Kathleen was kind enough to do a guest post.
Query:
Do you think the accusations were based on these women’s deviation
from the proscribed role of women in those days?
The
Salem witch trials of 1692 were a unique and tragic episode in
American history. The trials and executions, which took place in
Salem Village---now the town of Danvers, Massachusetts--- included
close to a hundred and fifty people, mostly women and girls, arrested
from twenty two towns all over New England; including the territory
of what is now Maine. The accusers who took center stage during the
trials, and who did most of the finger pointing, were all girls or
young women from the ages of nine to eighteen. The witch hysteria,
and the ensuing legal actions, took a little more than a year from
January 1692 to May of 1693, and yet the fascination with the Salem
“witches” has never diminished.
One
of the nineteen people hanged in August of 1692 was Martha Carrier,
my grandmother back nine generations. She was so vocal in her own
defense, denying the charges of witchcraft leveled against her, that
Cotton Mather, one of the leading theologians of the day, named her
“The Queen of Hell” and called her a “rampant hag.” In my
novel The Heretic’s
Daughter, I wrote about
Martha’s bravery confronting her judges and accusers; she is
perhaps the only person to have called the magistrates to task for
their part in sentencing innocent women to death by saying, “It is
a shame that you should listen to these folks who are out of their
wits.” In my second novel, The
Traitor’s Wife,
Martha challenges her family and society by marrying a man who was a
soldier for Cromwell in England and who, reputedly, was one of the
executioners of King Charles I of England.
Who
were these women who were hanged solely on evidence that could not be
perceived by any tangible, earthly means, but were “spectral”, or
invisible, in nature? Even though the accusations began in Salem
Village, women were arrested from neighboring towns with alarming
rapidity. What began with neighbor turning against neighbor soon
became family member pitted against family member with spouses,
siblings, and children accusing in great numbers the women of their
households. One man, Moses Tyler, accused six female members of his
extended family of witchcraft. They were all imprisoned in the Salem
jail.
It’s
no coincidence that changes in Puritan life--- in medicine, in law
and in religious practices---had an impact on the witch trials. The
perception in the rigidly patriarchal society of the day was that
women were the daughters of Eve, and therefore to blame for all the
initial evils and ills of the world. Women as a whole were
considered innately flawed, unable to participate ethically in
religious practices, intelligently and rationally in matters of law,
and effectively in matters of healing and medicine. Further to
being ineffective in practicing medicine, it was believed by the wise
men of the age that women would use their powers in herbalogy for
their own purposes, even conjuring up the Devil to gain worldly
powers.
Women
in the New World, up to the mid to late seventeenth century, were
acknowledged for their experience with herbal healing and midwifery.
But new colleges, open only to men, were teaching newer, more
“advanced,” methods in medicine. One of the results of men
practicing midwifery was that twice as many women and their infants
died during childbirth with a male midwife as a female one.
The
so-called witches of Salem were hanged for many reasons. Some of
them were mentally unbalanced, some of them were propertied and a
target of covetous neighbors, and some of them, like Martha Carrier,
were simply strong-willed, outspoken women who went against the
expectations of what a Puritan woman was supposed to be: subservient,
docile, obedient and, most of all, silent.
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