Feminism, women’s bodily autonomy, transgender rights

I was recently asked to speak to a university class about the play by Arthur Miller, The Crucible. The timing is great, as the play is on in London at the Globe Theatre in London, and I warmly encourage you to go and see it. The performance is superb. Being asked to speak on this topic was profoundly welcome to me, and I am so grateful that I was asked. Readers of this blog may have noticed that I write from time to time about witchcraft, about the persecution of minorities, about feminism, and about the Albigensians.

Given the anti-transgender climate and the rollback of women’s right to bodily autonomy (viz. Roe v Wade) sweeping through the world like a brush fire, the relevance of this play to modern society is topical and profound. What readers will not know is that Rebecca Nourse, the last person to be executed for witchcraft in the US, was my 12th great grandmother, or that my mother’s family name came from an ancestor who protected and was an Albigensian and whose family was slaughtered and dispossessed on the orders of the Catholic Church. This play is personal.

This discussion was 90 minutes, with one hour of “lecture” and 30 minutes of guided discussion. The lecture was Socratic in nature, my questions led the class along the arc of the narrative which this outline represented. The extensive material was there to help me guide the discussion and was later handed out to the class to enable further study.

Original title:

“The wrong-headed exoneration of Rebecca Nourse compounds the original injustice of her murder for witchcraft.“

Class Duration: 1 Hour

Method: Socratic Discussion (Guided Inquiry & Dialogue)

Objective: This session challenges students to rethink the Salem Witch trials; the history of witchcraft; how the play The Crucible was used to expose McCarthyism^[1] as a “witch hunt”; why this is more than a metaphor for today; why “witches” have and continue to hold such a grip on our collective psyche; and modern political movements as interconnected struggles over power, gender, and economic control.

INTRODUCTION (5 MINUTES)                                                                                                                                                    

CLASS BREAKDOWN (55 MINUTES)                                                                                                                                     

I.      What Is a Witch? (5 minutes)   p.5                                                                                                                                           

II. The Reality of Salem: Power, Land, and Silencing Women (10 minutes)                                             p.9

III. Why Exoneration Is Not Enough—it is just wrong: Lorde, Federici, Cixous (15 minutes) p.18

IV. Conclusion: Why Rebecca Nurse Still Matters (15 minutes)                                                               p.23

V. Personal Reflections on the Implications of Today’s Lecture (10 minutes) + Question time        p.27

VI. Endnotes and Essential Reading                                                p. 29

VII. APPENDIX: SUMMARY OF THE 5 KEY MESSAGES                                                                                        p.35

By engaging with historical evidence, literary analysis, and feminist theory, students will explore how:

• We’ve done this before: The Albigensian Crusade^[2] is an early example of ‘othering’, persecution, and slaughter.   Labelled as “heretics”, an estimated 200,000 to 1,000,000 men, women and children were murdered.

The Albigensian Crusade as Precedent

In the early 13th century, the Catholic Church launched a campaign of total war against the Cathars, a religious group deemed heretical.  Entire communities were massacred, not for criminal acts, but for holding beliefs that deviated from Church doctrine.  This was one of the earliest state-sanctioned campaigns of systemic “othering”—transforming nonconformity into moral threat, and justifying mass murder through appeals to purity and divine will.

Relevance

It shows that the witch trials were not isolated events, nor were they purely about gender or superstition—they were part of a broader structure of ideological enforcement.  Both the Cathars and the “witches” were accused of unseen crimes—heresy, consorting with the devil—based on fear, projection, and the need to maintain centralized power.  Just like Salem, the Crusade depended on community betrayal, moral panic, and legal theatre to turn suspicion into execution.

Importantly, it expands the students’ frame: they see that witch hunts are just one chapter in a much longer history of scapegoating those who live or believe differently.

• The Salem Witch Trials were similarly shaped by land disputes, economic tensions, and patriarchal control—power.
• The Crucible critiques ideological persecution but still tells a male-centred story. 
• Capitalism requires control over women’s labour and bodies, making strong, independent, women like Rebecca Nurse a threat. 
• Modern politics—Trumpism, Roe v. Wade, and gender-based oppression—continue these power structures. 
• Feminist writers such as Lorde, Federici, and Cixous challenge the idea that “exonerating” Rebecca Nurse dismantles the system that condemned her.
• Being a witch, for a woman, is about embracing her power.
• Silence is complicity.

The Architecture of Power

How Patriarchy Feels (Especially for Men)

Patriarchy doesn’t just happen. It is built—maintained by habits, laws, expectations, and fears that dictate who gets to speak, lead, or even be believed. If you’re listening to this lecture as a man, you may feel:

• Challenged — because the systems under critique are ones you may have benefited from, even if unconsciously.
• Uncomfortable — especially if you were taught that gender inequality was a thing of the past—or someone else’s issue.
• Defensive — because the lecture critiques a structure that may feel personal, even when it isn’t an accusation.

These reactions are not wrong. They’re part of the process. But they are not the endpoint.

When Power Wounds the Privileged

Living in a society built on dominance and control doesn’t only hurt the marginalized. It also confines those who benefit from it—especially men:

• Patriarchy punishes vulnerability. Boys are taught to suppress emotion, avoid softness, and perform strength. This leads to isolation, shame, and emotional illiteracy.
• Masculinity is policed. Deviating from its script—whether through queerness, caregiving, gentleness, or uncertainty—is seen as weakness or failure.
• Privilege demands silence. When men are rewarded for fitting the mold, speaking up can feel like betrayal. So they stay quiet. And like all systems of silence, it costs them their wholeness.

As bell hooks writes, “The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women.  Instead, patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation.” — The Will to Change (2004)^[3]

What This Lecture Asks of You

Not guilt. Not shame. Not defensiveness. But courage. Curiosity. Compassion.  To see power clearly. To see yourself clearly within it.  And to ask: How do I want to use the space I’ve been given?

The point in all of this is that it is about power: who has it, how it is used, and the perceived threats that those who might have power represent to those who do.

The systematic silencing of women did not begin with the Salem trials, but it is vividly exposed through them. It begins more subtly: by training women to be submissive, to see themselves as lesser, and to accept a role defined by male authority. Those who resist are punished—through social exclusion, physical violence, or psychological coercion. And those who still dare to speak can be discredited. They are dismissed as hysterics, liars, or dangerous influences, and their words are either ignored or forcibly suppressed.

The historical record reflects this erasure. Men’s contributions are documented, celebrated, institutionalized; women’s are minimized, obscured, or attributed to others. In many cases, their participation is not recorded at all. Women were confined to the domestic sphere, while the public narrative—political, intellectual, and historical—was authored almost entirely by men.

When these strategies fail—when women speak too clearly, organize too effectively, or claim too much power—violence escalates. Women are not only punished; they are killed and then removed from the historical memory. Their stories are lost not by accident, but by design. Isolation becomes a tactic: women are separated from one another, taught to compete, to mistrust, to see each other not as comrades but as rivals. They are positioned not as whole beings, but as extensions of men—wives, daughters, muses—never protagonists in their own right.

This silencing is not incidental. It is necessary for the maintenance of patriarchal power, because the justification for male dominance has always been precarious. It must be reinforced constantly, especially when women begin to recognize it for what it is: a fragile and manufactured fiction. The Crucible dramatizes this process with disturbing clarity. Women’s voices are either instrumentalized—used to serve men’s fear and ambition—or silenced entirely when they cease to be useful. Abigail is disbelieved when she tells the truth, and Elizabeth is punished for her honesty. Rebecca Nurse, the most righteous woman in Salem, is condemned not for what she has done, but for refusing to break under pressure. In each case, we see how female power, once visible, becomes intolerable.

Introduction (5 minutes)

Who am I and why am I here today?  What do I have to say about The Crucible?

• For one, I am a 12^th great granddaughter of Rebecca Nurse.  Her story is my story for I carry her in my genes.
• I am also a witch, was born a witch, and come from a lineage of witches.  She is not alone in my ancestry who was killed.  Others were labelled witches or heretics.
• I am a trans woman.  Every day I am on trial.
• My struggle is to fight for women.  I devote my life to women.  Humanity’s freedom lies down the path of tolerance, and it is fear which keeps us from it.
• But this fight isn’t just about women or for women.  Can any of you think about how the way that society prescribes gender roles is stifling?  Are there instances you can think of where the expectation to be a man might be a burden?  Be harmful?  What about being a woman?  What does living inside those strictures do to you?  What might it feel like to push against it, to resist?

I’d like you to think about the lessons of this play, not just as it was intended when it was written, but in today’s context, with the tools of analysis and thinking we have at our disposal.

My goal for you is to see how important it is to live without fear.  And when you are afraid, that you go and face it.  Own it.  Conquer it.  Never run away from it.

Rebecca Nurse’s story is not just a fiction, not of yesterday, but is very much alive today.  The issues raised by her life, death, and narrative resonate for all women, for all marginal people, for anyone who is a perceived threat to the established social order.  And also for men.

I want you to learn to see.  To be awake.  And by seeing to exercise the choice of action, for inaction is silence, and silence is complicity.  It takes all of us to change the world.

Class Breakdown (55 Minutes)

I.                            What Is a Witch? (5 minutes)

Opening Question: 

What comes to mind when you hear the word ‘witch’?  What is a witch?  Can you think of what being a witch might mean?

