Role Of Witchcraft

During the early-modern period there was a clear association between women and the crime of witchcraft. This was arguably used as a form of social control.
It 's fair to think that relating witchcraft to women was a form of social control because society took all the characteristics/ roles it had prescribed to women to represent feminity- especially does that were unsiredable- and attached them to a definition of evilness and unpuresness in order to have those charactersitcs extinguish/controlled. The early-modern period was pre-dominantly ruled by the beliefs of the church over the state. At this time, gender roles were also very divided, and there was a clear distinction between what the roles each gender played aswell as what limitations …show more content…
Not only were women simply the weaker sex in a general societal view, they were also regarded as naturally unpure, with a greater chance of succumbing to sin. One of the biggest arguments at the time was that women were seen as more easily tempted by the devil because they were sexually vulnerable to demonic seduction. Since womens sexuality was also considered dirty, this all made for an argument that women were just naturally an easier target of harmful magic. At the height of the witchcraft persecutions, an idea of what witches were supposed to resemble was circulating around the masses. Most of these charactersitics were considerd as possible warning signs of witches, and most of these warning signs targeted women e.g women who were unmarried, women who had premarital sex, women of lower class. Although it wasn 't unheard of for a man to be convincted of witchcraft, it was a scarce occurance and it mostly applied to men that were seen under these same 'female ' qualities that were applied to heresy. Men who were covincted of witchcraft were often seen as less dominant, weaker, more suscipatable to the seduction of the devil; all of the qualities that were predominantly female in …show more content…
Seeing the circumstances of the times, it is obivous to see why there might have been a inclination to gender witchcraft as a female crime. Witchcraft was not only a psychological epidemic but it also became a way for the church to control that which they feared and did not accept. It was no coincidence that the characteristics that described a witch were also those which were highly undesirable in women of the time. During the witch hunts, it was these women that were more likely to be sought, persecuted, trialed and convincted, which perhaps acted as a way to clean society of what it did not