In Defense of Witches by Mona Chollet

“They didn’t burn witches. They burned women.”

 

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

Let’s get that straight at the outset. Witchcraft doesn’t actually exist - or I suspect a lot of people would use it. There is no “magic” that allows one to inflict harm on others through the use of supernatural powers. Or you can bet that the 9-11 terrorists would have used that instead of going through the trouble of learning to fly jetliners. Women do not have a special line to the Devil, or you can bet that abused women would have availed themselves of that. 

 

WITCHES. ARE. NOT. REAL.

 

But women are. 

 

And they burned women. 

 

The question is, why? Why did this happen at a particular time in history? And in a particular place? A particular culture? 

 

And, more important for us today, how do those “reasons” for murdering women affect us today? How are they embedded in our thinking? In what ways do we punish women today for those reasons? 

 

That is what this book is about. 

 

The historical facts are pretty clear. During the early modern period, between 1400 and 1782, between 40,000 and 60,000 were murdered as suspected witches. Most of the victims were women, although some men were also accused. Most were over the age of 40 - old for the time - and a significant number were unmarried or childless. 

 

Something few know or remember is that during the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church dismissed belief in witches as pagan superstition, a leftover from the pre-Christian beliefs in Europe. Furthermore, the “proof text” that people cite from the Old Testament for the killing of witches probably doesn’t even say what we think it says. There was plenty of argument over the translation, but the word that was translated as “witch” in the Bibles of the time of the witch hunts - notably the Geneva Bible and the King James Version - is better translated “poisoner.” As with a number of our most familiar texts, the KJV made some specific translation decisions - including some deliberate mistranslations - for political and theological reasons. This is one of those cases. 

 

 It wasn’t until the eventual rise of inquisitions (before the infamous one that nobody expects) that the belief in witchcraft and the revival of persecutions of certain kinds of women came into being. 

 

It is not a coincidence that other things were happening in European culture at that time, of course. There was a great deal of political and social upheaval. The Black Death killed a third of the population, crops failed repeatedly due to a regional change in climate. The stranglehold of Catholicism on doctrine was being challenged by reformers, the printing press and increasing literacy gave revolutionary ideas the ability to sweep across political boundaries. 

 

Human nature, unfortunately, has a tendency to search for scapegoats during times of stress, whether the Jews in Nazi Germany or LGBTQ people during the late Comstock era or Communists in the McCarthy era. (And many, many more, of course.) Find the person who is different, or who fails to meet cultural expectations, and you have a potential victim of scapegoating. Oh, and also, you need someone who is relatively powerless. 

 

Mona Chollet makes the case for some specific reasons that (mostly) women were targeted in the witch hunts. The most strongly supported by the evidence is that women who lacked relatives to defend them were particularly vulnerable, and that this often included childless women, particularly those widowed. Wealthy women were rarely targeted, although within the spectrum of poverty, those who were just a bit better off could be the objects of jealousy and seen as a chance at unjust enrichment. 

 

Chollet goes beyond these, though, in making an argument that then as now, women who fail to “fulfill their role” are targeted as dangerous to society, and singled out for punishment. While this argument is the subject of dispute as to how historically supported it is - in large part because cultures do not perfectly correspond, and teasing out what was religious horseshit from the possible deeper motivations isn’t easy. I would also say that there are some times in this book that Chollet, who is a journalist and writer, not a historian, gets some details wrong. (The most obvious to me is the continued crediting of James Sims for the invention of the speculum, ignoring the evidence that it dates at least back to the Roman Empire. Sims was a total asshole, but he wasn’t particularly original, so don’t give him credit for what he didn’t do.) 

 

To a degree, trying to figure out the “why” for any case of witch hunting (or the holocaust) is never going to lead to a final conclusion. Every evil is complicated, because humans are complicated, and predicting how and when a mob turns is frustratingly difficult. It requires a confluence of factors that are imperfectly understood at best, although patterns can be seen. 

 

With that caveat, I do think that Chollet has correctly identified a significant common thread that connects misogyny over the last 700 years, and probably before that. Whether or not we can ever determine how it spilled over into mass murder or not doesn’t change the fact that women have been and are persecuted now for essentially the same “crimes.”

 

This book was translated from the French by Sophie R. Lewis, and has a bit of a British flavor (this will be obvious from the slang in certain quotes), but is quite readable. I see plenty of influence from Chollet’s compatriot Simone de Beauvoir. The book was published in France in 2018, but only this year was translated into English and published in the United States. 

