18th Century Witchcraft

These women that were accused did not fit into the norm of society due to their independence from patriarchal norms, specifically elderly women that lived outside the parameters of the patriarchal family. The suspect issue that surrounded these women were that they often never gave birth or married, leading them to create a sub-set of English social hierarchy that was unable to mesh into the traditional, male-dominated, immediate family unit that was so prominent in English society. Another reason why elderly women were so vulnerable to the accusations of witchcraft were that as they aged and became more dependent on other people, her neighbors in the community would have to pick up the burden that normally her immediate family would; “The …show more content…
Many of the factors that contributed to the explosion of the belief in witchcraft, stated earlier in this paper, such as low wages and standard of living, improved tremendously over the years. However, these improved factors, like most economic developments, hit the urban centers first. Then, the economic and social expansions eventually leaked to the countryside of England. This took quite some time though, so much time that many villages did not feel the same economic and social progressions until the mid-eighteenth century. “The most we can say with any degree of certainty is that communal provision for the poor became more systematic and effective after 1660, and that may very well have eliminated some of the social tension between the dependent members of the community and their more well-off neighbors.” Although there is no legitimate evidence on specifically whether lower-class people actually stopped believing in witchcraft, the evidence that shows the social improvements within society show a cause and effect relationship to the decline the witchcraft trials and