• The word “witch” originates from the Old English wicce, meaning “wise woman.” By the early modern period, it became a slur against women with power or independence.[1]
  • Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English remind us that women have always been healers—midwives, herbalists, and community caregivers whose knowledge passed from mother to daughter and neighbour to neighbour. They write: “They were called ‘wise women’ by the people, witches or charlatans by the authorities… Medicine is part of our heritage as women, our history, our birthright.” [40] To reclaim the witch is not merely a symbolic act of resistance; it is a reclamation of women’s empirical, embodied, and communal knowledge that patriarchal systems sought to erase.
• 70-85% of accused witches in Europe and the Americas were women, often midwives^[4], healers, or widows.[2] 
• The Malleus Maleficarum (1487), a witch-hunting manual, explicitly states that women are more likely to be witches due to their “insatiable lust and deceitful nature.”[3]

Guided Discussion: 

Why is the image of the powerful woman often portrayed as monstrous?

• Patriarchal societies fear female power and transform it into something grotesque.[4]
• Witches, like Medusa, were feared because they could “turn men to stone”—they symbolized a power that men could not control.
• Hélène Cixous writes in The Laugh of the Medusa that women who write, speak, or express themselves outside patriarchal norms are cast as “monstrous”—not because they are evil, but because they threaten to undo the masculine order of knowledge and control.^[5]
• The witch, like Medusa or Lilith^[6], embodies a woman who escapes containment. That’s why she must be burned.  Today, both are being reclaimed by feminists.^[7]

Do we still see the word ‘witch’ used against women today?

• In the US, Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, and other female leaders have been called “witches” in political rhetoric—as a way to question their femininity, morality, and power.  Several figures in relatively recent British history have been called witches, including Margaret Thatcher, Theresa May, and Liz Truss^[8]. The term has been weaponized to delegitimize female authority, drawing on centuries-old tropes that associate powerful, noncompliant women with danger, manipulation, or malice—especially when their leadership disrupts male-dominated expectations of behavior or decorum.
• The phrase “witch hunt” has been cynically co-opted by powerful men—such as Donald Trump or Boris Johnson—to discredit legitimate investigations. This inversion not only distorts history, but also erases the real violence faced by those historically targeted as witches—women, healers, and dissenters who posed a threat to power.
• How has the witch become a symbol of empowerment?  Invite students to think about the reclamation of the word “witch” by feminist and queer movements. [13] [25] [26]

Why Some People Might Call Themselves “Witch” Today

Many people today call themselves witches not because of belief in supernatural powers, but as an act of identity, resistance, and reclamation. The term “witch” has been embraced by feminists, queer activists, healers, and spiritual practitioners as a symbol of autonomy, intuition, and defiance against patriarchal norms. For some, it represents a connection to ancestral knowledge, herbal medicine, or earth-based spirituality. 

For others, it’s a political identity—reclaiming a word once used to silence and punish women and turning it into a badge of power. Writers like Kristen Sollée and Silvia Federici show how the modern witch embodies resistance to systems that have historically demonized female agency, sexuality, and knowledge.

• What might it mean to the interpretation of The Crucible to see it instead from the perspective of the “reclaimed witch”?^[9]

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch, [2], and Mona Chollet, In Defence of Witches: Why Women are Still on Trial. [24].

II. The Reality of Salem: Power, Land, and Silencing Women (10 minutes)

Discussion Starter: 

“Was Rebecca Nurse executed because people truly believed she was a witch, or was it for other reasons?”

• Social Context and Background: A Fractured Community and the Othering of Women and the “Forest”^[10]
  • Salem was divided into Salem Town (urban, wealthy, merchant-driven) and Salem Village (agrarian, deeply Puritan, resentful of inequality).[5] 
  • The Putnam family, who led many accusations, had land disputes with the Nurse family.[6] 
  • By the late 1600s, New England colonies were experiencing population stress. While initial immigration had slowed, the colonial population still needed to grow to secure labour, maintain land, and defend against external threats. A lack of people meant fear—fear of depopulation, of economic decline, and especially fear of being overwhelmed by hostile forces.[10] This fear was deeply gendered.

How was this fear deeply gendered?

1. Women Were the Primary Reproductive Agents

In a colonial society where labour was scarce and territorial expansion depended heavily on settler reproduction, women’s ability to bear children was seen as central to survival. The Puritan ideal of womanhood emphasized piety, submission, and prolific motherhood. Women who did not or could not fulfil these roles—whether by remaining single, refusing marriage, or being infertile—posed both a demographic and moral problem. Population anxiety wasn’t abstract; it was literally embodied in women. As historian Carol Karlsen notes, “The economic, religious, and social position of women rendered their reproductive potential a critical focus of male concern” [46].

2. Demonization of Nonconforming Women

This fear of female autonomy translated directly into accusations of witchcraft. Women who lived outside patriarchal norms—such as widows, midwives, healers, or landowning single women—were disproportionately accused. Many of the women charged in Salem were older and no longer of reproductive value, such as Rebecca Nurse herself. Their marginality made them easy targets. Silvia Federici links this process to the rise of capitalism, arguing that the persecution of so-called witches was a means of disciplining women’s bodies and destroying non-patriarchal forms of knowledge and power [2].

3. Moral Panic Was Tied to Gender Deviance

As Puritan men faced challenges to their religious and territorial authority, the failure of colonial growth became a spiritual and existential crisis. Women’s sexuality, independence, and “unproductive” bodies became a source of fear. The witch trials, in this view, were not just about superstition or personal vendettas, but about enforcing a collapsing patriarchal order. As historian Mary Beth Norton writes, “The witchcraft crisis was a gendered response to fears about the integrity of the Puritan mission and male authority” [6].

4. The Legal and Religious Language Was Gendered

The rhetoric used in sermons, trial records, and confessions reflects this deep entanglement of gender and fear. Witches were depicted as spiritually perverse women—wives of the Devil rather than godly men. This language framed female independence as not just rebellious, but diabolical. Early American ministers frequently warned that women were more susceptible to temptation, echoing the biblical Eve. These texts reveal how accusations of witchcraft provided a religious justification for punishing women who violated the gendered expectations of their time [47].

• As Silvia Federici argues in Caliban and the Witch, control over female reproduction became a central concern in early capitalism: women’s ability to bear children was no longer seen as a communal or spiritual matter, but a political and economic one. Witch hunts targeted those who resisted these reproductive expectations—midwives, herbalists, widows, and others who threatened patriarchal control over fertility and lineage. In this light, Rebecca Nurse’s social and maternal authority may have been seen as dangerously autonomous, particularly in a time when colonial survival seemed to depend on disciplined, reproductive labour. Women were expected not only to marry but to marry strategically, often to strengthen land claims or solidify religious conformity. They had little or no legal say in whom they wed, when they wed, or how many children they would bear. Women could not vote, rarely owned property, and were legally absorbed into their husband’s identity under coverture. 
  • These structures ensured that reproduction—and by extension, women’s bodies—remained under male control. In every legal, social, and spiritual sense, women were treated not as full persons but as property—objects to be transferred from father to husband. Under coverture laws, a married woman had no legal identity apart from her husband’s. She could not enter contracts, hold office, or act independently in court. Even her children belonged to her husband. A woman’s mind, labour, and body were considered instruments to serve the family and the colony—never her own. This denial of personhood meant that when women rebelled, resisted, or even simply stood apart from patriarchal expectations—as Rebecca Nurse did—they were seen not as citizens with rights, but as threats to be eliminated.[2]
  • Ehrenreich and English show how the witch trials in Europe—and by precedent, in New England—were not about irrational fear, but calculated professional and political campaigns. By the 14th century, male medical authorities had successfully petitioned to criminalize female healing as illegal “practice of physick,” imposing fines and imprisonment on women who dared to cure. [41] Witch trials became a ritual drama in which the male doctor was positioned as the expert, called upon to determine whether an illness had supernatural origins. The Malleus Maleficarum itself states, “the first [way] to determine if an illness is witchcraft is by the judgment of doctors.” [42] In this performance, the physician gained legitimacy not through science, but through participation in state-sanctioned persecution. As Ehrenreich notes, “The trial in one stroke established the male physician on a moral and intellectual plane vastly above the female healer he was called to judge… He owed his new status not to medical or scientific achievements of his own, but to the Church and State he served so well.”[43]
  • This fear was exacerbated by the memory of King Philip’s War (1675–1678), a brutal conflict with Native Americans that left deep trauma and paranoia. The forest, often portrayed as dark and unknowable, became a symbol of chaos and the unknown. Native people, resisting displacement, were viewed as agents of this darkness.[11]
  • Witches were imagined consorting with the devil in the forest – reinforcing the belief that women who lived on the edges of society might be allied with dangerous external forces. The forest, in this symbolic logic, became a site of the “Other”—everything unknown, wild, and beyond patriarchal control. To accuse a woman of entering the forest was to accuse her of stepping outside male-defined morality.^[11]

Women, the Forest, and the Embrace of Otherness

The image of the girls dancing in the forest is not only a flirtation with sin—it is a metaphorical embrace of otherness. In Puritan theology, the forest represented danger, chaos, and the Native world—everything outside Christian, male-controlled order. To step into the forest was to step out of place: away from the home, away from the church, and away from the watchful eye of patriarchal control.

When the girls enter that space, they are temporarily rejecting their roles as submissive daughters, chaste maidens, and silent observers. They are touching something primal, something pre-Christian, something beyond the fences of Salem.

This fear of women in the wild—dancing, bleeding, speaking, disobedient—is not unique to Salem. In Europe, too, the forest was imagined as the witch’s territory: a place of midwives and healers, herb-lore and animal spirits. It was where women’s knowledge lived outside of male institutions, where bodies were free of corsets and catechisms. That freedom terrified both Church and State.

