Confess or Deny? What's a "Witch" to Do?

Abstract

When I teach about the Salem trials, students typically ask two related questions: “why were women accused of witchcraft more often than men?” and “why would a woman confess to witchcraft if she really didn't do it?” This essay attempts to answer both of these questions. But, first, what was a “witch”? For Puritans, a witch was a person who made a pact with the devil, thus giving the devil permission to use her body to harm others and lure them into his service. This definition highlights something important about the Puritan world—it was the scene of a cosmic struggle between God and Satan. Puritan New Englanders accepted the devil's presence and believed he could come to earth, seduce victims to sign his book or covenant, and enlist sinners in his war against God. Witches could be male or female, but in New England they tended to be women. In fact, so many of the accused witches in Salem were women (approximately 78 percent) that it is worth exploring Puritan attitudes towards women, sin, and the devil. It would be easy, but inaccurate, to characterize the Puritans simply as misogynists. In fact, Puritan New Englanders considered themselves to be rather more enlightened than others when it came to women's place in society and in their cosmology. They did not subscribe to the prevailing European view that women were inherently more evil than men. And yet womanhood and witchcraft were inextricably linked both to each other and to Puritan interpretations of evil and sin (1).