By Isabella Nestor (’26)

During this sacred time of year, when our minds may wonder about the peculiar ways of the 1600s, the book, In Defense of Witches by Mona Chollet made me wonder why the Witch Trials happened. Many of you reading may know of the terrors and violence that presented itself during this time as another strange occurrence from textbook history but in most respects, the Witch Trials were generally associated with feminism and the way it was perceived vs how we perceive feminism now. It is important that, when looking at the purpose of these trials, to understand the motives behind them and we can start with taking time to understand the ethical implications of the Witch Trials. In this day and age, the Witch Trials will most likely never happen again because we all have the decency to think, “That’s messed up!”. Why were the witch trials perceived as normal? To better understand the viewpoint of society in the 1600s, we should consider the viewpoints on women and what they were influenced by, and how those perspectives are considered in modern protests today.

When looking at this particular period in time, we need to ask ourselves, why were the victims of burnings and wallings most often women? Witch hunters, in the view of society, were generally accepted as a fact of everyday life. Within the very religious period brought by the 1400s and the 1700s, many associated normal acts of women with Satanism. The classic broom and cat is a great example of how Protestants and Catholics used their religion to justify violence against women. To women, The broom represented a clean home and cats were often kept as mice repellents. However, Protestants or Catholics used religion as an excuse to cover up a sort of prejudice that believers could not face fully when beginning to confront the justifications for their actions. Placing their actions as “God’s word” from a twisted religious interpretation, they ignored how brutal their actions were in the criteria of humanity. And in using religious glorification as justification, men, mostly, intended to protect their mixed sense of fear and astonishment of women. Even though some victims had been men too, they were attacked because of their allies, women. Religious fanaticism creates a distorted reality; where the word ‘witches’ slowly starts to become ‘women’. 

When looking at acts of violence such as being, we see a sort of creativity among religious believers to blame women for almost anything they do. Of course, not all of the justifications for ‘Witch Hunting’ come from stout Christians or Protestants, but these justifications became so pronounced that a special rule book titled Kramer and Sprenger’s Malleus Maleficarum was created to contain all the ‘Witch defining rules’. Both religious justification and those influenced by text by Malleus Maleficarum, women were blamed and burned for anything deemed even mildly suspicious. Anything could be turned or twisted to be opposing women, and due to a male-dominated religious society, most would agree with whatever the religious men wanted. Torture was a common method of dealing with Witches: drowning, tying them to burning chairs, hanging them, burning them alive, and even crushing them were all justified by the text. Kramer and Sprenger’s Malleus Maleficarum also share many parallels to a text written by Hitler called “Mein Kampf” connecting Witch Hunts with anti-semitism. With this information, historians can connect witch hunts to anti-semitism. For example, the star of David, a symbol of the Jewish religion, was directly associated with the things witches were supposedly doing (potion making, casting spells, etc.) because of how the symbol was used in the Jewish religion to banish demons. Other terms like ‘sabbath’ and ‘synagogue’ were associated with witches in further comparison. Through historical events that portray the same hatred of different ethnicities and genders, we can even relate witch-hunts to the present day. 

Modern feminist movements represent witch hunts in many ways. First of all, the figure of a witch embodies someone who is free from all of the laws of a normal society and who will trudge through her business without doubt. Through the eyes of the religious realm, the thought of a woman being independent and wild scared people because women would seem unpredictable and thus uncontrollable. Yet, it is hard to be able to face the reality that many faced when being condemned and truly understand the meaning behind the killings. We distance ourselves from the period that the violence happened in which we seem to associate with the dark Middle Ages. However, through studying this period in time, historians can derive parallels of injustice against women at every point in history. The figure of the hysterical witchy woman has been used in modern marches, protests, and other feminist acts because of its association with challenging social norms and how the world can properly recognize the metamorphosis of violence throughout the centuries. 

It is important to be able to recognize violent events in history and how their implications changed our future today. Without the witch hunts, there would be no feminists, no women’s activists, and no drive for the improvement of women’s safety and lives. Without the witch trials, there wouldn’t be the famous feminists and truly our society today would be nearly unimaginable. So the next time you come across an abortion movement or a women’s activist movement, think about the witch trials because without them bringing light into feminists’ eyes, there would be no fight for the half of the population that is destined to live up to its potential.