In this context, Tituba becomes doubly dangerous^[12]. As a woman of colour—possibly of Arawak or Afro-Caribbean descent—she already embodied the colonial “other.” When she led the girls into the forest, she was not just leading them into a clearing; she was leading them into symbolic rebellion: the European fear of the untamed woman and the non-Christian world, fused with the Puritan nightmare of racial and spiritual disorder. Her body was read as wild. Her knowledge as foreign. Her voice as transgressive. She was the forest: in the Puritan imagination Tituba embodies the unknown, the wild, the foreign—all that was feared about the forest itself.

As Hélène Cixous might suggest, they are embracing the wild, embodied, erotic, and communal self—the very parts of womanhood that patriarchy seeks to silence. Though their actions are quickly co-opted by fear and violence, the moment in the forest represents a kind of feminine ritual, an entry into power not sanctioned by the court or the church. The suggestion that one of the girls danced naked takes on deep symbolic meaning. In Puritan society, nudity—especially female nudity—was profoundly taboo, not only as a sign of immodesty, but as a breach of public morality. To be nude was to be exposed, untamed, and uncontained by the structures that defined women as modest, obedient, and domestic.

In a patriarchal culture, the female body itself is treated as dangerous—something to be hidden, controlled, and regulated. The naked girl in the forest becomes a terrifying symbol of what male authority cannot master. The fear is not just of witches or devils, but of women—in their natural, embodied state—wielding knowledge and energy outside patriarchal permission.

This fear persists today in the cultural discomfort and widespread ignorance surrounding the female body. From under-education in anatomy^[13] to social media censorship of breastfeeding, the female form continues to be treated as something shameful, mysterious, or illicit. This lack of knowledge is not accidental. It keeps women “othered”—unknown, unknowable, and thus controllable.[56]

By contrast, the midwife—often accused of witchcraft—is the one who knows. She understands the body, the rhythms of birth, menstruation, pain, and pleasure. She becomes a conduit for de-othering women through shared knowledge and community care. And for a society that depends on keeping women alienated from their own power, the midwife is dangerous.

→ The naked body in the woods is not just scandal—it is rebellion. → Knowing the body is the first step toward reclaiming power. → Midwives were persecuted because they demystified the female form—an act that threatened patriarchal control at its core.

→ This was not merely a cultural fear; it was an economic and professional seizure of power. As Ehrenreich documents, midwifery was among the last remaining strongholds of women’s independent medical practice. But even this was systematically dismantled by male practitioners who weaponized new tools (like forceps) and medical licensing laws to ban women from practice. The transformation of birth from communal ritual to commercialized business was not a leap forward in care. It was a transfer of authority from wise women to paid men.[44]

→ Othering makes it easier to punish: When we call someone “the Other,” we make them less human, less deserving of empathy or protection. → The forest is feminized, racialized, and feared—tying together the image of the unruly woman and the resisting Native. → In this light, the witch becomes not just a threat to order, but a symbol of all that refuses to be assimilated.

Discussion Questions:

• What does the forest represent in The Crucible?
• Why do the girls go there—and what does it mean that their ritual is immediately criminalized?
• Is this a moment of feminine resistance, or simply fear?

Supplement: Objectification of Women

In The Crucible Miller’s play demonstrates, in subtle but persistent ways, how women were treated not as full people but as objects—symbols to serve male redemption arcs, or scapegoats to carry social guilt. Here are key moments where this objectification becomes clear:

1. Abigail Williams^[14] as temptation and scapegoat
   “Abby, I may think of you softly from time to time. But I will cut off my hand before I’ll ever reach for you again.”—John Proctor, Act I
   → Abigail is reduced to a sinful memory, a threat to Proctor’s morality. Her inner life doesn’t matter—only her effect on him.  The real life Abigail was only 11 years old.  Miller’s depiction of Abigail as a temptress is ethically disturbing…it is a distortion that more than dramatizes: it indicts the wrong person, and centralises female morality as a tool for control and judgement.
2. Elizabeth Proctor’s truth exists only in relation to John’s honor
   “That woman will never lie, Mr. Danforth.” —John Proctor, Act III
   → Elizabeth is only given a voice when she can affirm or deny a man’s reputation. When she protects John by lying, she is punished.
3. Girls as tools of accusation, not autonomous voices
   The courtroom scene shows Abigail and the girls wielding power only through performance, as instruments of male hysteria^[15]. → They are not believed because they are credible, but because they fit a desired script.
4. Rebecca Nurse as a revered but voiceless figure
   She speaks little and is largely spoken about. Her moral power lies in her silence—not in any agency the play gives her.
   → She is sanctified but still silenced.
5. Redemption only through submission or death
   Women survive only by confessing and submitting, or they are executed. There is no path for female autonomy in Miller’s world.
   → A woman who resists is not just silenced—she is eliminated.

Feminist Theory: Naming the Architecture

Feminist theorists have long recognized how women are made to bear the burden of male anxiety and punished for it.

In Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici argues that the European witch hunts were not irrational outbreaks, but carefully orchestrated state violence designed to discipline women’s bodies, suppress reproductive autonomy, and destroy communal female knowledge [50].

Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English show how the rise of male-dominated medicine led to the criminalization of midwives, herbalists, and women healers [52]. The female body was transformed into a site of professional control—and women’s knowledge of it was erased, degraded, or punished.

Hélène Cixous, in The Laugh of the Medusa, writes that patriarchal culture turns women into saints, monsters, or myths—figures that stabilize male authority by excluding women from full subjecthood [51]. Her call for women to “write themselves” is a call to rupture the male symbolic order that casts female expression as dangerous.

Teresa de Lauretis builds on this insight, arguing in Technologies of Gender [58] that gender itself is a constructed positionality shaped by cultural narratives, not a fixed essence. She shows how women are written into social reality through language, institutions, and representation—all of which serve to normalize male authority and render female resistance illegible or deviant. This is what makes Rebecca Nurse so dangerous to the system: she resists categorization. She does not confess. She does not submit. She does not perform the role she has been assigned.

Luce Irigaray pushes this further in Speculum of the Other Woman [55] and in This Sex Which Is Not One [57], arguing that under patriarchal logic, women are not allowed to exist as autonomous subjects at all. They are turned into commodities—valued only in exchange between men—or mirrors, what she calls “speculums,” used to reflect and stabilize male desire, identity, and fear. When a woman refuses to play this role—when she becomes unreadable, uncontainable, unmirrored—she is punished. In this light, hysteria is not a female pathology but a male crisis: a rupture in the symbolic order caused by female resistance.

bell hooks reminds us that patriarchy doesn’t just suppress men’s emotions—it punishes women for awakening them [53]. A woman’s voice, body, or power becomes the flashpoint for male shame, fear, or rage—and she is blamed for the very feelings she reveals.

Even in The Crucible, this architecture holds:

• Abigail Williams is punished not because she lies, but because she desires and defies.
• Tituba, racialized and enslaved, becomes the perfect vessel for colonial terror—her confession shaping the court’s imagined threat.
• Rebecca Nurse, revered and dignified, becomes dangerous the moment she refuses the performance of guilt. Her silence isn’t meekness. It’s unreadable. And because the court cannot interpret it, it becomes intolerable.

As Marilynne Robinson and others have argued, Arthur Miller’s play critiques injustice while still centring a male redemption arc.[54] John Proctor wrestles with guilt; the women carry its consequences.  But can a male writer expose patriarchal violence without replicating it? What happens when the vehicle for resistance is still a man’s pen?

When Harm Looks Like Justice

If a system is clearly corrupt, it can be dismantled.
But if a system is seen as just, even when it isn’t, it becomes almost impossible to challenge.
That is the deeper tragedy. The harm is perpetuated precisely because it hides behind legitimacy:

• They didn’t just kill Rebecca Nurse. They killed her and called it godliness.
• They didn’t just punish Tituba. They punished her and called it law.
• And when harm wears the mask of justice, the system doesn’t break—it becomes harder to see.

From Individuals to the Machine

We must always ask: Who designed the machine that made their deaths possible—and who still turns the crank?

If we focus only on the victims, we risk moralizing the past and missing the systems that still operate now. The greater tragedy is that entire institutions were built to mask fear as virtue—and they are still functioning today. With different names, different robes, but the same logic.

When Hysteria Becomes History

If injustice looks like justice, then we lose our compass. We start believing:

• Obedience is virtue.
• Silence is safety.
• Power knows best.

That’s how fear gets institutionalized. That’s how hysteria becomes history—not because people were afraid, but because they used law, religion, and moral authority to justify their fear. That’s what Salem teaches us, if we’re willing to hear it.

Supplement: Virtue as a Tool of Control

In patriarchal systems like Puritan New England, a woman’s value was tied tightly to her perceived virtue—her obedience, modesty, sexual purity, and selflessness. This moral identity was not simply personal; it was political. As Hélène Cixous and other feminist theorists argue, women’s bodies and behaviour were coded with meaning by male authority. Their worth depended not on their thoughts or rights, but on how well they performed a rigid script of “good womanhood.”

Rebecca Nurse, in both history and The Crucible, is portrayed as the ultimate virtuous woman: pious, humble, nurturing, and morally upright. But this idealization was a trap. Her virtue did not protect her—it was used to judge her. The moment she was accused, the gap between that ideal and the fear of female power snapped shut.

Her silence—interpreted by some as saintly—could also be read, as Cixous might argue, as a refusal to play the role she was written into. Once she was suspected, her virtue could be re-coded as pride. Her piety could be spun as manipulation. Her moral authority became threatening because it didn’t come from male structures. Thus, the very qualities that once made her admired became the fuel for her destruction.

→ In this way, virtue was not a shield for women—it was a leash. → The expectation to be “good” was never about freedom. It was a form of discipline. → When women refused that performance—or even hesitated—they were punished not for sin, but for deviation.

Miller’s play does not interrogate this dynamic deeply; instead, Rebecca’s virtue is sanctified but flattened. Her morality is praised, but her resistance is never fully explored.

