Reclaiming the Witch: Feminist Power, Resistance, and Why We Love Witch Stories

The Allure of Witchcraft: Stories of Defiance and Power

What is it about witches that makes them such enduring figures in our culture? Is it their mystery, their magic—or something more rebellious?

From Hocus Pocus to Agatha All Along. From Bewitched to Wicked. From Mildred Hubble in The Worst Witch to Isadora Moon. From Alix E. Harrow’s The Once and Future Witches to Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch or Danielle Garrett’s Murder’s a Witch, whatever floats your witchy boat there’s a story out there for you.

Perhaps our enchantment with them isn’t just about fantasy, creativity and imagination. Perhaps it’s about a counter-narrative to the story patriarchy has tried to write for women, a sneaking suspicion that History hasn’t always been entirely truthful.[1]

Why, for example, have we been “taught to fear witches but not the people who burned them alive”? A simple but thought-provoking question I have seen in various forms circulating on social media in recent years.

My relationship to witches has changed drastically over time. My first encounter was, I imagine, quite typical—the conventional, child-scaring villainous of fairytales, such as in Snow White or Hansel and Gretel. Witches designed to inspire unquestioned fear and obedience in young children. But over time, and as my library expanded, they came to represent something quite different. Something that society has long tried to repress: powerful, autonomous women who refused to conform.

Vintage illustration from Hansel and Gretel

For me, stories about witches have become more than imagination, but a reminder that resistance has always been necessary. They are a signifier of the control that society has tried to enforce over women’s autonomy—a control that, disturbingly, persists today in the form of restrictive laws and cultural policing of women’s bodies. And they are a spark of rebellion against that attempt to control.

If we take a deep dive into the history of witches, it may well cast a new light on the plight of women, one that is helpful for us in our contemporary struggles against a society characterized by gender-based violence in all its guises.

Witches, Autonomy, and the Roots of Patriarchal Fear

For this discovery of witches, I turn to work by the feminist scholar Silvia Federici, who has researched the witch hunts of the early modern period in Europe and parts of America, what came before and what came after.  

The structure of the “traditional” patriarchal family with a “housewife” is a creation of the 19th century.[2] Before then, it simply didn’t exist. The emergence of the housewife at that moment in history is referred to by scholars as the “Cult of Domesticity” and coincides with the standardization of wage labour and industrial capitalism.[3]

Book cover art

Make no mistake, although it happened slowly, this was a monumental shift for western society, a brand-new social order. For such comprehensive change to happen and to be accepted, the culture and society that previously existed had to be totally decimated. From its ashes, so to speak.[4] This decimation took the form of a war on women, a witch hunt, which is what we see happening in the early modern period that Federici has researched. We go from a medieval, feudal system to a capitalist world-system. And, make no bones about it, it was a brutal struggle.

As Federici explains, medieval times were by no means ideal for women, however, the transition to capitalism marked an intensified and targeted effort to strip women of autonomy. Communal lands, or “commons,” where women could once gather resources and subsist independently, were enclosed and privatized, cutting off these lifelines.

Similarly, the practice of midwifery which had given women a degree of autonomy over their bodies was taken over and medicalized. This medicalization extended to folk healing, a practice that was often transmitted from generation to generation and gave many women means to a livelihood as well as a place in the community.  

In short, back then witches weren’t the witches we think of today. They were “the village midwife, medic, soothsayer or sorceress, whose privileged area of competence […] was amorous intrigue” (or love potions).[5] In other words, they were important and valued members of communities.

Federici then encourages us to think about the disappearance of the commons as not only the disappearance of an important material resource, but also as “an enclosure of knowledge, of our bodies, and of our relationship to other people and nature.”[6] This cultural enclosure represented a profound shift that paved the way for women’s persecution.

Capitalism’s Witch Hunt: Controlling Women, Controlling Power

Capitalism reshaped everything. As Federici’s research highlights, enclosing the commons deprived lower classes of access to essential resources, creating a crisis that led to desperate acts like begging or stealing.

 The upheaval revealed itself in accusations of witchcraft that were often levelled against poor women who struggling for subsistence, midwives and folk healers, and any instance of female sexuality as it was seen as subversive as something “diabolical, the quintessence of female ‘magic.’”[7] The result was, Federici notes, that “Women were terrorized through fantastic accusations, horrendous torture, and public executions because their social power had to be destroyed.”[8]

Witch-burning in Saxony-Anhalt, 1555. Woodcut after original leaflet, Germanisches Nationalmusem in Nuremberg (Public Domain)

The new economic order and accompanying social order was made possible because of the extreme brutality characterized by campaigns of terror where the price of resistance was extermination. From persecution, “a new model of femininity emerged: the ideal woman and wife – passive, obedient, thrifty, of few words, always busy at work, and chaste. This change,” Federici contends, “began at the end of the 17th century, after women had been subjected for more than two centuries to state terrorism” and continues today.[9]

We have not divested ourselves of the legacy of the witch hunts. Far from it. In fact, we seemed doomed to reenact them.

Witches as Symbols of Rebellion and Solidarity

So, going back to out earlier question, why, despite all attempts to demonize them, do we love a story about a witch? Maybe because when we celebrate witches, we’re embracing resilience, subverting expectations, and finding solidarity across time and place with every woman who refused to be broken.

Capitalism tried its bloody and brutal best to rewrite the witch’s narrative by destroying their social power and casting them as evil personified. But you can’t hold a good witch down forever. Our continued cultural enchantment with witches, particularly with more nuanced representations, suggests that the subversive potential of witchcraft is impossible to fully extinguish.

When we embrace these stories, we are not only rejecting the cult of domesticity and its ideal one-dimensional woman. We are fighting back against the war on women. We are tapping into an alternative history that creates space for and solidarity between different experiences of womanhood. In embracing witches’ stories, we’re celebrating the power and potential—past, present, and future. And that’s a legacy worth keeping alive.

Embrace Your Inner Witch

Have you got a witch’s story to tell? Let’s write our own stories of strength, defiance, and magic.

Works Cited:

Silvia Federici. Witches, Witch-hunting and Women. Oakland: PM press, 2018.

----- Caliban and the Witch. New York: Autonomedia, 2004.

NOTES:

[1] As always, I am using a trans-inclusive definition of women and girls.

[2] Caliban, pp.98-99.

[3] Yes, yes, I know. But I simply cannot fully let go of the British system of spelling I was trained in.

[4] Caliban, p.204.

[5] Caliban, p.200.

[6] Witches, p.21.

[7] Witches, p.28.

[8] Witches, p.32.

[9] Caliban, p.103.