>CB: Well, "feminists" is an exaggeration on my part just like "witches"
>is tongue in cheek.
>
>However, why didn't they call them warlocks ? Still sounds like an
>anti-woman mentality, consciousness, some kind of misogynist expression
>from that historical period. The transcripts below don't contradict the
>interpretation of the events as anti-feminine. The little girls couldn't
>have started anything if the adults didn't believe in witches as some form
>of evil expression of feminiity.
The Salem witch trials are a faint echo of the European witch crazes which reached their height in the 16th and early 17th centuries. Estimates vary wildly, up to millions of women tortured and killed, based on the charge that they were the devil's consorts. (And if you apply enough torture, the church found, you could get quite a lot of information on the devil's sex life.) If people think of only of Salem when they think of witch crazes, that's like ignoring the entire transatlantic slave trade and only remembering lynchings in the 1940s.
The witch crazes, in addition to giving the poor someone to blame for their problems (diverting attention from the landlords and the church), seem to have had male supremacist goals as well as content. There are many interpretations, but one of the more convincing ones is that women healers were actually pretty good at curing diseases and injuries. This was a direct challenge to church authority, and undermined doctrine. Also, there's the issue of abortion and control of reproduction, information about which was also dispensed by wise women and midwives. Women who had this particular type of independent knowledge were a threat to the church and the feudal order, which was facing serious upheavels about then. (I've also seen arguments that witch crazes were a response to peasant uprisings.)
Similar to the U.S. in the 50's, there was a political goal, to stamp out a set of ideas, to make them too dangerous to discuss, or even think. So I think the "witch hunt" metaphor is fairly apt, if you go back to the big witch hunts.
Jenny Brown