1) "Eerily, nonsensically, the story continues to blind writers to its most sensational aspect, the mass killing of women, in part, at least, as a way of denying women political and economic power. Historians by the hundreds have described the horrors while ignoring the victims. Scarcely a word or question can be found on the consistent choice of females for burning at the stake or hanging on the gallows." Page 3

      2) "Once the idea of witchcraft was accepted, singling out a witch was easy, even if she was never actually caught in her evil activities, and never seen riding that broomstick, or conferring with her co-workers. First of all, at least half the population was immediately suspect: as wise King James of Scotland and England would write at the turn of the seventeenth century, for every twenty-one witches, twenty were women. This was not surprising. There was something otherworldly about women, who had the ability to produce a live human being from within their own bodies, something no man, not even a king, could do.

      Secondly, the Bible made the West's first woman, Eve, synonymous with lust and temptation, and advised, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live."

      Thirdly, a witch's appearance exposed her. At a time when most women died before the age of forty, she was still going strong in her fifties, sixties, or even seventies. She was too old to bear more children and so was no longer any use to society. And if she was near-sighted, or deaf, or bed-ridden: or if she limped, or stuttered, or was stooped-shouldered, she was especially to be feared rather than protected. Why then share scarce food or fuel with such a frightening-looking old hag who was hanging on only to do the Devil's bidding?

      Midwives made up another whole group of witches. If a midwife could bring both mother and child safely through the throes of childbirth, she doubtlessly was calling on the supernatural. On the other hand, if either mother or child died, the midwife-witch was demonstrating her unearthly power for evil.

      As for women who dared to assert themselves, they certainly deserved execution for witchcraft. After all, they were behaving contrary to history, the Bible, and the generally accepted inferiority of females to males in mental capacity and physical strength.

      In the absence of science and scientific knowledge, superstition reigned supreme. Men acted on what they believed, what they had been told and taught over the centuries- not on what they could prove. page 10-11

      3) Regarding Lady Alice Kyteler of Kilkenny (fl. 1324): "Her conviction for witch-heresy would allow confiscation and redistribution of her holdings." page 28

      4) Regarding Joan of Arc: "With Alice Kyteler it was money and property. In an even more famous example one hundred years later, it was political power that brought the cry "witch." That woman was Joan of Arc (1412-1431)." page 29

      "Her success against the English was the underlying - and purely political - reason for her persecution. Again, as in the case of Alice Kyteler, the trial record reflects only subtly the real reasons for Joan's persecution. All accusations against her were couched in terms of heretical behavior: wearing male clothing and sporting short hair; insisting that she was answerable directly to God for her words and deeds, not to the Church; falsely denying that she had been trained in the arts of witchcraft by neighbor women at her peasant home in Domremy, or that the voices that had impelled her actions were those of evil spirits." page 30

      5) Referring to Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches) by Jakob Sprenger (1436-1495) and Heinrich Kramer (c. 1430 - 1505): "In fact, they made he point even for those who never got past the title page, by using the feminine form of the word for witches, Maleficarum. (In direct contrast, the more commonly used Latin form, though in the masculine gender, was long accepted as referring to either sex as witch.)" Page 37

      Quoting from Malleus: "Witchcraft is high treason against God's Majesty. And so they are to be put to the torture in order to make them confess. Any person, whatever his rank or position, upon such accusation may be put to the torture, and he who is found guilty, even if he confesses his crime, let him be racked, let him suffer all other tortures prescribed by law in order that he may be punished in proportion to his offenses.

      Note: In days of old, such criminals suffered a double penalty and were often thrown to wild beasts to the devoured by them. Nowadays they are burnt at the stake, and probably this is because the majority of them are women." page 37, her emphasis

      "For more than 200 years, the Malleus Maleficarum would serve as a handbook for inquisitors, giving step-by-step instructions on arrest, torture, conviction, and execution of witches." page 37

      "The timing of the Malleus was remarkable. The book entered the scene in a Europe bewildered and overwhelmed by the turmoil of at least five ongoing revolutions: (1) the Reformation, which pitted established Catholics against upstart Protestantism; (2) the replacement of feudal enclaves by national monarchies; (3) the rise of the modern economic system, dominated by commerce and industry; (4) the ascendancy of science, which was demolishing age-old beliefs and superstition; (5) overseas exploration and empire-building.