 

Perhaps a good place to start is in the forward, by Carmen Maria Machado. When we think of witches, what do we envision?

 

I imagine I can tell you some things about her. She is a woman, single and childless. She has her own little house, which she may or may not share with an animal. She is an artist, or a craftswoman, or a scientist, if you imagine magic as a kind of science. She has an undeniable air of poise and wonderful sense of style. Whether or not she is evil (after all, we have The Wizard of Oz, Grimms’ fairy tales, and decades of Disney movies to contend with), it cannot be denied that she is wily, self-satisfied, and in charge of her own affairs. She commands respect. She is, to interesting people, someone worth learning from, if not emulating entirely. She is what happens when women get to direct the warp and weft of their own lives.

 

This will set the tone for the specific issues that Chollet will examine: independence from male control, choice in childbearing, aging and its separation of women from their objectification by men, and women’s competence outside of childbearing and domesticity. 

 

That, after all, is what makes a woman a “witch.” I hate to have to say it, but these are the very things that Christian Patriarchy teaches are evil in a woman, and the traits that women like my wife have in abundance. Oh, and the exact issues that led to my parents’ mistreatment of my wife and the destruction of the relationship. We mostly do not kill women as openly - although women are still more likely to be murdered by an intimate partner than anyone else - but we do punish women for having the nerve to insist on full personhood. 

 

In the long introduction, Chollet has some interesting things to say about the present, and I think this line applies both to misogyny and to the rise of Trumpism. 

 

Truth be told, it is precisely because the witch-hunts speak to us of our own time that we have excellent reasons not to face up to them. Venturing down this path means confronting the most wretched aspects of humanity. The witch-hunts demonstrate, first, the stubborn tendency of all societies to find a scapegoat for their misfortunes and to lock themselves into a spiral of irrationality, cut off from all reasonable challenge, until the accumulation of hate-filled discourse and obsessional hostility justify a turn to physical violence, perceived as the legitimate defense of a beleaguered society. 

 

One need only read recent calls to fascism by mainstream right wing publications to see this in action. “Spiral of irrationality” is perhaps generous. Later, Chollet, writing about how the witch-hunts sprang into being out of a longer tradition of hate, has this to say. 

 

Centuries of hatred and obscurantism seem to have culminated in this wave of violence, born of fear in the face of the increasing space taken up by women in the social realm.  

 

Again, this seems to be repeating itself in the American Right at this time. They are not happy with the way women have taken up increasing space in our society. 

 

Another interesting parallel: for much of human history, contraception was the realm of female healers and midwives, part of the feminine folklore that was passed down through generations. While the modern push to criminalize abortion and contraception in the United States arose in the 1800s, in concert with the change of gynecology from a female realm to a male-dominated medical practice, the first criminalization of contraception and abortion started hundreds of years before that, and was strongly connected to the witch-hunts. And yes, this includes forcing women to declare their pregnancies and punishment for miscarriages. (Sound like our current laws in certain states?) 

 

Chollet also notes that the witch-hunts were also connected with a shift in how labor was viewed. 

 

For Federici, the witch-hunts paved the way for the gendered labor division required by capitalism, reserving remunerated work for men, and assigning to women the birthing and education of the future labor-force.

 

This is true. The exploitation inherent in factory capitalism requires that gendered division of labor. For my own family, we had to intentionally work different shifts and do part-time work so that both of us could have careers. We were fortunate, in a country that largely refuses to assist new parents with things like paid leave, to be able to make it work. But the system would completely fall apart without gendered labor, and the expectation of uncompensated labor by women. 

 

After the introduction, there are four long chapters, each addressing one of the issues I listed above. The issue of independence is a huge one, and I truly did not understand the depth of the problem until I observed the expectations put on my wife and other women in my life. I also hadn’t listened all that well to the constant background noise in our culture that tells women they have no value or purpose unless they successfully capture a man and have children. And the related noise telling men to avoid the clutches of those designing women. It has been shocking to me to see how mistreated childless and unmarried women are in our society, but particularly in the right-wing church. 

 

I couldn’t resist writing down this Gloria Steinem quote. 

 

What’s more, the full and dynamic life Steinem has led and leads today, a whirlwind of travels and new vistas, of activism and writing, of love and friendship, seriously complicates the picture for those who believe a woman’s life means nothing without partnership and motherhood. To a journalist who asked why she wasn’t married, Steinem gave the justly celebrated reply: “I can’t mate in captivity.”

