Some sources say that there were more than five (!) millions women sentenced to death by hanging, burning at stakes or drowning.

Why these numbers are vague and why there hasn’t been a worldwide rehabilitation of women killed, the answer is obvious – it is the gender of victims. Witch-hunts and trails were gender-related and gender-based, but most important is the fact that it was a case of an intentional gendered violence against women, accused by fabricated allegations of being ”witches” and prosecuted as such.

Accusations were centred around the female sexuality or female work (midwifery, household chores), but most of them were unsubstantial figments of imagination and ignorance. Midwives, for example, were accused of witchcraft because of their nature of work (i.e. sexuality, female bodies, reproduction) and for possessing experiential knowledge about the birth regulation, which was by clerical authorities of the Catholic Church (CC) understood as interfering with their ‘natural’ demographics. Other factors for witch-hunt mass hysteria can be found in (1) religious wars, which left many women single with no paternal or marital protection and economically helpless, (2) women’s economic dependence and vulnerability,(3) the emerge of natural sciences, (4) medieval catastrophes (e.g. plague, syphilis, wars) and (5) CC’s attempts to preserve their religious and legislative power. Those were social amplifiers that created the climate of damnation, something an average person could not comprehend. Yet the CC had abused those cross-fertilizing events to reinforce their own doctrines of hell, sin, devil and heretics (witches included).

Witches had become an omnipresent evil that needed to be gone but their soon-to-be-doomed existence also served a CC’s campaign to destroy any religious competition: alternative readings of Bible, paganism or even Judaism. The CC’s contempt for Judaism is evident discursively; the naming of witch gatherings is called ”sabbat”, ”synagogue” was the place of such get-togethers. Their message was clear: do not mess with CC.

Not to forget the political and economic aspects of witch hunts which were used as a disciplinary method to consolidate the power of church and feuds and as a profitable business for every party involved: judges, executioners, innkeepers, professional witch hunters.

For a successful prosecution of witches, a manual for an inquisition (or investigators) and jurists (or judges) was written, now known as Malleus Maleficarum (1486). This manual consolidated witchcraft as woman’s civil crime, so the myth of a woman as ‘maleficia’ (i.e. witch) became a ‘scientific’ fact and no one did disbelieve the (new) authority of science.

Witch-hunts and trials were misogynistic feasts; women were accused by men, trials were held by male juries, searched by male prickers, sentenced by male judges, tortured by male jailers and burned to death by male executioners. Witch-hunts were the first documented victim blaming strategies of the male ruling class (i.e. theology, wealth, elite), a strategy that justifies the violence against its victims as something that a victim has ‘attracted’.

Women, accused of being witches, were Othered as a group and for the first time in history, they had been collectively prosecuted. Any woman could have been accused of being a witch for just being a woman. From the beginnings of the witch-hunt epidemics, old/er women were the main culprits of the witchcraft, but later the age structure had changed, so the paradigm of witchcraft also included young girls, due to their allure and beauty, and catholic nuns for belonging to the ‘wrong’ gender. Unlike other systematic eliminations in history (Holocaust for Jewish people or Porajmos for Romani people), victims of witch-hunts do not have group history or group identity, because those acts were undetected as a strategy to exterminate women and unfortunately, that led to the depoliticization of witch-hunts.

Among other victims – apart from women – were also other socially and morally Othered persons: disabled people, petty criminals, sex workers, animal lovers, beggars, vagabonds, thieves, drunks, homosexuals. Albeit their identities were associated with magic or sorcery, Roma people or Jewish people were never accused for crimes of the witchcraft.

Opening the monument, which is dedicated to women, that were burned, hanged and drowned, sends a clear message of an acknowledgement of historical injustice that had been made upon those women, and what witch trials were – a gynocide; but more essentially, it means rehabilitation of their image. The reason for not massively rehabilitating them must lie in the gender of victims. Apparently, misogyny doesn’t age.

P.S. One of the first witch trials in my country took place in my hometown in 1546. More than ten women were accused of poisoning meals, copulating with the devil, riding brooms, influencing the weather, having cats and dogs as their helpers … All of them were burnt at the stake.

References:

Brian P. Levack: New perspectives on witchcraft, magic and demonology, New York: Routledge, 2001.

Marjeta Tratnik Volasko, Matevž Košir: Čarovnice: Predstave, procesi, pregoni v evropskih in slovenskih deželah, Ljubljana: Znanstveno in publicistično središče, 1995.

