American Women In The 18th Century

Most of the health-related wise women practiced alternative medicine to help people, especially young women to conceive and give birth, hence, they had a great deal of responsibility for the survival of the community. Because this was a very delicate job during the seventeenth-century, there was a risk of thing going wrong, and women were often blamed for someone’s sickness, incident, or death. According to John Winthrop, Massachusetts’s governor, “Jane Hawkins was used to give young women oil of mandrakes and other stuff to cause conception” and it was not tolerable, so they took it to the magistrates. Another event –among many– was after Mary Dyer delivered a deformed, deceased baby, she was judged for using diabolical forces, Winthrop arguing the corpse was a “monster with horns, claws, and scales” to insinuate she and some others were witches, therefore, she was told to leave the town. …show more content…
The clergy saw the faith that the peasants placed in these female healers and recognized the need to denigrate their practices.” Although universities did not allowed women to learn or practice, and even upper-class women were barred from official medical institutes of learning, midwives were highly respected among the population. Karlsen highlights that "The frequency with which doctors were involved in witchcraft cases suggests that one of the unspoken (and probably unacknowledged) functions of New England Witchcraft was to discredit women's medical knowledge in favor of their male