Socratic Discussion Prompt: Virtue as a Cage

Rebecca Nurse is often described as “pious,” “gentle,” and “godly.” But what happens when those same traits are used to control or condemn her? Can virtue be a kind of trap?

Follow-up questions to guide the flow:

• Who defines what counts as “virtue” in Salem?
• How is Rebecca’s silence interpreted by the court? As saintly? As stubborn? Why does it matter?
• Is virtue a path to justice—or a tool used to discipline women?
• Do we see this happen today? Can “being a good woman” still be weaponized?

How Being a Good Woman is Weaponized

Survivor Shaming

In cases of sexual assault, victims are often judged not by what happened to them, but by whether they meet the standard of a “good woman.”

• Was she drinking?
• What was she wearing?
• Did she say no clearly enough?
  If she fails the purity test, she’s not believed. The implication is: only good women deserve protection, and if harm came to you, maybe you weren’t good enough.

Respectability Politics in the Workplace

Women—especially women of color—are often expected to perform professionalism and politeness in a very narrow way.

• A “good woman” is calm, agreeable, soft-spoken.
• If she’s assertive, she’s labeled “aggressive.”
• If she names injustice, she’s accused of being divisive.

This standard is used to dismiss, silence, or fire women who advocate for themselves or others. It says: be good or be gone.

Motherhood and Reproductive Rights

In debates over abortion, contraception, or parenting, the “good woman” narrative is everywhere.

• A good woman sacrifices.
• A good woman keeps the baby.
• A good woman doesn’t need help or state support.
  When women make choices that prioritize their autonomy—whether it’s ending a pregnancy, choosing not to have children, or demanding better maternal care—they’re often shamed for not fulfilling the “good” role.

Political Obedience and Female Loyalty

In some political movements and religious spaces, “good women” are expected to support men’s leadership without question.

• Think of women told to “stand by their man,” even when he is abusive or corrupt.
• Or women who are praised only when they “submit” to male authority—whether in politics, the pulpit, or the home.

The “good woman” becomes a shield for patriarchy. Her virtue is weaponized to silence other women who dare to disobey.

The “Perfect Victim” in Media

When a woman is murdered or abused, media often focuses on whether she was a good wife, a good daughter, a good student.

• If she was “promiscuous,” “troubled,” or “difficult,” her death gets less sympathy.
• But if she was sweet, white, and well-behaved, she becomes a symbol of national tragedy.

The story we’re told is: only some women are worth grieving.

Quote Analysis Activity

“Let you fear nothing! Another judgment waits us all!” —Rebecca Nurse, Act IV

Instructions for students:

• Read this quote aloud.
• Ask: What does Rebecca mean by “another judgment”? Who is she speaking to, and why?
• Then ask: Does this sound like a woman begging for mercy—or a woman refusing the court’s authority?
• Cixous writes that women must “write their bodies” and reject the roles given to them. Could Rebecca’s silence—and then this calm, defiant statement—be a form of feminist resistance?

Extension (Optional):

• If Rebecca had screamed or wept or confessed, would she have been taken more seriously—or would she have been punished even more?

III. Why Exoneration Is Not Enough—it is just wrong: Lorde, Federici, Cixous (15 minutes)

Discussion Starter:
“If we say that Rebecca Nurse was ‘innocent,’ are we saying the system that killed her was otherwise justified?”

Historical Context: McCarthyism and the Red Scare
Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible in 1953, during a time when the United States was gripped by the Red Scare. Senator Joseph McCarthy led public hearings accusing Americans—often with no evidence—of being communists, spies, or subversives. Careers were destroyed. People were blacklisted. Fear was used as a weapon of control. This era of political repression, known as McCarthyism, was defined by loyalty oaths, denunciations, and a national obsession with ideological purity.

Miller used the Salem witch trials as an allegory to expose the dangers of moral panic and ideological persecution. But while he critiqued McCarthyism, he still centred the moral drama around John Proctor. In doing so, he replicated the very erasure of women’s voices that he was critiquing. Can a play that silences women challenge a system that silences dissent? What gets lost when we reduce witch hunts to political allegory, rather than lived gendered violence?

The Problematic Nature of Male Authorship of Herstory

Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible as an allegory for McCarthyism, using the Salem witch trials to expose the dangers of moral panic, ideological persecution, and the collapse of due process. In this sense, the play is a powerful indictment of political hysteria and collective scapegoating. But Miller does not tell the story of Salem from the perspective of the girls, the accused women, or even the communities affected—he centres it on John Proctor, a flawed but fundamentally noble man wrestling with guilt, integrity, and redemption. The witch trials become the backdrop for a man’s internal moral reckoning.

This narrative choice matters. It means that even in a story about the persecution of women, the moral weight, tragedy, and heroism are given to a man. Women, meanwhile, are flattened into symbolic roles: the seductress (Abigail), the saint (Elizabeth), the mad (Tituba), or the voiceless martyr (Rebecca Nurse). Their inner lives are not explored, their motivations not given the same complexity or dignity. Miller critiques the machinery of oppression while still operating within its architecture—replicating the very erasure of women’s voices that his allegory purports to expose.

Moreover, by casting Abigail as the primary antagonist—a jealous, vengeful girl whose desires spark the whole crisis—Miller subtly shifts responsibility for the hysteria away from institutional power and onto a single young woman. This not only distorts the historical record (the real Abigail was eleven, and Proctor likely never had a relationship with her), it reinforces the trope of female emotional instability as a social threat. In centring John Proctor’s integrity, Miller displaces the true stakes of the trials: not whether a man could die with his name intact, but how a society could justify the execution of women whose only crime was defiance, difference, or age?

Lorde’s Critique: The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House
Audre Lorde reminds us that reform within unjust systems often reinforces those systems. When Rebecca Nurse is exonerated, it may feel like justice—but it affirms the logic of the court by suggesting that what she is being exonerated for should even be considered a crime.

• Exoneration frames her death as a mistake—not a symptom of patriarchal violence.
• It implies that the system works when it recognizes innocence—rather than questioning why “witch” was ever a crime at all.

“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” —Audre Lorde [23]

Guided Discussion:

• What does it mean to say, “Rebecca Nurse wasn’t a witch” instead of “Witchcraft shouldn’t be a crime”?
• Who decides who is ‘innocent’? Why?
• Does exoneration challenge the court—or reinforce its authority?

Federici’s Insight: Witches as a Threat to Capitalist Patriarchy
Silvia Federici helps us understand that the women burned as witches were not just random victims—they were systemic targets. In early capitalism, controlling women’s bodies and labour was essential.

• Midwives, widows, and healers posed a threat to emerging capitalist discipline.
• Women who resisted reproduction, refused marriage, or lived communally disrupted economic control. [8]
• Federici urges us not to mourn witches as “innocent victims” but to honour them as rebels.
  • Ehrenreich and English add to this by showing how the rise of male-dominated medicine not only erased women from healing roles but actively criminalized their knowledge. Witches were not accused solely of malice; they were persecuted for healing, for contraception, for abortion, and for organizing knowledge outside state and church control.[45] “If a woman dared to cure without having studied,” they write, “she was a witch and must die.” The power to name illness—and to punish those who challenged institutional authority—became a central weapon of the state. And it still is.

“Witch-hunting was a war against women… a key instrument for the construction of a new patriarchal order.” —Silvia Federici [22]

Socratic Questions:

• What if Rebecca Nurse had practiced herbal medicine? Would that make her less worthy of remembrance?
• Why is remembering her as a martyr easier than remembering her as a threat to power?

Cixous and the Silencing of Women’s Resistance
Hélène Cixous shows how patriarchal cultures cast strong women as mad, monstrous, or invisible. In The Crucible, Rebecca Nurse is almost too good—she has no flaws, no rebellion, no voice.

• Her silence may be seen as saintly—but it could also be refusal.
• Cixous would ask: Why don’t we hear more from her?
• Is the “ideal woman” one who suffers quietly?

“Woman must write herself… must put herself into the text—as into the world and into history—by her own movement.”—Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa

In this light, exoneration serves the medical and legal establishments much the way it once served the Church. It absolves the system by retroactively declaring one woman innocent—without ever interrogating the conditions that made her dangerous.  The witch trials not only sanctified the silence of women like Rebecca Nurse, but they also elevated her killers by casting them as reasonable men who simply made a tragic mistake. But Ehrenreich insists it was not a mistake. It was the foundational act of professional medicine.[46]

Women’s Voices; Women’s Narrative

When Hélène Cixous called for women to “write themselves,” she was demanding more than participation in literature—she was demanding transformation. In her 1975 essay The Laugh of the Medusa, Cixous argues that Western culture has long forced women to speak and write through male frameworks: male language, male logic, male metaphors. These structures don’t merely exclude women—they actively repress the female body, desire, and experience. To “write herself” means for a woman to step outside those constraints and produce work rooted in her own physical, emotional, and intellectual reality. It is a mode of creation that refuses hierarchy, embraces fluidity, and permits complexity. Writing oneself can mean writing memoir instead of myth, poetry instead of polemic. It can mean telling the truth about the body—about menstruation, birth, desire, rage, aging—without apology. It is creating theory in conversation with lived experience or daring to write fiction where female characters are not punished for their power. It is not merely about authorship, but authority: a woman claiming the right to define herself, in her own terms, on the page.

