Introduction

Not many people know this, but Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid's Tale (1985), is the descendant of a witch. Almost ten years before the infamous Salem witch trials, Atwood's distant ancestor Mary Webster was accused of witchcraft in the colonial town of Hadley, Massachusetts. Mary came under suspicion of witchcraft and was dragged from her home and hung from a tree overnight. Later, her body was cut down and dumped in a shallow grave. Despite being lynched, buried and dug back up, Mary survived the tortuous ordeal - which only made people all the more convinced she was in bed with the devil.

Atwood spent much of her childhood hearing stories about her infamous ancestor from her grandmother. Mary's story of survival and resistance was a source of inspiration for Atwood, and, given the sparse historical details available on Mary Webster, she decided to pen a narrative poem titled Half-Hanged Mary, which tells the story of the attempted execution from Mary's perspective. What must it have felt like to be out there all night long? To be rejected by her own community? And why was she accused in the first place? These are some of the questions Atwood attempts to explore in the poem. Through the poem, we learn that Mary lived poor and alone on a 'weedy farm' where the townspeople visited for cures for their ills ranging from warts to unwanted babies.

After Mary is cut down, she is even more feared by her neighbours, but is protected by the law and cannot be executed twice for the same crime. She describes the strange freedom she now experiences after surviving death at the hands of her community. The gossip and rumours that led to her accusation and failed execution became a self-fulfilling prophecy: 'Before, I was not a witch. But now I am one', Mary declares. There's something delightfully revolutionary about a woman deciding to live her life in outright defiance of society, even if this version of Mary only exists in Atwood's imagination.

To live in defiance of society's expectations and rules, that is what it means to be a witch. The poem explores themes that would become essential to The Handmaid's Tale (both the book and, later, the television series), including enforcing limitations on independent women, policing women's bodies and punishing women who challenge male dominance. Keen-eyed readers of The Handmaid's Tale will have spotted that Atwood dedicated the book to her witchy foremother.

The poem is one of my favourite stories about a witch because, rather than focusing on Mary's goodness or wickedness, the emphasis is instead on the question of power. If we read the word 'women' instead of 'witches', we can start to peel back the layers of sexism that wrap around our common assumptions of what we actually mean when we label someone a witch. At its core, sexism is a system of categorization, one that rests on the ideology that men are naturally superior to women. This categorization aims to scientifically naturalize the differences between not only men and women, but also, importantly, between so-called good women and bad women. Witch hunts are a means not only of identifying 'bad women' but also of punishing them and thereby reinforcing that very thin and dangerous line that separates good and bad women. As philosopher Kate Manne (2017: 125) puts it, sexism wears a lab coat; misogyny goes on witch hunts.

In this book, I look at the figure of the witch through a feminist lens that allows us to comprehend why we see witches re-emerge in popular culture during certain periods of time. Why are we seeing more witches in the movies and young adult fiction? Why has #WitchTok taken off? Is it a flow-on effect of the #MeToo movement? Or something else? Why does the world need witches now? Why does the world need witchy feminists? These are the questions that animate this book.

My own fixation with witchcraft and feminism began when I was quite young, beginning, unsurprisingly, with pop culture classics like the 1993 film Hocus Pocus. I always found myself rooting for the witches who were supposedly the antagonists rather than the intended heroes of the story (but seriously, with Bette Midler singing her heart out and Sarah Jessica Parker's super sexy solo performance, how could I not be on their side?). It's very possible that this movie also heralded my burgeoning queerness, on top of my interest in witchcraft and feminism. Later, I would figure out just how interconnected these three vectors of my identity were, which is something I explore in this book. I think that the witch has always helped me to orient myself in the world, to figure out where I belong. As a young, brown, knobbly-kneed kid in an almost all-white school, I wasn't white enough physically or culturally to fully feel like I belonged. And when I would visit my cousins, I couldn't speak our language, and so I didn't quite fully fit in that world either.

I think because I've always felt like I'm part of two worlds and at the same time not enough for either of them, I belonged to the world of the witch the most.

Witches, women and power

What exactly is a witch? The story of the witch does not begin with Mary Webster or indeed with any of the women who were accused of witchcraft during the Salem witch trials. However, that period of accusation and violence offers us a number of critical clues for understanding how we ended up with our current socially agreed-upon image of what constitutes a 'witch'. The Oxford English Dictionary gives us the following definition: a person (in later use typically a woman) who practises witchcraft or magic, especially of a malevolent or harmful nature.

Before the fifteenth century, the term was relatively gender-neutral, used to refer to practitioners of magic whether they were men or women. Witches for a long time simply referred to 'somebody [my emphasis] who causes harm to others by mystical means' (Hutton 2018: 99). The etymological root of the word witch is from the Old English wicca (masculine) and wicce (feminine). In the lead up to and during the European witch trials (fifteenth to seventeenth century), a shift occurred whereby the term witch came to be associated with women - evil women, to be specific (Gibson 2023). The witch is a woman.1

Why did the figure of the witch change, to refer to women who cause harm via magical means? The short answer is power. Several important social and political changes occurred during the period of the witch hunt, from the end of feudalism and rise of capitalism in Europe (Federici 2004), to major shifts and splits in the Church. The latter changes resulted in the Church taking extreme measures in order to maintain and extend its power during this period of social unrest and change. A major part of this new political project involved identifying and expelling threats to the power it held, which, in the fifteenth century, meant executing heretics. Pope John XXII in the papal bull released in 1326 declared witchcraft to be heresy, and thus it could be tried under the Inquisition. By definitively marking witchcraft as heretical, the figure of the witch came to be seen as a tangible threat to Christian society that had to be stamped out. The witch is a threat.

A threat to whom, exactly? In the infamous witch-hunter manual Malleus Maleficarum (also known as The Hammer of Witches) Heinrich Kramer writes that 'all witchcraft comes from carnal lust which in women is insatiable' (Mackay and Institoris 2009). If we consider the larger social processes unfolding during this period of time, then this framing of women's sexuality does have its own particular logic. For example, if we follow Federici's (2004) hypothesis that the witch hunts served to create and enforce a newly established role in society for women, one in which women are consigned to unpaid reproductive labour, then this framing of women's sexuality as being out of control and requiring discipline makes more sense.

Simply put, to keep women in their place as homemakers and mothers, the institutions that benefit from this unpaid labour needed to create a system of rewards and punishments. The reward: you get to live in the new world. The punishment: you die in the old world and serve as a reminder to other women about what happens when they step out of line. Witches have a long history of being labelled as sexual creatures. Kristen Sollée (2017) posits that the 'slut' is in many ways the 'witch' of the twenty-first century. The witch is a slut.

At first, witchcraft accusations were not specifically directed against women; over time, however, this changed. While both men and women may have been accused, 80-85 per cent of those prosecuted were women (Levack 2015). There are many theories about why women were prosecuted and executed more than men during this period. I've distilled a few of the more popular ones below:

• Feminist-Marxist scholar Silvia Federici (2004; 2018) argues that the witch hunts were a means of stripping women of reproductive control, constructing and subsequently imposing a gendered and uneven division of labour and capital.
• Historians Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English (2010) argue that the witch hunts were primarily aimed at midwives and healers, as a means of taking the knowledge and power...