Witches: Proto-Feminism and the Collapse of The Patriarchy

Modern witch stories often depict witches as feminists avant la lettre (meaning, before the concept existed). What’s interesting about this is that it is done by both feminists and anti-feminists alike. The former seeks to re-appropriate the image of the witch, while the latter seeks to associate feminism with witchery’s more malign aspects. Both, however, say almost exactly the same thing, but come to two very different conclusions.

Take, for example, Silvia Federici’s Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women, and Edward Dutton’s Witches, Feminism, and the Fall of the West. The first is told from the feminist perspective. Federici argues that a witch was a woman who resisted the patriarchal order, one who lived outside the confines of society, practising holistic medicine and behaving in what was considered an anti-social way:

They threatened, cast reproachful looks, and cursed those who refused them help; some made nuisances of themselves by sudden, uninvited appearances on their better-off neighbors’ doorsteps or made uncalled for attempts to have themselves accepted by giving small gifts to children. Those who prosecuted them charged them with being quarrelsome, with having an evil tongue, with stirring up trouble among their neighbors, charges that historians have often accepted