In this, Cixous converges with Silvia Federici, who locates the female body at the heart of historical struggle. In Caliban and the Witch, Federici argues that the witch hunts of early modern Europe were not about superstition alone, but about disciplining women’s bodies and destroying alternative systems of knowledge—especially those rooted in communal healing, midwifery, or reproductive autonomy. The violence inflicted on women was not incidental—it was structural, designed to strip them of power, isolate them from one another, and embed their obedience in the foundations of capitalist and patriarchal order. To reclaim the body, then—to write it, to speak from it, to refuse its containment—is an act of historical resistance. Like Cixous, Federici insists that liberation requires more than entry into existing systems; it demands a reimagining of knowledge, power, and connection from the perspective of those who were systematically erased.

In the context of Salem and The Crucible, this reclamation feels urgent. Women like Rebecca Nurse could not write themselves. Their bodies were marked, judged, and destroyed by systems that silenced their speech. And yet, Rebecca’s silence at her trial was not passive: her refusal to confess or to plead for her life was also a refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of the court that condemned her. In a world that demanded women perform submission to survive, her silence was dangerous precisely because it spoke so loudly. The move to exonerate Rebecca Nurse is a compound injustice, a posthumous silencing. She is being exonerated for not being a witch rather than accepted for what she was, a powerful woman who threatened the patriarchy.

Quote Analysis:

“I am innocent as a child unborn, but I am ready to meet my God.” —Rebecca Nurse, Act IV.

• What kind of power does Rebecca claim here?
• Is she resisting the court, or appealing to it?
• What would her voice sound like if she had written her own story?

The Gendered Nature of Silence and Power

Silence does not mean the same thing for men as it does for women. It has been historically assigned, expected, and interpreted differently depending on gender—and that difference is not incidental. It is foundational to how power operates.

In patriarchal cultures, a man’s silence is often read as strength, stoicism, or contemplative authority. He is silent because he has nothing to prove, or because his power is assumed. His silence is dignified. It is a form of control.

A woman’s silence, on the other hand, is usually demanded. It is equated with obedience, modesty, submission. Her silence is not empowering but imposed. And when a woman breaks that silence—especially to protest, accuse, or assert her truth—she is often punished for it. In this way, silence becomes gendered: the same act—speaking or not speaking—means very different things depending on who is doing it, and how society is conditioned to hear them.

We see this dynamic vividly in The Crucible. Rebecca Nurse is mostly silent during her trial. She does not perform her innocence or beg for mercy. Her silence is not passive—it is a deliberate denial of temporal male power—underlined by her invocation of the Divine. But the men in power interpret it as defiance. Because she does not plead, she becomes suspect. Her refusal to confess, to perform the script assigned to her, renders her silence intolerable.  By calling on a higher authority, she becomes that authority.

By contrast, John Proctor’s silences are framed as noble and redemptive. His refusal to sign the confession is a moment of personal triumph—the climactic gesture that restores his integrity. Silence becomes his weapon, his legacy.  Proctor’s redemption is allowed because he is a man.  His refusal is understandable by the court whereas Rebecca’s is not.

Abigail, meanwhile, speaks too much. She is outspoken, passionate, transgressive. Her voice is not celebrated; it is condemned. She becomes dangerous not simply because of what she says, but because she refuses to stop saying it.

So when we say silence is gendered, we are talking about power: about who gets to be silent, who is expected to be, and what silence means in the mouths of men versus women. In patriarchal systems, silence is the condition of womanhood—until a woman chooses it for herself. Then, it becomes subversion. Rebecca Nurse’s silence is not acquiescence. It is refusal. And in that refusal, she becomes radically dangerous.

Rebecca Nurse’s final line: “I am innocent as a child unborn, but I am ready to meet my God.”  is quietly devastating.  What makes it so?

1. It affirms Rebecca’s moral clarity in a world turned upside down.

By comparing herself to an “unborn child,” Rebecca evokes a state of radical innocence—untainted by sin, untouched by the corruption of the court. She speaks not from fear or desperation, but from deep spiritual certainty. While others plead, bargain, or collapse, she simply states the truth as she knows it. In a world where chaos has replaced justice, her unwavering moral clarity exposes the absurdity of the court’s logic. She refuses the court’s authority without needing to raise her voice.

2. It shows how silence becomes dangerous when it is a woman’s choice.

Rebecca’s silence throughout the play is not submission—it is resistance. She refuses to confess, refuses to perform grief or remorse, and refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of the court. This deliberate withholding of speech marks her as defiant. But unlike male silence, which is often interpreted as stoicism or dignity, Rebecca’s silence is treated as subversion. Her refusal to speak on the court’s terms disrupts the script of feminine obedience. In patriarchal systems, silence is expected of women—until they choose it for themselves. Then, it becomes intolerable. Rebecca’s silence, unbroken and self-authored, is a threat precisely because it is not controlled.

3. It exposes the full moral perversity of the trials.

Rebecca likens herself to a child unborn—pure, untouched, undeserving of condemnation. And yet she is about to be hanged. The juxtaposition is jarring. The court, claiming to uphold God’s law, is preparing to murder a woman who lives by that very law. This line crystallizes the play’s central horror: that a society claiming moral authority has inverted its own values. In killing Rebecca Nurse, the Puritan leaders reveal that their true concern is not righteousness, but control. The line strips away the last vestiges of justification and forces the audience to confront the brutality of what is happening.

4. It contrasts female dignity with male-centred redemption arcs.

Rebecca’s final stand is quiet, grounded, and free of spectacle. She does not wrestle aloud with her conscience. She does not ask for sympathy. She simply walks to her death, whole. In contrast, John Proctor’s moral crisis is written as the emotional and narrative climax of the play. He agonizes, confesses, tears up his confession, and dies a redemptive death—his silence elevated to heroism. Rebecca’s refusal to confess is just as courageous, but it is not treated as the climax. Her quiet dignity threatens the narrative structure itself. In a play that critiques moral hysteria, it still centres the male journey. Rebecca’s death, without spectacle, without a stage for her suffering, forces us to reckon with a different kind of heroism—one that does not need to be witnessed to be true.

Activity Prompt:

Rebecca Nurse refused to speak the words the court demanded of her. That silence was not submission—it was a form of power.

Write a short reflection in response to these questions:

• What does it mean to resist without speaking?
• Can you think of a time when you have used silence as resistance?
• How do unjust systems punish those who don’t play by the rules?

You may wish to begin with one of the following sentence openers:

• “Silence can be a form of resistance when…”
• “I have stayed silent before because…”
• “When I chose not to speak, this is what happened…”
• “Systems expect us to speak in certain ways because…”
• “Rebecca Nurse’s silence reminds me that…”

You don’t have to share what you write.

Core Takeaway:
Exoneration comforts the living—but it often erases the truth about how the dead lived, fought, and were feared. Real justice doesn’t mean clearing a woman’s name. It means questioning the system that needed her name destroyed in the first place.

IV. Conclusion: Why Rebecca Nurse Still Matters (15 minutes)

To treat The Crucible as a closed chapter in history—or a cautionary tale about long-past hysteria—is to miss the ongoing relevance of what happened in Salem, or in Europe more broadly. The witch trials were not aberrations. They were the logical outcome of systems designed to control women, punish dissent, and consolidate power. Rebecca Nurse was not simply a victim of superstition; she was a casualty of a much deeper architecture—one that linked gender, land, theology, and politics in service of patriarchal control. Her death was not a mistake. It was a message.

What Arthur Miller exposed in McCarthy-era America—the weaponization of fear, the punishment of nonconformity, the machinery of ideological purity—was not unique to the 1950s, nor to the 1690s. It is a structure that adapts itself. It does not die. It rebrands. It still exists today in our courts, our media, our legislatures, and our personal relationships. Which means our response must also be structural. Not symbolic, not sanitized, not satisfied with apologies.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

– George Santayana [48]

Below are three central themes to consider—as students of history, but also as participants in its unfolding:

1. Witch Hunts Were Never Just About Witches
   They were about power, land, gender, and the control of bodies. From Federici’s theory of reproductive discipline to Salem’s land disputes and population anxieties, the witch was never just a supernatural scapegoat. [7] She was a real woman—dangerous not because of magic, but because of autonomy.
2. Exoneration Doesn’t Dismantle the System That Killed Rebecca Nurse
   As Lorde teaches us, we can’t dismantle patriarchy using its own language of exceptionalism and forgiveness. Real justice is not an apology for the wrong woman—it’s an unmaking of the court itself.
3. Modern Witch Hunts Still Exist—Passivity is Complicity
   From the demonization of feminists and trans people to the criminalization of reproductive autonomy, to the silencing of survivors, the structure that killed Rebecca Nurse is alive in modern laws, headlines, and courtrooms. The fear-mongering and ideological purity tests used during McCarthyism—when individuals were targeted for their political beliefs and silenced—mirror the way modern society continues to demonize marginalized groups. These same forces are alive today, as we see in the increasing attacks on LGBTQ rights, abortion access, and immigrant communities. Just as McCarthyism thrived on fear and othering, so too does today’s political climate.

The Fragility of Democratic Systems

During the final day of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, as the delegates exited Independence Hall, a woman reportedly approached Dr. Benjamin Franklin and asked, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”

Franklin famously replied, “A republic—if you can keep it.” [49]

Franklin’s warning—“A republic, if you can keep it”—reminds us that justice is not self-sustaining. Systems do not remain humane by accident; they are kept humane only through the active resistance of those willing to challenge power. In Salem, the republic failed Rebecca Nurse. In every generation since, we’ve been asked the same question: not what system we inherited, but whether we are willing to confront the forces that threaten to corrupt it again.

Call to Action: What Will You Do with What You Now Know?

“Your silence will not protect you.” —Audre Lorde [38]

Audre Lorde said, “Your silence will not protect you.” [38] But more than that—it will not protect others either. Every time we stay quiet when harm is happening, every time we soften the truth to make it more comfortable, we allow the system to go on unchallenged. Silence may feel safe, but it is not neutral. It is participation.

