She can curse you, blight your crops, ignore you, refuse you, correct you.
With her spells, a witch can transform you into a pig, or defeat you in battle. Witches are often called unnatural because of their ability to threaten men. A whore transgresses norms of female sexuality a witch transgresses norms of female power. Both are time-honoured tools for policing women, meant to shame them into socially prescribed behaviour. A witch transgresses norms of female power – punishing her makes others afraid to follow in an unruly woman’s footstepsĪ better parallel to “witch” is the word “whore”. Further, the words used to describe men with magical powers – warlock, magus, sorcerer, wizard – don’t carry the same stigma. Sure, men have also been accused of witchcraft, but they are by far the minority. When we say witch, we almost exclusively mean woman. Their histories, she intimated, run hand in hand. As a thought experiment, she suggested that for “witches” we should read instead “women”. She was, instead, likely to be a woman “of superior knowledge”. She didn’t fly on a broomstick naked in the dark, or consort with demons. It was simply entrenched social misogyny, the goal of which was to repress the intellect of women. The persecution of witches, she said, had nothing to do with fighting evil or resisting the devil. In the late 19th century, the suffragette Matilda Joslyn Gage asserted something revolutionary.
The oz series l frank baum trial#
Given that the last witch trial in the US was more than 100 hundred years ago, what are we to make of this? Her opponents named her The Wicked Witch of the Left, claimed they had sources testifying that she smelled of sulphur, and took particular delight in depictions of her being melted. D uring the 2016 US presidential election, American social media was flooded with images of Hillary Clinton wearing a black hat and riding a broom, or else cackling with green skin.