Witch Hunts and Women’s Rights: Why the Past Still Matters

If you’d asked me just a year ago about the history of the witch hunts, I wouldn’t have had much to say beyond vague images of folklore or distant medieval legends.

That changed when I began working on my art project, All of Us Witches, which explores this dark chapter to uncover its impact on women’s lives and gender roles definition in western society.

And if I didn’t know about it, I wondered, how many like me were unaware of its long lasting effects on our misogynistic society?

Why Witch Hunts Are Overlooked in Education—And Why It Matters

Learning about the historical persecution of women accused of witchcraft has been clarifying and empowering. It has given me a clearer understanding of our society, helping me make sense of how power and gender roles are constructed. Yet, our education system often fails to help students connect the dots between history and the world we inhabit now.

We tend to study the past as if only the last 100 years have directly shaped our present reality, neglecting events from further back that still resonate in our social structures. Reflecting on my own experience in school, history lessons were mostly centred around kings, wars and political treaties.

But it felt very far and disconnected to the reality around me. It’s like starting a book halfway through and expecting to grasp the whole narrative. There was little emphasis on understanding cultural dynamics or community relationships. Definitely nobody mentioned anything about misogyny and how the role of women changed in society over the centuries.

As I learnt more about witch hunts, I discover how the vast majority of victims were women and how the accusations were tied to their expected role in society. I also began to question why events like this are so grossly overlooked. Why are they not considered significant enough to be included in school curricula, especially when we rightfully study other forms of persecution to understand today’s society? And even then, these lessons rarely delve deep enough.

How The Witch Hunts Affected Gender Roles

The witch hunts were not the persecution of pagans nor a simplistic byproduct of a belief in magic. All these imperfect interpretations and recounting of history are themselves a product of interpretations and revisionism throughout history that historians themselves have been trying to correct for the last four decades.

The persecution and killing of tens of thousands of people across Europe - 90% of whom women - happened in the Early Modern Period, between the 15th and 18th centuries. This was a period of high instability due to religion conflicts, food scarcity, the advent of capitalism and employment work.

All this uncertainty set the scene for extreme ideas to spread. Not necessarily new ideas, beliefs in magic and sorcery had been around for centuries, but they definitely took a more extreme and violent turn. One of these new ideas was that witches were the agents of the devil and the main cause of bad events in people lives and livelihood.

Women’s roles were already vulnerable in patriarchal societies. But after the witch hunts, they also lost access to professions, financial independence and even the right to gather freely. Their ability to gather together for chores or childbirths dissipated, because it was seen as suspicious. Their role in women’s health transitioned fully into the hands of male doctors and all their knowledge was lost.

It is interesting to notice how the number of executions due to witchcraft accusation overlap with peaks in inflation. At times where people struggled financially and food got more expensive, it seemed that communities turned to women to find someone to blame for their problems.

The Modern Relevance Of Witch Hunts

Today we are still waiting for the recognition and apology of this miscarriage of justice in the countries that were theatre to these prosecutions. A unique example happened thanks to the Witches of Scotland, when in 2022 the Scottish Government offered a formal apology to people accused of witchcraft.

But most countries haven’t done so yet.

However, I believe that without a proper acknowledgement on a collective level of this miscarriage of justice we lose our ability to recognise its horror and heal for the future.

In our “advanced” societies, men kill women every day because the justice system fails to protect these victims, while our educational system fails to prevent this from even happening in the first place. As a society, we often overlook these issues, somehow they are not shocking enough to mobilise the resources needed to stop it.

Historical events such as the witch hunts desensitised people in regards to violence against women and we are still paying the price for it.

Thankfully, today’s digital access to information means that more of us can engage with diverse perspectives.

Historians who research witch hunts and their consequences highlight how we ended up here and why understanding these events is vital to understand our world and ourselves.

It’s encouraging to see how this topic has become more popular, with books and documentaries that speak about this topic, in order to spread the awareness about its long lasting negative effects on our culture.

Empowering Women Through Art: All Of Us Witches

Shedding a light on the horrors of witch hunts is about paying tribute to our ancestors and to reclaim our individual and collective power. This is what I aim to communicate with my art project All Of Us Witches.

Through visual art and poetry, I amplify the stories of women persecuted as witches and draw parallels to the biases women face today.

The portraits invite the viewers to connect with the women of the past. These women could have been our mothers, grandmothers or friends. Each piece reflects a bias once used to condemn women - assertiveness, independence and community - transforming these accusations into symbols of empowerment.

Meanwhile, the poems offer a dialogue with these women.
By reading their stories and thoughts, we may realise they are not that different from us and they’re struggles are fundamentally still our struggles.

The message I hope to deliver through All of Us Witches is this: our present reality was built by the actions of those before us. By identifying and questioning our biases, we can change these structures to create a more inclusive and just future.