Women became the prime target of the witchcraft accusations throughout
Women became the prime target of the witchcraft accusations throughout
From about 1480 to 1700, a witch craze spread rampantly throughout most of Europe, more specifically in the southwestern region. More than 100,000 so-called “witches” were tortured and executed after being accused of witchcraft, along with their alleged connection with the Devil. The three main reasons for the oppression of these citizens were religious reformations, social descrimination, and financial greed. This craze landed during the same time as the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution.…
Women were considered weaker than men so they were most likely to surrender to the Devil’s desire which explains why majority of the accusers were women. They believed that women were inferior to men which they used the story of Adam and Eve to explain this since Eve was created from Adam’s ribs. Infertile and menopausal women were also most likely to be accused of witchcraft since according to the Puritan values, they didn’t serve a purpose in society since they couldn’t give birth. Sarah Good was named one of the supposedly accusers. There were some evidence even from her own husband, William…
Many poor, old women were single and this was disliked by other citizens. Out of fear, it became easier to blame unexplainable events on them. When they were accused of being witches…
Women accused of witchcraft had an economic bias. One historian believes that those accused of witchcraft were the “-moderately poor” not the poorest women(Karlsen Ch. 3, Paragraph 1). Eunice Cole, for example, was not dirt poor but not middle class filed to receive poor relief yet was denied. Eunice was accused of being a witch after rebuking Hampton about how a man in the same economic status as her was receiving aid. Most women were economically dependent on the male members of their family.…
The more recent book, Mary Beth Norton’s In the Devil’s Snare, stated that the witchcraft trials were influenced by events during that time period, particularly the Indian Wars. These wars caused refugees from towns that were destroyed by the Indians to move to Salem in droves, boosting fear and social instability. The author asserts that the primary difference between these theses is that the former would have you believe that accusations of witchcraft were made solely out of devotion to faith, while the latter adds the variable of a troubled time…
Was the Salem Witchcraft Hysteria a Product of Women’s Search for Power? In the late 1600s, occurrences of “witchcraft hysteria” took place in Salem, Massachusetts. These occurrences involved young girls experiencing fits and blaming it on the practice of witchcraft. They would accuse other women of practicing witchcraft, and this eventually caused a hundred colonists to end up in jail, and nineteen hanged.…
Throughout the course of the seventeenth century, at least 342 New England women were accused of practicing witchcraft. Although the majority of these cases were dismissed by authorities, the most notorious case took place in the Puritan dominated Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. The entire community was thrown into chaos as a result of a group of girls claiming they had been bewitched by several old women. This very infamous case of hysteria not only showed that there was underlying blatant sexism and twisted misconceptions of women in New England, but it also exposed the dark side of Puritan beliefs. Therefore, the Salem witchcraft hysteria was indeed caused by a fear of women.…
The victims accused of committing witchcraft during the Salem Witch Trials were primarily women. Basic Demographics show that 74% of the accused were women (Demos 1315). This is due to gender roles that were established by the Puritans in the colonies. There were numerous double standards within the trials that made women more susceptible to being accused of witchcraft. For example, women were often accused of sexual relations with the devil, but men were never questioned about it.…
There was a pattern in the accusations, older women who were not married and women who didn’t follow the patriarchal society. Women who were not married threatened the balance because there was no man that was the head of the house, which made the women very independent. Being an independent women gave them individual freedoms which was not how a patriarchal society worked, the men were suppose to be the head of the household and women follow the men. One way to stop women from being so independent was making fewer of them and that’s by hanging them because of being a “witch”. Another way to keep the balance is to show how powerful the town majest’s is, to show how powerful the majest’s is they signed all the arrest warrants.…
After the Black Death swept through Europe during the early modern period of European history, societies were left in a state of chaos. The repercussions from such a debilitating plague were numerous and the impact on society was powerful. The economy was destabilized and the Church lost most of its power as citizens looked at the plague as punishment from God. In looking to be back in God’s grace, societies looked to purge their communities of those they thought responsible; about 100,000 people, most of them women were tried for the crime of witchcraft.…
They would accuse women of being witches who were diabolical and evil. This phenomenon was the causes of many deaths in young innocent…
People were having the realization that others around them were having their entire lives ruined because they were being falsely accused of witchcraft with no real physical evidence against them. The same can be seen in The Communist Red scare where a large amount of false accusations are made on…
The Salem Witch Trials, had its dealings with the supernatural world, people afflicted (or bewitched) seeing “witches’ in their visions, a “mysterious” man taunting people to sign his book, or even unexplained deaths of livestock or even an infant. Whatever it may have been, the people of Salem Village all assume that it is “supernatural.” Samuel Parris and others speculate that anything supernatural is because of the doings, or even presence of the devil. It is this concept that brought forth the Witch Trials which convicted over two-hundred, and nineteen of them hanged. Their convictions stemmed from people who bewitched, seeing them in visions.…
“Witches” were generally poor, unemployed women or widows from ages twenty to twenty-five. Usually women, but there were exceptions in which there were some male witches. Women are more credulous and more impressionable than men. Women have “slippery tongues and cannot conceal from other women anything they have learned by the evil arts” Women had greater sexual appetites, so their lust leads them to accept even the Devil as a lover. Women are defective and cannot control their affections or passions and so they “search for brood over, and inflict various vengeances, with be witchcraft or by some other means.”…
The biased view of women and the lower class led to easy accusing. There was no one factor to the escalation of the Salem witch trials, rather it was a combination of many things that all stemmed from their religion…