Chris' Fish Place

Perhaps the best known play about witch trials in the United States is Miller’s The Crucible.  Its popularity is not only due to the connection to the McCarthy Hearings, but also because it is taught in what seems to be almost every American school.  It says much about our culture that the play about witch trials is a plot about a jilted lover getting revenge on the married man who jilted her.

                Witchcraft trials wouldn’t really about that at all.

                The connection between misogyny and witchcraft trials is pretty much obivious, but what Barstow does in this study is present numbers to prove it.  Some numbers are not shocking, such as more women being accused and executed in general, and some numbers are shocking, such as the information from Finland.

                Besides numbers, Barstow also shows how the investigation could destroy a village, at least the female population of a village (some villages only had one woman left) or the voyeurism of the witch finders.  Apparently the witch finders were paid to feel up women and touched their most private areas.  Of course, the witch finders did this would the best interest of everyone at heart. 

                It is this close look at not only accusations in terms of gender and class but also on the investigation of such charges that Barstow brings the trials back to where they should be seen – as an attack upon women.