 

Can you even imagine a man being asked why he wasn’t married; with the implication his life was meaningless without it? Particularly a man who was as accomplished as Steinem? Later, Steinem is cited for this perceptive quote: “The more patriarchal and gender-polarized a culture is, the more addicted to romance.” 

 

One of the things I knew I had to do if I were to have a happy and fulfilling marriage to my wife is to understand that she needs this independence, this meaning outside of me and our kids and our home. There is nothing wrong with that, any more than there is anything wrong with a man wanting the same. 

 

The second chapter is on children, and it is entitled “wanting sterility.” Chollet is intentionally childless, and is proud of that fact. She doesn’t hate children, as she patiently explains, just does not wish to have her own. And again, there is nothing wrong with that in either a man or a woman. I would say from my experience as a child, as a parent, and as a divorce attorney, the bigger problem in our world isn’t that too many people don’t have children who should. It is that too many who should never have children have them. The trauma is all too apparent for everyone to see. 

 

But the great fear of anti-feminists is exactly this one. “If we let the wimmins choose, they won’t have children, and the race dies off.” Which is bullshit on a stick, of course. First and most obviously, there is no human duty to perpetuate the species. There is no moral imperative to make more humans. This burden should not be placed on anyone. But nearly as obviously, plenty of people are having children - we are at the point where the earth cannot support all of us, but whatever. (In reality, this fear is more about the fear that there will not be enough pure blood white people.) The thing is, this exposes the deep cognitive dissonance inherent in most retrograde ideas. 

 

Wombs on strike: this great fear was at the heart of the debates (among men) that preceded the legalization of contraception, which amounts to a peculiar admission - for really, if motherhood is such a universally wonderful experience in our society, why would women choose anything else?

 

Same thing with “every woman really wants to be a stay-at-home mom.” If that were true, then you wouldn’t have to force them, right? But these retrograde ideas are more about what men think women should want than what they actually do want. (And, the flip side of this is to deny the nurturing side of men, many of us whom very much wanted to be parents - and just as much to parent our kids rather than farm that all out to our wives.) 

 

It is fascinating to see the history that Chollet cites regarding contraception. Prior to the Black Death, the church largely kept out of the question of birth rates. Indeed, given the number of days sex was forbidden, it would seem the church really preferred celibacy. However, this changed, and it is interesting why. 

 

[P]ro-birth advocates agitated in the name of social peace, national interest and the protection of the race. 

 

Yep, then as now, it was crucial to have too many mouths to feed, too many workers for scarce jobs, and so on, to prevent labor unrest. And also, best to out-grow those other countries, and particularly those awful brown-skinned humans. Don’t believe me? I listened to this shit for decades as part of white Fundamentalist “Christianity.” The specifics changed - was it Muslims, or Hispanics, or blacks who were out-reproducing us today? - but the fear remained the same. 

 

But it wasn’t just about popping out babies, of course. Otherwise, what would be the problem with women going back to work afterward? And why this talk of a “biological clock”?

 

In other words, this expression was an early harbinger of the imminent anti-feminist backlash, and its dazzlingly successful integration into the female anatomy makes it a unique phenomenon in the history of evolution - it would have given Darwin pause for thought. Since women’s bodies give them the option of carrying a child, of course Nature would prefer that women also change the resulting infant’s nappies, once born, that they attend all meetings with pediatricians and, while we’re on the subject, that they mop the kitchen floor, do the washing-up and remember to buy loo roll for the next twenty-five years. This is known as “maternal instinct.” Yes, Nature orders precisely this, and not, for example, that, in order to thank women for taking on the major task required for perpetuation of the species, society do its best to compensate them for the inconveniences they thereby suffer; nothing of the sort. And if you thought that might make sense, you haven’t really understood nature. 

 

It isn’t just about babies, it is about an entire hierarchy. I came to understand this when, apparently, giving birth to five children, and taking a majority role on childcare when they were small wasn’t enough for my family. We split things too equally, and, perhaps most of all, my wife expected to have an equal say in how we split things. 

 

Related to the issue of a biological clock, male fertility declines as well, and our sperm degrades as we get older. But few see an issue with an octogenarian fathering a child he will likely never raise. That’s women’s work, right? 