Rebecca Nurse was not simply a victim. She was a woman with land, voice, and moral power in a world that could not allow her to keep them.[37] Her silence was not submission. It was resistance: a strategic refusal. And that resistance was punished not to restore order, but to protect power.[39]

You are not yet lawmakers, judges, or historians. But you already hold power: the power of attention, of empathy, of voice. Even before you can vote or legislate, you can see clearly. You can speak bravely. You can choose not to be complicit in the silencing of others.

Justice means listening to what Rebecca could not say. Truth means knowing she was dangerous—not because she sinned, but because she lived outside their control. Memory means carrying her name not as a tragedy, but as a torch. Let your knowledge become action. Let your discomfort become clarity. Let your voice become something no one else can write for you.

Reflection Prompt:
“Now that I understand how silence can uphold power, where in my life am I being asked to stay quiet—and what would it mean to speak instead?”

---

Socratic Discussion Prompt:

• What will you do to stand against modern fear-mongering and ideological purity tests that seek to “other” people in society? 
• How do you see connections between the McCarthy era and today’s political climate in how we treat marginalized people?

Optional Supplement:

Understanding Rebecca Nourse through Ehrenreich’s lens adds new urgency to her legacy. She was not just a victim of local religious hysteria. She was part of a long and global history in which women were executed for healing without a license, for organizing outside male control, and for embodying knowledge that threatened institutional power. Today, that legacy continues in the exclusion of women and trans people from medical authority [45], in the criminalization of abortion and bodily autonomy, and in the ongoing erasure of collective, community-based health care. As Ehrenreich wrote: “To know our history is to begin to see how to take up the struggle again.”

Supplemental Reflection: State Violence and the Lie of Exoneration

You can dress it up in law books, robes, and scripture—but Rebecca Nurse was murdered. The fact that the state called it an execution does not change what it was: a killing done to maintain power, order, and hierarchy. To call it anything else is to cloak injustice in the language of righteousness.

This is where the concept of “exoneration” becomes not just hollow, but harmful. It implies that Rebecca’s death was a legal error, rather than a moral crime. It offers tidy closure, not truth. In doing so, it once again takes her voice away—because it rewrites her death as an exception, rather than a warning.

When we say someone has been “othered,” we mean they were made to seem less than human—stripped of voice, rights, and empathy. Once that happens, even murder can be rebranded as justice. That is what happened to Rebecca Nurse. And it is why she doesn’t need to be cleared. She needs to be heard.

Reflection Prompt:

What Would It Mean to Carry Rebecca Nurse’s Name as a Banner?  How might you think about it?  How might you live it?  How might you articulate this from an analytical/critical, personal, political, or symbolic perspective?

Analytical / Critical Thinking

• It means recognizing that Rebecca Nurse wasn’t just a victim of superstition—she was a threat to a system that couldn’t tolerate women who were respected, independent, and principled. Carrying her name as a banner means questioning every system that still punishes people for standing in that same kind of power.
• To carry her name as a banner means refusing to accept posthumous forgiveness as justice. It means naming the violence, not sanitizing it, and refusing to let history remember her as meek when she was defiant.

Personal / Reflective

• It means thinking about the moments when I’ve stayed quiet to stay safe, and deciding that maybe next time, I won’t. That my voice might honour someone who didn’t get to speak.
• As a girl who’s been told I’m “too much” when I speak up, carrying Rebecca’s name would mean not apologizing for being strong. It would mean using my words when hers were taken away.

Political / Action-Oriented

• It means speaking up when laws try to erase people like me, or my friends. It means not letting the court write the last line of the story. It means seeing “witch” as another word for someone they feared and deciding that fear was earned.
• To carry her name as a banner means protecting the people today who are being targeted for being different, queer, trans, poor, or loud. Because they’re still burning people—just in different ways.

Poetic / Symbolic

• She died quiet, but not compliant. To carry her name is to make sure the silence she chose gets remembered as resistance, not weakness.
• It means turning her grave into a protest sign. It means knowing that if she were alive today, she might be standing beside the people the world still tries to erase.

Closing Thought:

Rebecca Nourse was a woman with land, voice, and moral power in a world that couldn’t allow her to keep them. She refused to be a victim.  Her murderers turned her into one; her exoneration would do the same. Her memory demands more.

Let us not mourn witches. Let us become the kind of people for whom no one needs to be burned again.

To exonerate Rebecca Nourse is not to repair her story—it is to rewrite it in the master’s hand. 

She was not saved. She was sacrificed.

Her silence was sanctified, but it was also seized. Her body, her virtue, her name—each was made useful to the system that destroyed her. And even now, when we apologize, we silence her, deny her voice.

Justice means listening to what she could not say. Truth means knowing she was dangerous—not because she sinned, but because she lived outside their control. Memory means honouring her not as the innocent exception, but as the woman they feared most: wise, respected, and unwilling to bend.

What if Rebecca Nurse was a witch?  Would it matter?  In truth, could she be anything other than a witch given the social symbolism of what that word means?

V. Personal Reflections on the Implications of Today’s Lecture (10 minutes) + Question time

I am a trans woman. I am a witch. I am the 12th great-granddaughter of Rebecca Nurse. Today’s discussion is personal for me on many levels.

You don’t have to look very hard to find how people like me—trans people, queer people, feminists, healers, and truth-tellers—are still persecuted, still “othered.” And the consequences are not symbolic. They are real. They are violent. [25] [26]

• Trans people are over four times more likely than cisgender people to be victims of violent crime, including rape and assault (U.S. Department of Justice, 2021). [28]
• 41% of trans adults in the U.S. report having attempted suicide, compared to less than 5% of the general population (National Center for Transgender Equality, 2015). [27]
• Trans people are more than twice as likely to be unemployed [29] and are nearly four times more likely to live in poverty (UCLA Williams Institute, 2021).

Why? Why do you think people like me are still seen as threats to the world’s order? Why do we scare patriarchal systems so much that they move to erase us?

• Today, in the United States:
  • There are bills that would make it a felony to identify as transgender in public schools (Tennessee, 2023). [34]
  • Some states have proposed laws to forcibly alter identity documents without consent. 
  • Others are actively working to deny trans people access to lifesaving medical care, especially youth.
  • In many places, trans people face barriers to voting, including voter ID laws that don’t match gender presentation.   And while the US may seem far away, it is happening here too.
• In the UK:  
  • A 2023 Stonewall report found that 45% of trans people have considered suicide in the past year, and 27% have attempted it. [30]
  • The same report found one in four trans people have experienced homelessness, and two-thirds avoid public spaces for fear of harassment or abuse.
  • According to Galop (2021), one in four trans people in the UK have experienced domestic abuse in the past year. [31]
  • The UK Government Equalities Office (2018) found that trans people in the UK earn less on average, face greater unemployment, and often delay or avoid seeking healthcaredue to discrimination. [32]
  • The Cass Report (2024) on transgender youth care has already resulted in reduced access to gender-affirming care, and the review panel included no transgender people. Since the report’s publication, trans support charities have reported a rise in suicidal ideation among youth, citing fear, isolation, and disrupted medical pathways. [33]
  • When we talk about witch hunts, we are not speaking metaphorically. We are talking about the structures that still label people like me as dangerous, unnatural, or corrupt. We’re talking about being punished not for crimes—but for existing outside what power says is acceptable.
• Ask yourself: • 
  • Why do systems so often require conformity to survive? 
  • Who is considered a threat—and who gets to define that? 
  • What does it cost someone to live honestly, if honesty means defiance?  
  • And when we know diversity produces better outcomes (socially, professionally), why do we wage ware against our differences rather than celebrate the kaleidoscope of human experience and expression?

“What do you now understand about power, gender, and justice that you didn’t before this lecture—and what responsibility comes with that understanding?”

If I am to think of final words for you, I would ask you to always think critically.  To seek understand why.  To understand the motive and the agenda of those speaking.  Keep your eyes open, and for goodness’ sake, speak up.   Silence is complicity.

Questions: How is Today’s Discussion Relevant in Your Own Life

• Are there things that you understand about power, gender, and justice that you didn’t before today?
• What did I once believe about Rebecca Nurse that I no longer do?  
• How have I used the language of innocence or guilt to make myself feel comfortable?
• Do I benefit from systems that ask others to stay silent so I can remain safe?
• Is there responsibility that comes with understanding any of these concepts?

You don’t need to share any of this…for you to keep.

