When for “Witches” We Read “Women”: Advocacy and Ageism in Nineteenth-Century Salem Witchcraft Plays

In her landmark 1893 text, Woman, Church, and State, historian and women’s rights activist Matilda Joslyn Gage wrote, “When for ‘witches’ we read ‘women,’ we gain fuller comprehension of the cruelties inflicted by the church upon this portion of humanity.”¹ Gage dedicated a full chapter to “Witchcraft” in her book because the church—arguably one of the most powerful ruling forces in Western culture until the Enlightenment—regarded it as a sin exercised almost exclusively by women, with postmenopausal women considered highly suspect. This popular viewpoint resulted in legalizing women’s torture throughout Europe as well as colonial America, and, in many cases, led to punishment by boiling, burning, pressing, or hanging if found guilty. Publication of Gage’s work occurred the year after the Essex County witchcraft crisis bicentennial (1893) and followed a period that proved especially violent toward women over the age of forty (1830–1860).² In the years leading up to the bicentennial, politicians, religious leaders, and artists called upon this historical event to serve their respective intentions. Several nineteenth-century playwrights recognized the dramatic potential of the political and religious overreach occurring in the Massachusetts colony during 1692. Like Gage, these playwrights drew attention to the oppression women suffered under seventeenth-century doctrine. Their work fueled postulations by public individuals such as politicians about whether this oppression persisted in nineteenth-century America. In this article, I address four plays written between 1846 and 1893 using colonial Salem, Massachusetts, as their cultural backdrop. I analyze how these Salem witchcraft plays grappled with the early women’s rights movement. In addition, I explore how these works addressed a nineteenth-century social problem that remains prevalent in contemporary US culture: virulent ageism practiced against women.

Seventeenth-century records of witchcraft trials in colonial America elucidate the extreme violence practiced against women—especially middle-aged and elderly women—under the auspices of church and state.³ For example, in 1662, Rebecca Greensmith, described as a “lewd, ignorant, considerably aged woman,” was hanged to death in Hartford, Connecticut, for witchcraft.⁴ What separates her confession from many other accused witches of the colonial period is that she actually admitted to having “familiarity with the Devil.” She confessed her crimes because each time she denied them a spectacular physical transformation occurred: “She was as if her flesh had been pulled from her bones.”⁵ Skin avulsion, or the tearing off of the skin from a body part resulting in irreparable tissue loss, is not common in everyday life. It has been medically proven to occur more regularly in geriatric patients because aging results in the loosening of skin properties: “The histologic deterioration of the skin due to aging correlates with the clinical findings: thinning of the skin, decreased resistance to shearing forces, decreased elasticity.”⁶ As torture was regularly used to force confessions from accused witches, it’s quite possible that the gory sensation Greensmith felt was actually occurring owing to the combination of her age and physical abuse undergone during jailing and examination.

Because of witches’ supposed supernatural abilities, as well as reports of exceptional physical changes occurring while accused bodies underwent torture, the majority of theatrical performances including witch characters included spectacular physical transformations or actions. Throughout the past century and a half, audiences have seen witch characters fall into fits, levitate, fly, transform, burn, disappear, break through shackles, and melt onstage. Although these spectacular physical events occur in US productions containing witch characters of all ages, and at times these events result in positive outcomes for witch characters, the elderly witch most often undergoes violence or is put to death onstage. This mistreatment is grounded in a deep-seated social antipathy, often leading to malice, aimed at peri-and postmenopausal women in American culture. How have we come to anticipate spectacular violence against the elderly female or “crone” witch onstage in the United States? Much of the violence can be traced to one of the first American plays addressing the Salem witch trials: the 1846 production of Cornelius Mathews’s Witchcraft: Or, the Martyrs of...