Why Witches Are Usually Women?

Pedro_P

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Illustration of the Salem witch trials.
(Image: © Everett Historical/Shutterstock)
▼ "Witch hunt" — it's a refrain usedto deride everything from impeachment  inquiriesand sexual assault  investigationsto allegations of  corruption.
When powerful men cry witch, they're generally not talking about green-faced women wearing pointy hats. They are, presumably, referring to the Salem witch trials, when 19 people in 17th-century Massachusetts were executed on charges of witchcraft.
Using "witch hunt" to decry purportedly baseless allegations, however, reflects a misunderstanding of American history. Witch trials didn't target the powerful. They persecuted society's most marginal members — particularly women.
Too rich, too poor, too female
In my scholarship on the darker  aspects of U.S. culture, I've researched and writtenabout numerous witch  trials. I teach a college course here in Massachusetts that explores this perennially popular but frequently misinterpreted period in New England history.
Perhaps the most salient point about witch trials, students quickly come to see, is gender. In Salem, 14 of the 19 people found guilty of, and executed for, witchcraft during that cataclysmic year of 1692 were women.
Across New England, where witch trials occurred somewhat regularly from 1638 until 1725, women vastly  outnumbered men in the ranks of the  accused and executed. According to author Carol F. Karlsen's " The Devil in  the Shape of a Woman," 78% of 344 alleged witches in New England were female.
And even when men faced allegations of witchcraft, it was typically because they were somehow associated with accused women. As historian John Demos has established, the few Puritan men tried for witchcraft were mostly the husbands or brothers of alleged female witches.
Women held a precarious, mostly powerless position within the deeply  religious Puritan community.
The Puritans thought women should have babies, (▪ ▪ ▪)

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