Femininity is something that I, women or persons, who identify as women, do every day by embodying the cultural script of gender(ed) expectations and norms; how to look, behave, feel, think, what to expect from a society and what society expects from us. The cultural script of what femininity is, modifies historically (i.e. through time in the society) and biographically (i.e. through time in an individual life), producing an array of femininities, differing themselves on the basis of intersecting gender expression, sexual identity, skin colour, ethnicity, class (social, economic, cultural capital), religious background, age, body ability etc. An individual femininity is therefore a cumulation of different social positions, for example: androgynous, bisexual second generation Asian woman, living in Germany, originating from lower middle class with M.A. degree.

There is one golden standard that all cumulated femininities are subjected to; it is so called ‘good’ femininity. Sociologist Raewyn Connell named it ‘compliant’, scholar Mimi Schippers coined a term ‘hegemonic femininity’ but all in all, it is femininity with many privileges, embodied in whiteness, heterosexuality, middle class, body ability and youth, together with the fulfilment of all woman-constituting roles – a mother, wife, caregiver, housewife.

When not occupying these privileged social locations (e.g. skin colour or class), ill-performing or deliberately rejecting women’s roles (e.g. being a single woman), Othering occurs as a milder or stronger sort of the social repercussion.

First among those femininities is Clara‘s femininity (Meryl Streep). She could be the visual and behavioural prototype of the ‘good’ one – she is a mother and wife, has long, blonde hair, white skin, fragile figure, is dressed in a whitish clothes, she is coming from the upper class, her personality is non-conflicting, peaceful, angelic, almost virginal. But Clara has a flaw.

She is clairvoyant (her name can be interpreted as ‘clear’ or ‘clear-eyed’, unpolluted by material/istic society and unattached to her physical body) and telekinetic (she can potentially rearrange things with her mind). This specific personal trait labels her as a liminal being but her spiritual Otherness is protected by her upper class and skin colour; in a less privileged context, she would be vilified as a mad woman or stigmatised as a person with an (invisible) impairment (‘a freak’).

Her clairvoyance and deliberate muteness can be interpreted as an exaggeration of a gendered expectation for a good woman to be ‘pure’, moral, spiritual and silent. And by this, she has intentionally withdrawn herself from the patriarchal order, a system where women’s visions or voices are anyway dismissed as silly or unnecessary.

Ferula and Clara

Ferula (Glenn Close), Esteban‘s (Jeremy Irons) sister and Clara‘s sister in law, is double Othered femininity – for being unmarried and queer (or latent lesbian). If Clara is depicted as the white angel, then is Ferula a dark antagonist; dressed in almost monastic attire, consisted of black, thick clothes, crucifix, hanging around her neck with mousy coloured hair, firmly styled into a prudish bun. Being socially forced to be unmarried due to her gendered caregiving obligations towards her disabled mother and misogynous brother, her singleness is deepened with her closeted lesbianism.

Ferula personifies the stereotypical cinematic trope of a dangerous lesbian who can lure a straight wife (Clara) into lesbianism and disrupt heterosexual marriage. Her queer affection for Clara stretches from her motherly care to purely lustful tendencies (e.g. she explains while in the confession that she wants to climb into Clara‘s bed and feel her warm skin). It is never directly revealed if those two women have a sexual relationship (they definitely share an emotional one, a quasi-Boston marriage perhaps?), however when Esteban catches them in the same bed (fully clothed though), he decides to send Ferula away. Ferula as a double Othered woman is sentenced to a life of poverty and social isolation which is an expected punishment for a queer singlehood in homophobic cinematic narratives. A lesbian is fruitless for the heteronormative patriarchy.

Pancha Garcia (Sarita Choudhury) is one of Esteban‘s Latina woman workers and multiple Othered on grounds of her skin, nationality, class and gender. The cumulated Othering results in the portrayal of her as a nameless (nobody addresses her by her name) and voiceless (she doesn’t speak, only screams in pain when being assaulted) Othered beauty (i.e. dark-haired, brown-skinned, sensual, young) whose powerlessness toughens Esteban‘s (male) entitlement over her body – he brutally rapes her. Pancha is the tragic reminder of the white male history where women of colour were being animalised, dehumanised and objectified.

Pancha Garcia (Credits: Miramax Films)

Less obviously deviant and protected by their privileges (or status shield) femininities (e.g. Clara) are also less Othered than those with cumulated disadvantages (e.g. Ferula and Pancha).

But when women distance themselves by choice or social conditions from the standard of good femininity, the annihilation of trespassers is expected. THOTS, based on the novel by Isabel Allende, just continues the literary discourse of magic realism, a genre where gender roles are rarely challenged and by this, any deviation from the norm is met with the social powerlessness (i.e. muteness, social isolation, poverty, sexual assault).

In a masculine world, nothing a woman is or does “wrong”, goes unpunished.