 

Particularly wince worthy in this chapter was the bit on psychiatrist Genevieve Serre, who interviewed childless women, with the idea that they were broken and needed to be fixed. Read this bit of what she said:

 

Having identified among her interviewees qualities she describes as “masculine,” including “independence, efficiency, discipline, interests such as politics,” Serre writes, “This self-sufficient, independent masculine side may stand in the way of a femininity that’s more passive, more receptive in the sense of accepting life’s gifts, which is likely to be necessary in accessing motherhood.” Mothers, you lazy and dependent creatures who are content to float in the great mystery of life and leave politics to men: you have selected the nineteenth century, please hold the line.

 

My wife has those “masculine” virtues in abundance. But what the hell makes them “masculine” other than cultural bullshit? Those are human virtues that good parents try to cultivate in their children. Self-sufficiency rather than dependence, efficiency rather than laziness or lack of focus, self-discipline, and an interest in justice for others? Heck yes, and good women are like that too! 

 

I won’t quote all of the section, but the author quotes several instances where female authors are questioned (or questioned posthumously) as to whether their lack of children caused them pain. Again, something a male author would never be asked. Chollet quotes Pam Grossman with a telling observation.

 

“Women who create things other than children are still considered dangerous by many.”

 

Oh, and how about this passage?

 

Ultimately, given the current cultural norms, only one kind of woman can pursue her life with absolute peace of mind, enjoying both her own satisfaction and society’s approval: the woman who has one or more children she wants to have, who feels enriched by this experience and has not paid too high a price for it, whether thanks to her comfortable financial circumstances, to a working life that is fulfilling but still leaves time for family, to a partner who does their share of the educational and domestic tasks, to a wider circle - of relatives and friends - that helps out, or thanks to all these things at once. (If it is thanks to her easy financial situation, there remains a strong possibility that our exemplar’s happiness also relies on her domestic employee or nanny’s demanding and often badly paid job.) Other women are all condemned to some kind of great or lesser torment, and to envying each other, and so dividing the divisions between them.

 

And yes, I understand that our financial privilege is one reason we are able to do things the way we do. (Although not as much as the financial privilege that allows for one parent to not work at all.) 

 

The third chapter is mostly about aging, and it is truly excellent. Our obsession with younger female bodies is the great objectification of our age, and it is inseparable from our view of women as existing for reproduction. 

 

We often say that aging and death are taboo in our society - except it is only women’s aging that is infra dig. 

 

Chollet goes a bit deeper too. The problem isn’t just a loss of youth, but something else that men find threatening. 

 

More broadly, what seems to be most problematic about women’s aging is their experience. 

Experience leads to both competence and confidence, two things that are unattractive to controlling men. There are several pages just on the tendency of [some] men to want far younger women - as conservative asshole Phil Robertson pithily put it, you want to marry girls at age 15, before they get too opinionated, when they are still willing to pluck your ducks for you. And sure, it is a lot harder to impress a 40-year-old woman than a 20-year-old one. So what? Up your game as you get older - maybe learn some household skills too: I have it on excellent authority that good women are turned on by a guy who cooks and cleans. 

 

There is another factor at work here that I hadn’t really thought of, but I think Chollet is correct about it. 

 

Western culture decided early on that the body was repulsive - and also that it was female, and vice versa. Theologians and philosophers projected their horror of the body onto women, and were thereby able to disavow the claims of their own bodies. Saint Augustine explains that, in men, the body reflects the soul, but that this isn't the case for women.

 

At the heart of our hang-ups about sex is that simple fact: we are modern Gnostics, seeing body and soul as separate things, the one evil and the other good. With an evil, disgusting body, it is easy to assign both disgust and evil to women, as their bodies are more obviously necessary for reproduction. A true embrace of our bodies and our embodiment as equally full of goodness as our souls (and, best yet, an acknowledgement of the inseparability of our selves) would go a long way toward fixing what ails our culture, and enable us to see other bodies as goodness and thus stop mistreating them. 

 

The end of this chapter has an amazing Susan Sontag quote. 

 

Women have another option. They can aspire to be wise, not merely nice; to be competent, not merely helpful; to be strong, not merely graceful; to be ambitious for themselves, not merely for themselves in relation to men and children. They can let themselves age naturally and without embarrassment, actively protesting and disobeying the conventions that stem from this society’s double standard about aging. Instead of being girls, girls as long as possible, who then age humiliatingly into middle-aged women and then obscenely into old women, they can become women much earlier - and remain active adults, enjoying the long erotic career of which women are capable, far longer. Women should allow their faces to show the lives they have lived. Women should tell the truth. 

