While I was studying at the University of Exeter, I discovered that it was the last place in England where girls and women were publicly hanged for witchcraft. It was a poignant reminder of the enduring historical anxiety surrounding female power and autonomy, and perhaps one of the subconscious reasons as to why I chose to devote the continuation of my studies to unearthing the historical oppression of the female form.
Three women, Temperance Lloyd, Susannah Edwards, and Mary Trembles, were executed in 1682 (Preston-Ellis), their deaths marking the end of an era steeped in fear, misogyny, and moral panic. Yet this same moral panic would serve as the polluted genesis of girls’ and women’s oppression that would persist throughout history. Standing within the walls of Exeter city, it was difficult not to feel how those centuries-old anxieties about female power still permeate the public discourse today.
The “witch”, in all her forms, has always been a problem for patriarchy. The Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Inquisition both declared witchcraft heretical and punishable by death, constructing lurid fantasies of the witches’ sabbath, complete with ‘sexual orgies with the devil’ (Maitland). In these imagined encounters with ‘Satan’, women transgressed every boundary of a patriarchal society’s ideals of ‘decency’; refusing the domestic sphere, rejecting submission, and embodying an uncontrolled sexuality that terrified the male imagination.
The broom, a traditional symbol of domesticity, became phallic; to ‘ride’ it was to let femininity and domesticity escape patriarchal control. In ‘demonizing’ femininity, society revealed its deepest anxiety: the woman who refuses to be contained.
Throughout Europe and colonial America, most of those accused of witchcraft were girls and women who lived outside patriarchal expectations: unmarried or widowed, economically independent, outspoken, or sexually autonomous. Witches were branded as dangerous, unhuman beings who ‘seduced, lay with the Devil, and could pollute men with their feminine fluids’ (Backe). Their very existence disrupted the moral discourse that confined women to purity, passivity, and the domestic sphere.
As anthropologist Mary Douglas observes, “the moral discourse surrounding witchcraft accusations often legitimized and reified gendered social hierarchies and political structures.” Accusations of witchcraft became a tool of control; a way to enforce female subservience and maintain patriarchal order. Seeds of misogyny threaded their way through every accusation, each one reinforcing the notion that female knowledge and autonomy were inherently dangerous.
Yet, what was once ephemeral, lasting only long enough to condemn girls and women to death, has become a source of strength. Today, artists, activists, and feminists are reclaiming the word “witch.” The witch now stands as a symbol of resistance: girls and women who refuse erasure and command their own narrative. She embodies female agency, sexuality, and solidarity in defiance of systems that still seek to silence women.
As Karlsen reminds us, even in the 1650s, Puritan societies branded female spiritual leaders as witches because they believed ‘anyone, regardless of gender, could teach the divine truth’ (Karlsen). The same logic persists today when powerful women are dismissed, vilified, or punished for stepping outside their assigned roles. To reclaim the word “witch” is to reclaim every person who was condemned for rejecting the traditionality that removed female agency and confined them to a life constructed by the patriarchy.
READ MORE IN OUR LITTLE WITCHES EXHIBITION
-Lottie Horn
Volunteer Writer
Girl Museum
References:
Backe, Emma Louise. “Something Wicked this Way Comes: Witches and Modern Women”. The Greek Anthropologist, 25 Jul. 2014.
Douglas, Mary (1991). “Witchcraft and Leprosy: Two Strategies of Exclusion.” Man, New Series, Vol. 26, No. 4. pp. 723-736.
Karlsen, C. (1989). The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England. New York, NY: Peter Smith Publisher, Incorporated.
Maitland, Karen. “Broomsticks and Orgies”. Historia Magazine, 1 Oct. 2014.
Preston-Ellis, Rom. “The Dark History of Exeter – The First and Last Place to Kill a Witch.” Devon Live, 25 May. 2018, https://www.devonlive.com/news/devon-news/dark-history-exeter-first-last-1609485