VI. Endnotes and Essential Reading

1. Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).  Hutton explores how fear of witches evolved across cultures and centuries, grounding it in broader anxieties about gender, religion, and the unknown. His work is crucial to this course because it contextualizes witch hunts as systemic expressions of social control.
2. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2004).  Federici argues that the witch hunts were foundational to the rise of capitalism by enforcing patriarchal control over women’s bodies and labor. This book provides the theoretical backbone for understanding the political and economic stakes behind the persecution of witches.
3. Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, Malleus Maleficarum (1487).  This 15th-century witch-hunting manual institutionalized misogyny under the guise of religious orthodoxy. It exemplifies how gendered violence was codified into spiritual and legal authority.
4. Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Signs 1, no. 4 (1976): 875–893.  Cixous calls on women to write their bodies and reclaim language from patriarchal control. Her essay is central to understanding silence and expression in The Crucible as tools of resistance.
5. Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974).  This study reveals how class conflict, land disputes, and familial rivalries shaped the Salem trials. It reframes the crisis as a socio-political conflict rather than pure spiritual panic.
6. Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 (New York: Vintage Books, 2003).  Norton situates the Salem trials within the trauma of colonial wars and Native resistance. Her work shows how racial fear and gender anxiety were fused in Puritan New England.
7. Kristen J. Sollée, Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive (Brooklyn: ThreeL Media, 2017).  Sollée traces the witch figure through history and pop culture to argue that she embodies unruly, transgressive womanhood. The book supports reclaiming the witch as a feminist icon.
8. Arthur Miller, The Crucible (New York: Viking Press, 1953).   Miller uses the Salem witch trials as an allegory for McCarthyism and political hysteria. The play provides the dramatic foundation for the lecture’s analysis of gendered persecution.
9. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 1984).  Lorde asserts that systems of oppression cannot be dismantled using the tools of the oppressor and that silence is a form of complicity. Her framework challenges the narrative of exoneration as justice.
10. Mona Chollet, In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial (New York: Macmillan, 2021).  Chollet reclaims the witch as a modern symbol of female resistance, autonomy, and dissent. Her work bridges historical violence with contemporary feminist politics.
11. Lindy West, The Witches Are Coming (New York: Hachette Books, 2019). West critiques how society still demonizes outspoken women and uses the witch label to control and discredit them. She shows how cultural misogyny adapts through modern media.
12. Elizabeth Wurtzel, Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women (New York: Anchor Books, 1999).
    Wurtzel celebrates women who reject social expectations and embrace complexity. Her work champions resistance to palatable femininity.
13. National Center for Transgender Equality, U.S. Transgender Survey (2015).  This comprehensive survey reveals the widespread violence and discrimination faced by trans people in the U.S. It supports the lecture’s contemporary framing of witch hunts as systems of marginalization.
14. U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Violent Victimization by Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, 2021.   This report provides data on the increased risk of violence for LGBTQ individuals, especially trans people. It substantiates the claim that persecution continues under new guises.
15. UCLA School of Law Williams Institute, LGBTQ Economic Vulnerability Report (2021).  The report outlines systemic economic disadvantages for LGBTQ communities. It connects material inequality to structural forms of exclusion.
16. Stonewall UK, LGBT in Britain: Health Report (2023).  Stonewall’s findings document the health disparities, discrimination, and mental health toll faced by trans people in the UK. It emphasizes the ongoing social cost of gender-based marginalization.
17. Galop UK, Trans People’s Experiences of Domestic Abuse (2021).  This study shows the disproportionately high rates of abuse experienced by trans individuals. It underscores the real-world violence perpetuated by systems of “othering.”
18. UK Government Equalities Office, National LGBT Survey (2018).  This government report reveals discrimination in employment, housing, healthcare, and public life for LGBTQ people in the UK. It affirms that marginalization is systemic and state-reinforced.
19. The Cass Review: Independent Review of Gender Identity Services for Children and Young People (UK, 2024).  The Cass Review critiques gender-affirming care and has led to significant rollbacks in medical access for trans youth. It exemplifies how institutional decisions can criminalize identity.
20. Tennessee General Assembly, Public Chapter No. 486 (2023).  This law makes it a felony for teachers to acknowledge transgender identity in public schools. It reflects contemporary legal frameworks for reinforcing gender conformity.
21. Owen Davies, Popular Magic: Cunning-Folk in English History (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2003).  Davies explores the history of folk healers and their persecution. His work helps distinguish between cultural respect for traditional knowledge and the institutional fear it provoked.
22. John Demos, Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).  Demos examines how personal grievances and Puritan theology merged to justify witch trials. He provides deep cultural context for early American witchcraft accusations.
23. Daniel A. Gagnon, A Salem Witch: The Trial, Execution, and Exoneration of Rebecca Nurse (Yardley: Westholme Publishing, 2021).  Gagnon offers a comprehensive biography of Rebecca Nurse, revealing the local politics and personal dynamics that led to her execution. His work grounds her story in historical fact.
24. Audre Lorde, “Your Silence Will Not Protect You,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches.  This powerful essay calls for courageous truth-telling as a moral responsibility. It reinforces the lecture’s insistence that silence is complicity, not safety.
25. Silvia Federici, Beyond the Periphery of the Skin: Rethinking, Remaking, and Reclaiming the Body in Contemporary Capitalism (Oakland: PM Press, 2020).  Federici argues that women’s bodies remain a battleground for political and economic control. This text links historical witch hunts to current struggles over bodily autonomy.
26. Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers (New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 1973).  This foundational pamphlet exposes how female healers were systematically replaced by male medical professionals. It shows how knowledge and power were forcibly extracted from women.
27. Carol F. Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (New York: W.W. Norton, 1987).  Karlsen shows that women’s age, marital status, and independence made them targets for witchcraft accusations. Her work is essential for understanding the gendered nature of risk and blame.
28. Elizabeth Reis, Damned Women: Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).  Reis explores how religious doctrine shaped perceptions of female sin, sexuality, and moral failure. Her work deepens the analysis of how gender and guilt were constructed together.
29. George Santayana, The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress, Vol. I (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905), 284.   Santayana’s famous line—“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”—sets the moral urgency for historical awareness in the lecture.
30. Dr. James McHenry, The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, ed. Max Farrand (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1911), 3:101.  This anecdote of Franklin’s “A republic—if you can keep it” is cited to stress the importance of vigilance in preserving justice. It frames the students’ civic responsibility.
31. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2004).   This citation reiterates Federici’s central argument: that capitalist patriarchy was built on the suppression of female autonomy and communal knowledge.
32. bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (New York: Atria Books, 2004). hooks challenges patriarchal masculinity and its emotional repression. Her insights support the lecture’s critique of male hysteria and the emotional roots of power.
33. Marilynne Robinson, “Onward, Christian Liberals,” in The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (New York: Picador, 2005), 148–157.  Robinson reflects on liberal complicity in systemic harm, questioning whether male authors like Miller can critique patriarchy without replicating its biases.
34. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). Irigaray analyzes how women are constructed as reflections or objects within male-dominated symbolic systems. Her theory explains how women are flattened into symbols in texts like The Crucible.
35. Maya Dusenberry, Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed and Sick (Harper Collins).
    Dusenberry exposes systemic misogyny in healthcare. Her work supports the lecture’s discussion of the dismissal of women’s bodily knowledge.
36. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).  Irigaray critiques how women are denied subjectivity in patriarchal systems, becoming commodities or mirrors for men. This underpins the lecture’s analysis of female silence as unreadable and threatening.
37. Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).  de Lauretis argues that gender is produced through representation and institutional structures. Her theory is foundational to the lecture’s framing of how women are written into—and out of—history.
38. Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).  Roper explores how fear, fantasy, and gendered violence drove witch hunts in Germany. Her work provides critical insight into how eroticized terror shaped public perceptions of women.
39. Owen Davies, Popular Magic: Cunning-Folk in English History (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2003).  Davies documents the folk traditions and alternative healing practices that coexisted with—and were sometimes confused for—witchcraft. His work contextualizes magical knowledge as both revered and repressed.
40. Silvia Federici, Beyond the Periphery of the Skin: Rethinking, Remaking, and Reclaiming the Body in Contemporary Capitalism (Oakland: PM Press, 2020).   Federici expands on her earlier work by arguing that the control of women’s bodies remains essential to capitalism’s operation today. This text bridges historical witch hunts with contemporary struggles over reproductive rights, gender identity, and bodily autonomy.
41. Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers (New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 1973), 3. This foundational feminist pamphlet demonstrates how women’s medical knowledge was delegitimized and criminalized to consolidate male control over healing. It situates the persecution of witches as part of a broader campaign against female autonomy and community-based care.
42. Ibid., 16.  This section highlights how male-dominated institutions used licensing laws and scientific authority to displace traditional women healers, turning knowledge into proprietary power.
43. Ibid., quoting Malleus Maleficarum.  Quoting directly from this witch-hunting manual, Ehrenreich and English show how male doctors were positioned as moral arbiters over women’s bodies, reinforcing spiritual and professional authority.
44. Ibid., 17.  This passage details how trials served to elevate the status of male physicians, not through medical innovation, but through participation in the persecution of women.
45. Ibid., 18–19.  Here, Ehrenreich and English show how the transformation of childbirth from communal ritual to commercialized medical event served to disempower women and centralize male authority.
46. Ibid., 15–17.  These pages contextualize the witch trials as political theatre used to destroy independent women’s roles as caregivers and community leaders.
47. Carol F. Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (New York: W.W. Norton, 1987), 115–118.  Karlsen reveals how women’s economic vulnerability, age, and marital status made them more likely to be accused of witchcraft. Her analysis is crucial to understanding the intersection of gender, power, and suspicion.
48. Elizabeth Reis, Damned Women: Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 62–65.  Reis examines how Puritan theology framed women’s bodies as inherently sinful and more susceptible to Satan’s influence. This text underscores the theological roots of misogyny in early American witchcraft discourse.
49. George Santayana, The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress, Vol. I (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905), 284.  Santayana’s aphorism—“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”—is used to emphasize historical literacy as a tool of resistance.
50. Dr. James McHenry, The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, ed. Max Farrand (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1911), 3:101.   This quote from Benjamin Franklin, recorded by McHenry—“A republic, if you can keep it”—serves as a civic warning about the fragility of justice and democracy, framing students’ ethical responsibility today.
51. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2004).   This citation reiterates Federici’s core thesis that witch hunts were not irrational outbursts, but coordinated campaigns to discipline women and establish capitalist patriarchal control.
52. Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1, no. 4 (1976): 875–893.  Cixous argues that women must reclaim their voices, bodies, and stories from patriarchal systems that silence them. Her call to “write the body” underpins the lecture’s exploration of Rebecca Nurse’s silence as radical defiance.
53. Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers, 2nd ed. (New York: Feminist Press at CUNY, 2010).  The revised edition expands on their original argument with updated historical examples and analysis, reinforcing how women’s medical authority has been systemically suppressed across centuries.
54. bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (New York: Atria Books, 2004).  hooks challenges dominant narratives of masculinity that rely on emotional repression, control, and dominance. Her work supports the analysis of male hysteria and how women become the scapegoats for male anxiety.
55. Marilynne Robinson, “Onward, Christian Liberals,” in The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (New York: Picador, 2005), 148–157.  Robinson critiques how liberalism often fails to address its entanglement in systems of power. Her essay invites readers to question whether critiques of injustice can avoid replicating the very hierarchies they seek to expose.
56. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). Irigaray explores how women are positioned as mirrors or commodities within patriarchal systems, rather than autonomous subjects. This theory is essential to understanding how female virtue and silence are used to uphold male identity.
57. Maya Dusenberry, Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed and Sick (Harper Collins).  Dusenberry reveals how biased research and institutional misogyny undermine women’s healthcare globally. Her work supports the lecture’s critique of the medical erasure of female knowledge.
58. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).  Irigaray argues that under patriarchal logic, women are defined by lack and made legible only in relation to men. Her theory explains how Rebecca Nurse’s refusal to confess renders her unreadable—and therefore threatening.
59. Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).  De Lauretis theorizes gender as a position constructed through language, representation, and institutional discourse. Her work is central to understanding how female subjectivity is shaped—and often erased—by patriarchal narrative systems.
60. Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).  Roper explores how fantasy, misogyny, and fear drove mass executions of women in early modern Europe. Her analysis shows how witch hunts were fueled by eroticized fears of women’s power and sexuality.
61. Owen Davies, Popular Magic: Cunning-Folk in English History (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2003).  Davies documents the folk healers and magical practitioners who operated outside official religious and medical institutions. His work highlights the social tensions between vernacular knowledge and institutional authority.