 

That is just amazing. And true. I wanted a grown woman, and, even though my wife was young when we married, she was confident and grown-up in the best of senses. As we both have aged, we have changed in body and mind and many other ways. But that is nothing to be afraid of, and certainly nothing to fault a woman for. 

 

The final chapter has many sub-topics, one of which is the disgraceful way that medicine treats women. Don’t get my wife started on this, or you will get an earful. Or, my mom back in the day. (We were all born at home, with a midwife, not in a hospital. I’m not judging any choice here, but obstetrics in the 1970s were simply horrible, from what so many women tell me, and even now, even with a wonderful doctor, there is so much room for improvement.) 

 

Another note here: Chollet correctly points out that it is mainstream medicine’s mistreatment of women that has contributed greatly to the explosion in popularity of snake oil remedies and general woo. Ironically, it is the same male chauvinists and giant mega-corporations selling most of this, but it is marketed as somehow “gentler” than science-based medicine. Don’t get me started on this topic. But it does make a lot of sense that the impersonality of male-dominated medicine does contribute to the success of scammers and grifters.

 

Chollet nails it again with her insistence that the problem stems from a separation of the so-called “masculine” and “feminine” virtues. With male doctors, they could get the money and be the boss, with the actual caring left to the female nurses. Doctors are to avoid emotion, of course. Fortunately, this too is changing for the better. I love Chollet’s line here. 

 

On the other hand, what message do we send when we appear impassive in the face of suffering? Is the psychopath implicitly our model for the good doctor? And does repressing your emotions really allow you to protect yourself? 

 

This is a recurring theme in this chapter. You cannot separate rationalism and emotion, or you become a monster. Both are parts of our psyche, and are necessary for us to respond appropriately. I love the note that in Chinese calligraphy, “think” contains both brain and heart as elements. Pure rationalism is not even possible, of course, but attempts to eliminate the heart - that is, empathy - result in monstrous conclusions. 

 

Which is one way you end up with witch hunts. This quote from Matilda Joslyn Gage stood out:

 

During the witchcraft period the minds of people were trained in a single direction. The chief lesson of the church that betrayal of friends was necessary to one’s own salvation created an intense selfishness. All humanitarian feeling was lost in the effort to secure heaven at the expense of others, even those most closely bound by ties of nature and affection. Mercy, tenderness, compassion were all obliterated. Truthfulness escaped from the Christian world; fear, sorrow, and cruelty reigned pre-eminent. Contempt and hatred of women was inculcated with greater intensity; love of power and treachery were parts of the selfish lessons of the church. All reverence for length of years was lost. The sorrows and sufferings of a long life appealed to no sympathetic cord in the heart.

 

This is how you know we are, in a significant sense, in a new period of witch hunts. At least on the part of the Right Wing. The crackdown on abortion and contraception. The pearl clutching about [white] birth rates. The lament that women aren’t “feminine” anymore, and don’t want to be domestic drudges like they used to. The vitriol lobbed at female politicians who express feminist viewpoints. (Taking a hammer to an 80 something woman, anyone?) 

 

The book ends with a tying of exploitative capitalism to misogyny, and I found it very interesting. Just like misogyny views women as a resource to be exploited, our current form of economy depends on the rape of mother earth in a completely unsustainable manner. It is intriguing to me the parallels - there does seem to be a different relationship than the one where we are part of nature, and nature has given birth to us. The final line in the book is worth quoting. 

 

Turning the world upside down is no small undertaking. But there can be great joy - the joy of audacity, of insolence, of a vital affirmation, of defying faceless authority - in allowing our ideas and imaginations to follow the paths down which these witches’ whisperings entice us. Joy in bringing into focus an image of this world that would ensure humanity’s well-being through an even-handed pact with nature, not by a Pyrrhic victory over it - this world, where the untrammeled enjoyment of our bodies and our minds would never again be associated with a hellish sabbath. 

 

Overall, a fascinating book. It expresses some of the feelings I have had over the last 25 years, particularly those resulting from watching what my wife and daughters have experienced at the hands of anti-feminists. Unfortunately, those include many of my former religious tribe, as well as extended family. It is disturbing how many resist any move toward gender equality, despite its obvious benefits not just to women, but to men as well, and to the greater good of society.