Essay On The Witch Craze

The witch hunt craze that enveloped Europe and the New World throughout the 13th-16th centuries resulted in the senseless murders of countless people through horrifying methods of torture and execution, and all for seemingly no reason. Women constituted the vast majority of victims of the witch hunt craze that enveloped Europe and the New World throughout the 13th-16th centuries, with up to 80% of all witchcraft victims being women (Barstow, page 7), for a wide variety of reasons that can all be traced back to one thing: oppressive sexism that dominated the patriarchal society of early Europe. Women were the dominant victims of witch hunt mania due to a combination of the oppressive roles that were forced upon women in early European society, …show more content…
Women were forced to adhere to the roles of the submissive wife and the nurturing mother, and those who openly defied those roles were the most common victims of the witchcraft craze. Women who existed on the fringes of society and lived a solitary life were often accused, alongside unmarried women- both wealthy widowers, who didn’t have to depend on a man to survive and young women who had yet to marry, specifically those who were beautiful and attracted the gazes of married men (History and Effects of Witchcraft Prejudice, 2016). The legends of witches was an inversion of the traditional motherhood roles, as witches were accused of crunching on children instead of falling into the traditional maternal role. The persecution of witches was also linked to women in the role of healer, which was occupied primarily by women throughout the history of early Europe as they used herbal based medicine to heal the townspeople. The authority of women to practice medicine was one of many liberties destroyed by the Catholic Church, who regarded female healers as a threat to the ultimate authority that God held over the power of life and death that he relegated to his chosen male representatives on earth. The