. One of the bewitched girls, twelve-year-old Ann Putnam lived on a farm in the swampy part of Salem, where her father raised grain which proved to be contaminated. Her mother and two other girls living on the farm were similarly afflicted. Further evidence of ergot poisoning offered by Linda Caparael was the language used by these accusers pointing out the witches. Their claims of biting, pinching and pricking by pins could allude to a crawling and tingling sensation usually experienced by ergot victims.

There have been other theories for the girls' strange behavior. A Tory governor claimed the afflicted girls were an early case of mob action. George Beard, the inventor of the electric chair claimed that the girls were in touch with spirits.
It has been suggested by others that Tituba, who was an expert in herbs might have induced the girls to experiment with the jimson weed, and their bedevilment might actually have been drug highs similar to the LSD trips experienced today.

If this was true, Tituba's motives are uncertain, but there are some who feel that she might have done this in vengeance for having been torn away from the warm Barbados Islands and her black kinsmen and brought to the harsh northern landscape to live among rigid unsympathetic aliens who worked her exceedingly hard for long hours.

Whatever the cause of the girls' hysterical fits, the fact remained that it was the poor and disabled who were imprisoned and hanged. There was no such thing as a democracy among witches. The rich and well-connected people accused by the girls were able to flee New England and the judges ignored the extradition laws.
In researching these trials, it becomes obvious that the accusations became a vehicle that enabled the community to rid themselves of the old, sick and other undesirable women in their midst.

Sarah Good was disliked by the community because she smoked a pipe and tramped around the area begging for food. When the magistrate asked Sarah why she did not attend church services like the other women, she snapped, "For want of cloose." At the time of her conviction, she was carrying another child. She gave birth in prison, but no one bothered to record the event. After Sarah's arrest, her five-year-old daughter, Dorcas, ran around the countryside like a mad dog, biting the girls for what they had done to her mother. A warrant was duly sworn out for her, as it was obvious that she too was a witch, so off to prison she went. They did not hang five-year-old witches, but Dorcas never recovered from her imprisonment. Shut off from the sun and cooped up with aging women in all degrees of piety, iniquity, imbecility and intelligence, her face became pinched and sullen and her hair became wild and matted. When she came out of prison, history records that she was never "hale and well-looking again." We are left to guess at her mental state.

Along with young Dorcas, others of a tender age were tried and convicted of witchcraft. These included Sarah Carrier, age eight; Abigail Johnson, who was age eleven and her brother, Stephen, who was thirteen-years-old.
Bridget Bishop was a flashy dresser who sometimes wore a "red paragon bodice" for best and she also owned a great store of laces. She was a tavern-keeper who sometimes allowed young people to loiter at unseemingly hours playing at "shovelboard." William Stacy, a neighbor testified in her behalf, stating that he had once admired her, for when he was twenty-two, she had been kind and visited him when he had smallpox. We can only guess at what Bridget herself said and did in court, because Stephen Sewall, the recorder took no pains to write her words down.

Martha Carrier's sin was having pockmarked children. When she refused to confess to the crime of witchcraft, her two oldest boys were tied heels to heels, but the blood came out of their mouths before they would testify against their mother. Eventually under torture, they admitted that they were witches, too, and that their mother had made them so. At this point the youngest child without much persuasion declared that her mother was a black cat. When asked how she knew, she replied, "The cat said so." Sarah Osburne was scandalously remiss in her church attendance. The fact that she was ill and not fit to be out of bed made little impact upon the court. The constables had to support her during her trial, and she was put upon a nag and ridden to Ipswich prison. The fetid air, cold floors and meager food extracted their toll. She grew weaker each day until she died on May 10th.

Martha Cory proclaimed to the court: "I do not believe in witches!" The court asked her how she could make such a statement when three proven witches had already been taken in their parish. She continued to deny the reality of witchcraft to the end.

Rebecca Nurse was guilty of the crime of being partially deaf. At the time of her accusation she had been infirmed with a stomach complaint and had not left her house for nine days. Rebecca was a well-loved grandmother in her community, but she had grown too hard of hearing to understand a crucial question from the jurors. "Oh Lord, help me!," she cried out in court and spread her hands out helplessly. Her gesture was immediately imitated by the girls, who then proceeded to duplicate every move that Rebecca made. Those in the courtroom started to weep for the afflicted girls. Rebecca did not. This was interpreted by Judge Hawthorne as obvious guilt, for would not an innocent woman weep like other women? But tears are not possible for witches. After her conviction, though Rebecca was unable to walk, she was carried from Salem prison in a chair to the church, where she was excommunicated --sent not only to the gallows, but doomed also to eternal damnation. Rebecca collapsed from the ordeal and had to be carried back to prison. Shortly afterwards her sister, Sarah Cloyce, was also sentenced to prison.

The courts were convinced that the convicted witches were still working their witchcraft upon the poor girls, so the authorities ordered that chains be put upon those in prison to circumvent their activities. The expense of these chains was charged to the accounts of the witches.

Life was wretched for those convicted and imprisoned. They were confined to foul overcrowded cells, forced to wear heavy chains upon their limbs, and suffer further indignities by having prison officials sweep down upon them periodically to search their bodies for witch marks.

After the trials had ended, those who had been convicted of witchcraft were not released until their families paid their prison fees. Unfortunately, not every accused witch had kinsmen willing to mortgage their farms. No one was interested in restoring old Sarah Doston to circulation, so she remained in prison until she died.

Abigail Faulkner and Elizabeth Proctor had been condemned to death, but were reprieved until their expected babies could be born. Both women left prison with their jail-born infants in their arms.

Tituba, the slave had no one to pay her prison fees, so she was sold back into slavery and sent south, never to be heard of again.

Noyes Parris, the son of the witch-hunting parson became a victim of the times also and grew up only to die insane.

History had an annoying way of failing to record complete data. The girls involved were never allowed to tell the truth and with the passage of time, the truth became much too complex.