Witch Way Now?
“Having expectations of others means you are trying to fix their lives. Fix your own life – that is freedom.” - Sadhguru
Witch Way Now?
“Well-behaved women seldom make history,” is the prison men have made for women. When women break free of their supposed ‘good-behaviour’ their power frightens men and men call them witches. In this blog I write about my thoughts on this slogan and why I think it upholds a long standing patriarchal narrative that has killed and shackled women for centuries. Long live the witches!
I am walking through Amsterdam early on a Sunday morning and it is a pleasure. The streets are quiet, the party goers have returned to their dens and the streets to the early risers. There is a lovely peace to a city slumbering and numb from the reveling of the night before. The sun rises lazily into a clear blue sky and a hint of warmth touches my cheek as I amble through the streets. The architecture of the Amsterdam School surrounds me, keeps me company and echoes of times past. Times have changed or have they? I pass a house on the street and look at a poster hung up inside the window. It reads, “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” (see foto above) It is a curious thing, isn’t it? Interesting. I stop and take a picture. Later, when I am thinking about the poster and the book I’m reading (In Defense of Witches by Mona Chollet), this post starts to germinate. I am glad I took the picture. I think the person who hung the poster there had good intentions and on the surface these words seem well intentioned. Well-meaning words can support existing male narratives and propaganda about women. I think this slogan does and it makes me angry. Let me explain.
These words play into a very old and long held patriarchal belief of what a woman should be. And what is that? Well, well -behaved of course. What does that species look like? Wife, mother, a faceless being at the service of others and the common good without sexual or intellectual desire. A ‘thing’ that does not have autonomy over herself or her body because that is not what the world of men want for her. This is a well-behaved women of not only then, in the shadows of history, but also now. Anti-abortion law in the USA speaks right into this narrative. Ill-behaved women on the other hand are characterized by their ‘refusal of motherhood, rejection of marriage, ignoring traditional beauty standards, bodily and sexual autonomy, homosexuality, aging, anger, even a general sense of self-determination[i],’ and are also the symptoms of witchcraft as Carmen Maria Machado Explains in her foreword to In Defence of Witches. Women who want these things for their lives were once labeled witches, ostracized and burnt at the stake. Women today are not hunted or burnt, yet the male narrative today portrays these women in a very negative and controlling light. The stakes are lower these days but women still have the pressure to conform in our patriarchal society.
The word witch has been sidelined into the imaginations of Disney viewers and the power it wields over us today is minimal. But once the witch bewitched men. Women outside the control of the patriarchal society in which they lived were called witches. Today we might call them Feminists, liberals, bitches or assertive. They were seen as the ultimate threat to the order and stability of societies. They were women just wanting to live their lives on their own terms. They died for the wish to be free. Just having a cat was enough to get you burnt at the stake.
These words in the window, they touch me in a different way than the sun, they leave me feeling cold. They are words of men who want to control women. And things men want to control, they destroy. “Nowadays despite being legally and practically sanctioned, women’s independence continues to elicit general skepticism.”[ii] Why is that? Because freedom, independence and volition is different for women than it is for men. A free woman is not a free man – for women, freedom comes at a price.
“We strongly sensed that with the pill, life would never be the same again, we’d be so free in our bodies it was frightening. Free as a man[iii],” Annie Ernaux says with certainty in her book The Years. But is wasn’t to be. ‘Free as a man’ is for men only. Women were shamed into not using the pill for many years after its introduction. Witches, in the broad sense of the word - women who had agency and self determination, were the only early adopters. It came as a surprise to men that women were sexual beings who had sexual desires and needs and yet who didnt want babies to show for it. It frightened men that the pill gave women the freedom to meet these needs without taking the responsibility of child rearing, just like men. The word witch was antiquated by the time the pill came along. A much older one, however, was used in its place to dissuade women from using the pill. Whore. Women wanting to be free in their bodies, in whichever way they wanted, suddenly became whores. It stopped most women from taking control of their sexual pleasure and bodies.
Why was a married woman wanting to take the pill? Was she wanting to be unfaithful to her husband and four kids? This is another way that the patriarchal socialization war machine has turned against women in a big way, labeling things that are ok for men as not ok for women. Of course the pill brought freedom to women across the globe, freedom to have control of their bodies. Freedom to have sex without getting pregnant. Freedom to decide not to have children. But it came at a cost: the cost of being labeled whores in the beginning; men taking away the ability to use it through law making and still, today, the cost of violence against women for wanting to make decisions about their own bodies.
There is a “deeply embedded tendency in our society to hold women ultimately responsible for the violence against them[iv],” says Karol F. Karlson, a specialist on the new England witch trials. Being a witch, and by men’s definition – ill-behaved, is a dangerous thing for a woman. It means women lose the ‘protection’ of the patriarchal structures around them and sometimes the support of the matriarchal support in place. Practically this means a woman will lose the protection of her village or the men in her life or the police are slow in responding to yet another report of partner violence. For the women involved, it feels like a target has been put on their backs. The male narrative that a woman wanting freedom is a target for violence should be the first on everyone’s list to eradicate. We have to hold the men who are violent against women accountable, not the women seeking to be themselves. As Mona Chollet says, ‘there is no need for witch hunts anymore as the trial and tribunal that condemns women to death has been privitised, death coming in the form of spousal violence.’ Why are the death of innocent women, then and now, still not a priority in the modern world?
Mona Chollet gives a very succinct answer to this question. “Truth be told, it is precisely because witch-hunts speak to us of our own time that we have excellent reasons not to face up to them. Venturing down this path means confronting the most wretched aspects of humanity. The witch-hunts demonstrated, first, the stubborn tendency of all societies to find a scapegoat for their misfortunes and to lock themselves into a spiral of irrationality, cut off from all reasonable challenge, until the accumulation of hate-filled discourse and obsessional hostility justify a turn to physical violence, perceived as the legitimate defence of a beleaguered society[v].” The answer brings us to another: When will the patriarchal society fall? The answer: not soon enough.
As Simone De Beauvoir reminds us, “Representation of the world, like the world itself is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth[vi].” And this is where this poster goes wrong, it is describing something from the world view of men, who want women to be well behaved and subservient. The poster should read, “Women in captivity seldom make history. Free women sometimes make history. To make history, free all women.” It is about freedom, not good or bad behaviour. Well-behaved speaks of an expectation that will always be a judgemental hook.
I walk away from the window and it’s message and turn down a street that’s brighter and breezier than the last. This street carries the hope of the architecture holding it in place. The sun is bouncing off windows and dancing and shimmering on the street before me, like the road of gold in the Wizard of Oz. The light breeze carries smells of life and life smells delicious. I am conscious of my feet walking, one step at a time. With each step I walk away from the poster, distance myself from its message. The road leads me to a T-junction. I stand at the junction and look left and right and ask myself, “Witch way now?”
“Having expectations of others means you are trying to fix their lives. Fix your own life – that is freedom.” - Sadhguru
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[i] Foreword by Carmen Maria Machado pg. vii In Defence of Witches by Mona Chollet
[ii] Pg. 16 In Defence of Witches by Mona Chollet
[iii] Pg. 30 The Years by Annie Ernaux
[iv] Pg. 16 In Defence of Witches by Mona Chollet
[v] Pg. 7 In Defence of Witches by Mona Chollet
[vi] The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