VII. Appendix: Summary of the 5 Key Messages

1. Exoneration Is Not Justice—It Is Erasure

When someone is posthumously declared “innocent,” it can feel like justice—but it often only reinforces the legitimacy of the very system that killed them. It allows us to imagine the problem was a one-time error, rather than a deep and ongoing structure of oppression. Saying “Rebecca Nurse wasn’t a witch” sidesteps the harder truth: that the category of “witch” itself was invented to justify punishing certain kinds of women. Real justice does not clear the name of the individual—it questions why the name needed to be destroyed.

2. Patriarchy Silences Women Through Every Available System—Then Punishes the Ones Who Refuse Silence

Across history, women have been expected to be silent, submissive, and self-erasing. If they break this script—by speaking, resisting, or simply existing outside the boundaries set for them—they are punished. This punishment can come through law, religion, medicine, or reputation. But sometimes a woman’s refusal to perform obedience—especially if she does it quietly—is more threatening than open rebellion. When a woman stays silent on her own terms, it destabilizes a system that depends on controlling the meaning of her voice.

3. Witch Hunts Are Not About Magic—They Are About Power and Control

The witch trials were not a paranoid exception in history—they were a strategy. They targeted people whose knowledge, independence, or refusal to conform made them dangerous to the order of things. These weren’t random panics—they were deliberate ways to discipline bodies, sever community ties, and strip people of autonomy. “Witch” was the label for anyone who disrupted how power wanted the world to look—and that label is still used today.

4. Patriarchal Power Hurts Everyone—Including the Privileged

The roles assigned in systems of dominance don’t benefit everyone equally—not even those who appear to have the most to gain. Boys and men are often forced to suppress emotion, avoid vulnerability, and police each other’s behavior. They are taught that real power comes from control—over themselves and others. But that control becomes a prison. Systems that silence and punish difference also demand performance and compliance from those at the top. The cost is isolation, emotional damage, and the loss of genuine connection.

5. Feminist Theory Is Not a Supplement—It’s the Key to Seeing the System Clearly

We cannot understand witch trials, or the continued silencing of women and marginalized people, by looking at surface events alone. We need to ask deeper questions: Who defines morality? Whose bodies are seen as dangerous? Who is expected to perform goodness, and who is allowed to resist? These are the questions that reveal the underlying machinery of oppression. Without this lens, we see individuals where we should see patterns—and we mistake exceptional tragedies for accidents instead of consequences.

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^[1] Named after US Senator Joseph McCarthy, and the “Red Scare”, it was the political repression and persecution of left-wing individuals and a campaign of fear of Communist influence in the 1940’s and 1950’s.

^[2] The Albigensian Crusade was the bloodiest crusade in human history. It was the first pogrom, or extermination of a people for their beliefs.   It ran from 1209 to 1229 and was led by Pope Innocent III and King Philip II of France. In common with other such movements we see, there was a perceived threat to institutional power structures, and ultimately a fight over land.

^[3] bell hooks describes “psychic self-mutilation” as the first act patriarchy demands of men: the suppression of their emotional selves in order to conform to a rigid ideal of masculinity. This internal violence—denying vulnerability, empathy, and connection—precedes and enables outward domination. Her work reframes patriarchy not as a system that solely harms women, but one that wounds everyone it enlists to uphold it.

^[4] Use of plant medicines by midwives posed the biggest issue for the Catholic Church during the Witch Trials (13^th-17^th Centuries).  In Western Europe, midwives often used belladonna, deadly nightshade, and ergot, a fungus which grows on rye, during the labour process. These remedies were effective in easing the suffering of childbirth, yet the Church perceived any attempt to assuage this pain as a violation of God’s wishes (Ehrenreich and English).  Major European churches enforced the belief that pain during childbirth was punishment for Eve’s Original Sin.[40] Ameliorating the pain of delivery was equated with witchcraft.  The 15^th century Catholic guide to witch-hunting, the Malleus Maleficarum, stated that “no one did more harm to the Catholic Church than the midwife.”

^[5] It was an explicit desire to push women out of healing, and out of medicine altogether, that led to these actions.[40]

^[6] Lilith was a figure in Mesopotamian and Jewish mythology (appearing in the Babylonian Talmud and in the Conflict of Adam and Eve with Satan) who was said to be the first wife of Adam and a primordial “she-demon” or “a hot fiery female who first cohabitated with man”.  She was banished from Eden for disobeying Adam.

^[7] The book Female Rage: Unlocking Its Secrets, Claiming Its Power by Mary Valentis and Anne Devane notes that “When we asked women what female rage looks like to them, it was always Medusa, the snaky-haired monster of myth, who came to mind

^[8] Margaret Thatcher was frequently portrayed as a witch in satirical media and was the subject of public campaigns such as the 2013 charting of “Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead” following her death (see The Guardian, April 10, 2013.  Theresa May faced sexist abuse online and in commentary, where “witch” was used to discredit her leadership (see The Telegraph, March 30, 2015: “Want a new kind of politics? Stop calling female MPs ‘witches'”.  Liz Truss was burned in effigy at the 2022 Lewes Bonfire with chants of “Burn the witch” from the crowd (see Newsflare, November 5, 2022.

^[9] To see The Crucible from the perspective of the “reclaimed witch” is to shift the narrative away from male redemption arcs and toward the voices of the accused women themselves. It invites us to read Rebecca Nurse, Tituba, and even Abigail Williams not as symbols of hysteria or morality, but as figures of resistance—women who, in different ways, threatened the authority of a rigid, patriarchal society.  From this angle, the witch is no longer just a victim or scapegoat; she becomes a challenge to the system. This interpretation reframes the story as one not merely about the dangers of false accusation, but about the cultural violence that targets women who refuse submission. It allows students to see the play as a critique not only of political hysteria but of the enduring fear of female power.

^[10] The forest, in both European and Puritan imaginations, symbolized danger, disorder, and everything beyond patriarchal and Christian control—especially Indigenous resistance and female autonomy. Across Europe, during the 500-year witch hunts that claimed the lives of tens of thousands—mostly women—the forest was repeatedly invoked as the witch’s domain: a space of herbal knowledge, erotic freedom, and spiritual power outside male authority. To accuse a woman of entering the forest was to accuse her of stepping out of place—socially, sexually, and theologically. [1], [2]

^[11] Why are we so afraid of women?  A Psychology Today article “Men’s Fears of Women in History and Myth” by Avrum Weiss PhD noted that in 200 Grimm’s Fairy Tales there are 52 dangerous female characters and only 6 dangerous male ones (Lederer, 1968).  The harmful impact of this on the developing female psyche is highlighted in the book Fairy Tale Princesses Will Kill Your Children by Jane Gilmore.  Dr. Weiss posits the shift towards the othering of the female to the shift from hunter-gather societies to an agrarian one, which interestingly parallels the moving from, and taming of, the forest, a metaphorical and real space often linked to the Dark Feminine.

^[12] Tituba was the first to be accused of witchcraft. She was described as coming from the forest, knowing strange songs, performing rituals “not of God.” In a society haunted by the memory of Indigenous resistance, her body, her voice, and her cultural knowledge were racialized as threatening. Tituba became the embodiment of the colonial imagination: a woman of colour who moved between the Christian household and the dark wilderness beyond. Her forced confession gave shape to the court’s fears—and licensed the violence that followed.

^[13] Giacomini et al. (1986) was the first to show that only 11% of the gendered images outside of urogenital sections in anatomy textbooks were of women.   Mendelsohn et al. (1994) evaluated over 4000 images and reported that females were represented in in only 32% of the gendered images.

^[14] In real life, Abigail Williams was 11 years old at this time in her life.

^[15] The word hysteria comes from the Greek hystera, meaning uterus, and was long used to pathologize women’s emotions as disorders of the womb. Though once considered an exclusively female affliction, the term broadened in the 19th and 20th centuries—particularly through psychoanalysis—to describe irrational anxiety or loss of control in men, exposing that the condition was never biological, but cultural.