One such passage from the second section, which focuses on describing witches in great detail, offers insight into how the author viewed women: This passage from the Malleus Maleficarum declares that women are ultimately more susceptible to possession from demons, as well as more prone to lash out using witchcraft just on the basis of assumed female characteristics, such as “loose tongues” and “lack physical strength”.
Because this treatise played such a large role in efforts against witchcraft in the early modern time period,[1] it may be assumed that these attitudes about women were widespread and believed by many people in Europe.
[2] The first Germanic law codes also referred to the existence of cannibal women who had strikingly similar characteristics as early modern witches.
One such record, titled, “The most wonderfull and true storie, of a certaine witch named Alse Gooderige of Stapen hill” from 1597 exemplifies how women were more likely to be accused of witchcraft based on possessing these characteristics.
[4] This description reflects the phenomenon that women were more likely to be accused of witchcraft if they deviated from the societal acceptance of being young, beautiful, and involved in society life.
[6] Many made mention of pagan festivals in which individuals dressed as women and drank from a type of potion,[6] because of this many early interpretations of witchcraft were stemmed from such practices.
As well, Russel Burton, author of Witchcraft in the Middle Ages, makes mention of behavior that was condemned in early Rome, with many believing that women only came to church on Sundays to participate in pagan activities.
[6] This darker, more twisted, version of Diana was the early leader of witch craft in the Middle Ages, and was another projection of women during the time period.
In 1893, she published the book Woman, Church and State, in which Gage argued that the witches persecuted in the Early Modern period were pagan priestesses adhering to an ancient religion venerating a Great Goddess.
[2] In 1973, two American second-wave feminists, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, published an extended pamphlet in which they asserted that the women persecuted had been the traditional healers and midwives of the community who were being deliberately eliminated by the male medical establishment.
Historian Diane Purkiss described it as "not politically helpful" because it constantly portrays women as "helpless victims of patriarchy" and thus does not aid them in contemporary feminist struggles.
[3] These attitudes about gender may be an explanation for why some areas experienced higher numbers of males accused, such as at the margins of Europe, in Normandy, Iceland, Finland, Estonia, and Russia.
In her book Caliban and the Witch (2004), Silvia Federici argues that the witch-hunts were historical events through which occurred the transformation of women's bodies into “work machines” for the reproduction of the workforce, a necessary precondition of a shift from the subsistence to the monetary economy.
She remarks that the period the witch-hunts happened in the world history took place at the same time with the conquest of America, beginning of the slave trade, and expropriation of the peasantry; which all indicate the rise of capitalism.
Because the burden of the structural change in economic relations and the production with enclosures in the first phase of capitalist development had stood mostly by women, they were the ones who tried to save their lands, social position, and subsistence-oriented agriculture practices.
However, governments in Europe, by passing a law that introduced a new crime, i.e. the accusation of witchcraft —a crimen exceptum equal to high treason— they attempted to silence the resistance of women and any other alternative solutions to feudalism other than capitalism.
Besides the structural changes in the spheres of reproduction and in the terrain of the relation between men and women, Federici argues that the shift coming with all the means and tools of capital accumulation was an attract to communal mutual aid.
With infra-politics of capitalism, the attack on the healer resulted in that the communal production and survival skills were taken away from the society, which had changed the structure of mutual aid, if not eliminated it completely.
First, before Michel Foucault, feminist activists and theorists understanding of the body were taken as the substantial factor since the early 1970s to analyze the positions of male and female in society avant la lettre.
Third, she criticizes him for writing the “History of Sexuality” (1978) from a “universal, abstract, asexual subject”[18] which enabled him to completely omit a historical event of gendered violence as big as the witch-hunt.
After the Black Death (1347-1351) drastically reduced the working population in Europe, it was increasingly difficult for feudal lords to control and discipline the peasants.
When the monetary economy was introduced, only men were entitled to receive payment, after which began the marginalization of women's labor from the economical and political realms of the society.
In the context of the aftermath of the Black Death, the question of population control was obvious to them, so began the “demographic recording, census-taking, and the formalization of demography itself as the first ‘state science’”.
[19] Finding a way of systematically increasing the size of the labor force was an important political goal for the ruling class and the nascent bourgeoisie.