History likes to tell it as if Salem was a fever dream about broomsticks and black cats. That has always been the cover story. You need one when you
History likes to tell it as if Salem was a fever dream about broomsticks and black cats. That has always been the cover story. You need one when you are doing others wrong. You have to make people believe that “those people” deserved it. And now your wrongdoings look heroic, or at least justified. Understandable.
So if you lean in close — if you read between the lines, and then look past them entirely — you will see another truth: the Salem Witch Trials were not merely about fear of the occult. They were about parting women from their peace, their place, and their property.
The Women They Targeted
In 1692, “witch” was less a mystical title and more a convenient accusation. Often, the women named were widows, healers, midwives, or women whose husbands had passed on and left them with land — an unthinkable thing to some men of that era. They were women who spoke plainly. Women who didn’t cower. Women whose lives could not be easily folded into the control of another household.
The Real Cost of the Accusations
The moment a woman was accused, she lost far more than her reputation. Her assets could be seized, her home taken, her animals sold, and her fields claimed. Whether she lived or died after the trial, her life’s work and security were gone. The witchcraft panic made this legal — even moral — in the eyes of the accusers.
Silencing the Independent
It’s no coincidence that many accused women lived at the edges of the social order, where their survival did not depend on a man’s authority. They may have run their own farms, practiced traditional medicine, or simply chosen solitude. Independence is often read as defiance in a world that wants your obedience. And defiance, in Salem, could be repackaged as devil’s work.
Why This Story Still Matters
When we call the Salem Witch Trials a tale of superstition, we make it sound quaint. A strange little chapter in Puritan history. But if we call it what it was — a campaign of dispossession and control — it stops being quaint and starts sounding familiar. The tools may change, the language may soften, but the pattern remains: label a woman as dangerous, strip her of her standing, and take what she has built.
Our Inheritance
I see echoes of Salem in the laws that have kept women from owning property, safety, peace, and prosperity.
Even today we have yet to outgrow through policy, practice, and habit the urge to punish of women who we perceive as outliving their usefulness to powerful men. Around the globe women’s independence still draws suspicion. It’s not always about witches. It is often about wealth. It is often about safety. It is often about the right to live unbothered and unbroken in the space you’ve carved for yourself.
Because in Salem, the greatest threat was not magic.
It was a woman with land, peace, and her own name on the deed.
**A women having education (not just traditional college & academics), independence, confidence, healing powers, and being vocal is intimidating to many including other women.