She didn’t fly on a broomstick naked in the dark, or consort with demons.
It was simply entrenched social misogyny, the goal of which was to repress the intellect of women. The persecution of witches, she said, had nothing to do with fighting evil or resisting the devil. In the late 19th century, the suffragette Matilda Joslyn Gage asserted something revolutionary. Given that the last witch trial in the US was more than 100 hundred years ago, what are we to make of this? Her opponents named her The Wicked Witch of the Left, claimed they had sources testifying that she smelled of sulphur, and took particular delight in depictions of her being melted.
D uring the 2016 US presidential election, American social media was flooded with images of Hillary Clinton wearing a black hat and riding a broom, or else cackling with green skin.
