In recent years, signs and T-shirts bearing the slogan “We Are the Granddaughters of the Witches You Couldn’t Burn” have popped up at political protests and rallies for a variety of causes, from #MeToo to reproductive rights. While hardly historically accurate — individuals convicted of witchcraft in early America were hanged, not burned — the phrase powerfully evokes the history of witch hunts as attacks on politically active women.
Just in time for Halloween, the Center for Women’s History at the New-York Historical Society (where I am associate director) has opened a new exhibit, “The Salem Witch Trials: Reckoning and Reclaiming,” which is on view through Jan. 22. Originally organized by the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., the exhibition features original objects from individuals affected by the witch trials of 1692 and two creative responses by contemporary artists who are Salem descendants. The juxtaposition invites viewers to challenge their assumptions about the familiar story and search for new meanings — including thinking about how generations of women’s rights activists have looked to the history of witch hunts as a call to defy gender norms.
In 1692 in Salem and elsewhere across early America and the Atlantic world, witches were thought to have made a pact with Satan to unleash “maleficia” — or harmful magic — upon their communities, causing sickness, misery and death. Accusations were overwhelmingly hurled at women, particularly those who were poor or older. Trials engaged the entire community as a form of popular entertainment and visible social control over women’s behavior and authority. The trials in Salem stand out among other witch trials in colonial America because they were so lethal and extreme: Within less than a year, 19 individuals were hanged, six others died in legal custody and hundreds suffered from the damaging legal accusations.
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But the accused and their families did not passively accept their fate. During Elizabeth How’s (also spelled Howe) legal examination, for example, the mother of six insisted, “If it was the last moment I was to live, God knows I am innocent of anything in this nature.” Even after she was executed, her family fought to restore her honor. Family members of the falsely accused began submitting petitions asking for their loved ones’ convictions to be overturned within a few years of the trials, pushing the legislature to exonerate the falsely accused in 1711. How’s daughters Abigail and Mary were paid restitution shortly after.
In subsequent centuries, activists continued to point to Salem and other witch hunts as defining moments of injustice and misogyny. In 1893, Matilda Joslyn Gage — an ardent suffragist, abolitionist and advocate for Indigenous rights who held more radical views than many of her contemporaries, including her once-collaborators Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton — published a book, “Woman, Church & State,” which identified the “witch” stigma as a historical source of women’s oppression. Gage contended that “the extreme wickedness of woman” was “taught as a cardinal doctrine,” with “witchcraft being regarded as [woman’s] strongest weapon” against Christian society. Gage decried these beliefs and pointed to how the persecution of witchcraft produced acts of physical violence against women, as well as causing great psychological, spiritual and economic harm. “It is impossible for us at the present day to conceive the awful horror falling upon a family into which an accusation of witchcraft had come,” she wrote.
Gage’s words echoed in the burgeoning field of women’s studies 80 years later. Amid the 1960s groundswell of various and diverse liberation movements, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English drew the attention of activists and newly organizing feminist scholars to a centuries-old tradition of “wise women” healers in their 1973 book, “Witches, Midwives & Nurses.” These women, they argued, held essential knowledge and skills that granted them stature at a time when women held very little formal power. As a result, beginning in the 15th century, such women were derided as “witches” by male religious and medical authorities, whose ire led to the spread of deadly witch hunts.
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While some of the historical details in the book are today debated, their polemical tome was crucial to the growth of the reproductive health movement and to modern feminist reclamations of the “witch” as an archetype of resistance. Activists, who recognized that the stigma had been weaponized against women and other marginalized people who refused to conform to society’s expectations for centuries, used the mantle of the “witch” to draw attention to ongoing struggles for women’s liberation.
In 1968, activists from New York Radical Women founded Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (WITCH), for example. The group’s first action was a demonstration “hexing” Wall Street on Halloween: The group donned witch costumes and used street theater to protest patriarchy and capitalism. Their manifesto declared, “There is no ‘joining’ WITCH. If you are a woman and dare to look within yourself, you are a Witch. You make your own rules.”
Similarly, in 1976, the radical, anti-capitalist feminist collective Wages for Housework organized a May Day march in Naples, in which 3,000 women chanted, “Tremble, tremble, the witches are returning, not to be burnt but to be paid!”
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These reclamations even emanated into pop culture. Yoko Ono responded to the derision she faced for her relationship with John Lennon with the lyrics, “Yes, I’m a witch … /I don’t care what you say/My voice is real/My voice speaks truth/I don’t fit in your ways.”
Beyond metaphorically taking on the witch mantle, some feminists in this period looked to witchcraft as an alternative to organized religion, which they increasingly identified as patriarchal. Women like Zsuzsanna Budapest and Starhawk reinterpreted nature-based, Wiccan and Pagan beliefs thought to have roots predating Christianity into new fluid, nondogmatic practices and belief systems. Like secular feminist “witches,” the new religious traditions of modern witchcraft have activism at their core. As journalist and Wicca practitioner Margot Adler put it in 1979: “The Craft is a religion historically conceived in rebellion” that can “be true to its nature only when it continues its ancient fight against oppression.”
This ethos continues to appeal to activists searching for spiritual communities today. Contemporary portrait photographer Frances F. Denny — whose ancestor was a Salem trial magistrate — recently interviewed 75 people from across the United States for her book, “Major Arcana: Portraits of Witches in America.” The spiritual healers, shamans, Wiccan high priestesses, Neo-Pagans, occultists, mystics, herbalists and activists that she photographed reclaim power on their own terms, subverting the witch taboo in favor of a complex and holistic state of being rooted in diverse spiritual traditions.
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Some of Denny’s subjects define their practice in ways that are inextricable from their political identities. As Mya Spalter explains in the book, “Witchcraft informs my worldview. It’s intensely political to believe in the oneness of life on Earth.” In another profile in the book, Leonore Tjia argues: “In a culture as racist and patriarchal and transphobic and hom*ophobic and materialistic as ours is, if you don’t see the way witchcraft is radical and revolutionary, you have some waking up to do.”
With threats to women’s hard-won and contested liberties looming after the reversal of Roe v. Wade and increasing discrimination against LGBTQ+ individuals, this Halloween, perhaps we can set aside stereotypical costumes and depictions of witches — and instead look to how generations of activists have reclaimed the witch archetype to resist patriarchal control and stand up to injustice in their own lives.
