From penis envy coined by 20th century psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud to penis theft cited by the Malleus Maleficarum of 1487 (a treatise used to convict witches), women have been accused of some pretty weird stuff over the years! Such bizarre finger-pointing can even extend to scapegoating us for all of society’s ills. Hell’s teeth! We can go right back to the beginning for that, when the very first woman was judged guilty for the entire Downfall of Mankind by consorting with Satan. And not for the last time – apparently women and the devil have been conspiring together forever, whether in serpent form, offering Eve the odd apple, or as the Great Black Dog of the Burning Times. Either way, it’s all her fault!
Time and again, history has shown to what devious depths society can sink in its blaming and shaming. When the going gets tough for the populace it’s so often laid at the door of the downtrodden, the defenceless or outsiders, as if their pitiable lot wasn’t bad enough before. And women, deemed inferior throughout the ages, scorned and frowned upon, made handy fodder for sacrifice.
Take the witch mania scenario of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for instance. A long spell (not of the witchy sort) (not that they don’t get the blame) of bad weather is causing repeated harvest failure and famine, and suddenly everyone’s getting hysterical and accusing neighbours of wicked capers! By far the majority of those tried for witchcraft were women, mainly the more elderly (by Tudor standards) and probably many widows and spinsters without male support and vulnerable to destitution. Poverty-stricken old women made a rather convenient scapegoat. Frequently forced to beg for survival, they were a nuisance to their village at a time when purses were already pinched and there’s a run-on parish charitable alms.
And yet how to be denied? This was a strict religious era in Europe, with Christian scriptures demanding: If thou in any way afflict widows and they at all cry out unto me, I will surely hear their cry, and my wrath shall wax hot against thee. (Exodus Ch. 22).
So people turned the matter inside out – they made the victim the culprit. “She is a witch,” they cried. “We will hold no neighbourly bond with such a one, we shall shun and spurn (and haply burn) her for the safety of the godly!” And thus the righteous folk of the village were left in peace of conscience and in peace at home, free from troubling scruples and troublesome widows.
The Hammer of Witches (Malleus Maleficarum) is hot on insatiable female sexual debauchery leading men astray, whilst the male-controlled Church and State had quite a few of their own belittling gender snubs. The claim that women are more susceptible to mental instability and frenzied behaviour well preceded Freud and the rise of psychology; the long-suffering church goers (and that’s practically everyone) of Elizabethan England were subject to this annual prescribed sermon on marriage:
Woman is a weak creature, not endowed with strength and constancy of mind; therefore they be the sooner disquieted, and they may be more prone to all weak affections and dispositions of mind, more than men be. (Anglican Library). And etc.
Court indictments concerning a witch’s demonic arts were totally bonkers – levitating cleaning equipment, genital teats for paranormal suckling, wantonly causing male impotence, alongside your bog-standard fornication with (of course) the horny devil.
As Suranne Jones’ two-part series, Investigating Witch Trials (a) on Channel Four discusses, women are still being blamed today, specifically for male sexual violence.
– Violence which now constitutes a “national emergency” according to the recent policing statement by the NPCC, reporting a massive 37% rise in violence (including sexual) against girls and women between 2019 and 2024. A staggering 1 in 12 women are victims each year, an alarming escalation “fuelled by online influencers” according to the police statement (b).
A massive internet following for Andrew Tate, who accuses women rape victims of responsibility for the assault, is just the tip of the iceberg. Women have regularly been held complicit in their own sexual abuse, due to their ‘provocative clothing’ or because they’re out on the town past women’s curfew hour, or they were ‘asking for it’ due to alcohol use, and so forth. And now we have the internet Incels (involuntary celibate men), a few of the most vocal of whom blatantly blame women for not providing them with sex, and obnoxiously threaten obscene violence against them. In the West Country where I live, five people were shot not long ago in Plymouth by a man who lapped up such online blusterings. Past and present, the ways of the world can be sickening – but we need to move on.
Maybe we can help empower young women against absorbing such ubiquitous allegations by reclaiming the label witch into mainstream culture and media (and not just as a Netflix sexy fantasy figure…), just as the derogatory term ‘queer’ was positively reinstated by the gay community. The constructive witch archetype, coming up from the grass roots today, is that of wild women who uphold their own authority and refuse to conform to society’s expectations of ‘appropriate’ feminine behaviour. No longer accepting blame or derision because they choose to live outside the norms.
My own personal experiences as a Cornish witch, combined with some deep delving into historical crimes against women, slowly grew into a novel, A Westerly Wind brings Witches, published earlier this year. Set both in Tudor England of the 1500s and in the contemporary world of modern witchcraft, I wanted to explore why women were accused of witchery and to tell my own story of what it means to be a witch today. Also to recall the lost but once widespread role of the traditional Wise Woman at a time when women were banned from official positions of public influence – how did that one slip under the patriarchal net!
The up-and-coming religion of Wicca is distinct in that it doesn’t favour men by venerating an exclusive male deity, as has been so prevalent across the board. And isn’t it time we offer little girls a Divine Feminine to relate to? Squeezing the Goddess onto the holy throne between a wholly reluctant God the Father and God the Son!
The witching hour was once depicted as a shadowy midnight when witch and devil dance. It epitomised society’s fears of the bogeyman, and so there may be some value in shining the spotlight there. Peering back into the darkest era for women, re-airing the stains in our history’s misogynistic dirty linen, can help focus our attention on the scapegoating going on under our noses in the modern world. It seems we still need to be vigilant for whoever’s being demonized and take a good hard look at who’s pointing the finger. Because we know to where it can lead.
And as for the old witch herself, she has been getting a more user-friendly makeover for the twenty-first century. But if you’re going to be that fiercely independent, defiantly non-conformist woman, with a bit of a wild side, then you may well encounter some heavy-handed, even scary, attempts to falsely accuse, control and silence you. Devilish indeed, just not the devil we were warned of…
About the Author
A Westerly Wind brings Witches by Sally Walker, published by Moon Books. Winner of Kindred Spirit’s Writer of the Year 2024 Award.
