Daughters of Witches By Julia Park Tracey

“We are the daughters of the witches you couldn’t burn.”

That’s a popular meme going around the internet these days, as we await the joyful coming of our savior, Kamala Harris, or the End Times, with the Mango Mussolini. I say that only slightly in jest, because I do believe we are in a fraught time. A woman president could set us up for incredible progressive movement, while a Trump/Vance win could mark the beginning of the end of women’s rights altogether.

There’s no way not to be political in an essay about feminism and religion, so if the current election is not of interest to you, I say, enjoy your privileges while you can and I hope the leopards don’t eat your face, as another meme goes. Regardless, the bodies of witches and the bodies of all our women, young and old, are still interconnected, both by virtue of our gender and of our position as political pawns (again? still? It is to weep).

I was recently thinking about the potential of another Trump administration, this time with Project 2025 and a rabid JD Vance in his hip pocket ready to do the ugly part, and I had a mild-to-medium panic attack. The thought is so horrific, scary, alarming, unbearable, and all my instincts tell me to run. (I have adult children nearby. I have aging parents. I can’t run. Do I stay? What to do? Escape plan?) It would be Hell.

I have been working on a novel for some five years, about a Puritan woman, based on my seventh great-grandmother, Silence Greenleaf. Silence: A Novel, forthcoming this month from Sibylline Press, shows Silence faltering in her faith after bad things happened in her life, and she angrily questions the existence of God in the throes of her grief. I have been able to write her rage, her losses, and her questions toward God, but I never quite understood the fear of Hell. I’m a Unitarian Universalist, formerly Catholic, mostly atheist these days, with a side-helping of Paganism when it suits me. I don’t believe in a heaven or hell.

But suddenly I felt it. That terrifying grip on my heart, the feeling of falling from a cliff, the utter, endless horror of what could come. And now, I see it, how the fear of Hell could so grip society, or a community, that they would push to the edges of reasonable behavior, like punishing women for “witchcraft.”

In 1715, Hannah Sewell, the Puritan daughter of Salem witch trial judge Samuel Sewell, “was frightened of dying. Sometimes…their faith faltered; more often, the prospect of an imminent meeting with God filled them with spiritual terror…If you succumb to fear and misery [near death], it suggests that God has not elected you.”[i] Only the Elect went to Heaven; the rest, to Hell. And you never knew until you died if you were Elect or not. Such a nightmare.

Much of the plan in Trump’s back pocket, Project 2025, bears on the bodily rights of women: their fecundity, agency, and role in modern society. For all women, there’s a lot to fear there, and it would be, in fact, a living hell. Leading up to Election Day, we are witnessing the handwringing in the media about how we got here. Mudslinging at childless cat-ladies and the evisceration of Roe v. Wade are symptoms of the rise of the new Puritanism, or, as some call it, the Christian Taliban.[ii]

“It absolutely baffles me that the government is pretending like they don’t know why we’re not having kids because, frankly, it is glaringly obvious,” said 29-year-old Charlie Fitzgerald in a social media post reported by BuzzFeed. [iii] Inflation, crushing student debt, and a post-pandemic world are not conducive to wealth-building, and the potential Hellscape future alarms some women enough that childbearing-by-choice is set aside forever.

Scholar Silvia Federici argued in Caliban and the Witch that it’s no coincidence that when population declined (because of the Plague and religious wars) in early capitalist societies, “severe penalties were introduced in the legal codes of Europe to punish women guilty of reproductive crimes,” that is, witch hunts.[iv] Those accused of being witches—often just women who did not perform femininity in the way society expected—were persecuted for providing abortions and allegedly making men impotent, amongst other things. They were seen as a threat to the patriarchal family structure and the potential population growth needed for capitalism to thrive. If this sounds eerily familiar, it should.

I would argue that the witch hunts of history are not too different from contemporary restrictions on women’s bodies. Restrictive abortion laws like those in Texas allow anyone to accuse and sue suspected abortion providers—eerily like those accused of witchcraft for providing abortions in 15th-century Europe.[v] 

While people may think that Puritan days are long behind us, some, including Booker Prize-winning author of The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood, will vouchsafe that the Christion-neo-fascism of today’s GOP is a clear descendant of such thought.

At this moment in time, there is a brief window where we can effect change and push back against modern witch-hunts and the Hellscape that has been nigh promised to women. Whether you are spiritual or religious or not, your future is tied up in the intersection of feminism and religion, and voting for a woman might be the only choice we have left to change the course of history.

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[i] Francis, Richard. Judge Sewell’s Apology: The Salem Witch Trials and the Forming of an American Conscience; Fourth Estate/Harper Collins, New York; 2005. p. 309

[ii] Bekiempis, Victoria; “Kinzinger slams fellow Republican Boebert and warns of ‘Christian Taliban’”; The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/30/kinzinger-boebert-church-state-christian-taliban, Jun 30, 2022.  

[iii] Alana Valko, Alana. “A 29-Year-Old Just Gave The Best Explanation As To Why Millennials Aren’t Having Kids.” BuzzFeed, Aug 15, 2024.

[iv] Ibid.

[v] Ibid

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BIO:  Julia Park Tracey: Award winning author Julia Park Tracey’s forthcoming historical fiction, Silence: A Novel, will be released Sept. 24. She lives in Grass Valley in a restored Victorian house. She loves hot summers, occasional snow days, history, and the library. Cat-lady, mother of five, and spiritually curious always, Julia is active on all social media platforms as @juliaparktracey.