      None of these revolutions displayed any concern for using the talents of women." page 45

      6) "Even Luther and Calvin, considered giant reformers by their followers, were content to rest their case by promoting the idea that woman's body was not a sinkhole of sin, that pregnancy and children derived from love. Then they proceeded to put both their own wives, and all women, in their place- well below the husband.

      Luther, speaking of his wife, ex-nun Katherine von Bora by whom he had six children after their marriage in 1525, insisted that she had complete control of the household - as long as he retained all his rights. He continued:

"Female government has never done any good. God made Adam master over all creatures, to rule over all living things, but when Eve persuaded him to set himself above God's will, she spoiled everything. Tis you women, with your tricks and artifices, that lead men into error." "             page 51

      8) "In a kind of seesaw effect, history began putting more and more outspoken women to death as witches in the sixteenth century and at the same time gave females their last real chance to exercise meaningful power. Spain had Isabella and Ferdinand in charge as joint monarchs at the turn of the century; for fifty years, 1553-1603, England was ruled by queens, first Mary, 1553-1558, then Elizabeth the Great; in Scotland the French-born regent, Mary of Guise, held power sometime after the death of her husband, James V, in 1542, until the accession of her daughter Mary Queen of Scots, in 1561; and France (temporarily closing its eyes to the 1317 edict prohibiting women from exercising rule) was controlled by Queen-regent Catherine de Medici from 1558 to around 1574.

      But this was the final death rattle of power for women." page 64-65

      9) "More and more, as wealth rather than mere subsistence became life's goal, man went into the outer world, leaving behind at home the wife he characterized as physically weak and intellectually incapable. It followed naturally that government was to be exercised by men only, and any woman questioning the God-given system was a witch who was to be treated, punished, and executed as such - to purge society of evil as well as to set an example for others of like mind." page 66

      10) "Parenthetically, one difference between Scotland and England should be noted here. The English - and their American colonists - regarded burning at the stake as barbaric, and so executed their witches by hanging them. The executioner gently "turned them off." In other words, he would remove the step or ladder on which the convicted witch stood, so that the noose around the neck was the body's only support. "Hanging by the neck till dead" meant instant execution." page 89

      11) "Increasingly, political scientists theorized and men believed that government was based on a compact or contract between God and men who were strong, virtuous, and intelligent. If women who were weak, prey to temptation (since Eve), and stupid should ever make a similar pact with the Devil, they would have unlimited power, but only to produce evil rather than good, anarchy instead of stability. In other words, men went round and round in circles, using the same arguments to exclude women from political power and to execute them for witchcraft." page 106

      12) "As did King James and many other contemporaries, Perkins advocated the never-fail test of "swimming a witch." She would be tossed into the water, right thumb bound to left toe, left thumb to right toe (a widely used practice on the Continent, beginning in the mid-sixteenth century.) If she sank - and presumably drowned - that meant the pure water accepted her, and so she was not a witch. If she floated, she was definitely a candidate for the hangman's noose. Either way she had no future." page 111

      13) "Only one woman in the seventeenth century, Jane Sharp, comes even close to answering the centuries of slander that made females prime candidates for execution as witches." page 122

      14) "In 1635, Roger Williams, a thirty-year-old Salem minister, began questioning white claims to Indian land and Church-State relations." page 133

      15) "Like many other early colonists who were female, she had great hopes for Massachusetts Bay when the colony set itself up as a New World utopia in 1630. Massachusetts had no entrenched traditions holding women down - and a wilderness living demanded their special skills.

      In fact, the Bay Colony positively pampered its women during the first decade or so to insure their migration and settlement. From the beginning, no man was allowed to beat his wife, unless she attacked him first. This was absolutely revolutionary, since Europe for centuries had stressed wife-beating as indispensable to successful marriage." page 133-134

      "But in 1648, eleven years after banishing Anne Hutchinson, the Bay Colony tried its first witch, Margaret Jones of Charlestown." page 138       16) "The first three Salem Villagers condemned for witchcraft were all women - Sarah Good, a beggar scraping along on food and clothing grudgingly handed out by neighbors; Sarah Osborne, a sixty-year-old helpless invalid; and the slave Tituba. Too frequently, they are dismissed by heartless historians as village characters, deserving their fate." page 152

      "Perversely, those who confessed to witchcraft, the presumed downfall of any society, went free; whereas the accused who denied they were witches were usually executed." page 187

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