What if I told you that the Witch Trials in Early Modern Europe were 200 years of social conditioning that taught women to be obedient under the threat of a horrible death…?

We’ve all heard of the Salem Witch Trials, which resulted in the deaths of around 20 people depending on which source you read. In fact, when you Google ‘witch trials’, you get pages of references to Salem before you get any mention of the European witch trials.

The witch trials in Early Modern Europe occurred in the 16th to 18th centuries and resulted in the execution of an estimated 50,000 – 80,000 people, roughly 85% of whom were women. This wasn’t one crazy year in a particularly conservative and God-fearing American city. This was a sustained effort by the churches to eradicate certain behaviours and certain types of people from the population.

We’ve all heard of dunkings and burning at the stake, and several of the other barbaric methods of determining whether someone was a witch. Those accused of witchcraft were tortured into making confessions, and those confessions were then considered proof. Many convicted witches were simply hanged, sometimes along with members of their family who were considered to be guilty of ‘collusion’.

Older, single women, who had out-lived their husbands, were often accused of witchcraft for being ‘assertive’ or ‘aggressive’. Unmarried women who became pregnant were also likely to be accused, as were married women who had ‘too many’ or ‘too few’ children. Witches were said to cause impotence in men, stillbirth, infertility, crop failures. Women were considered to be witches for making rape accusations, gathering in groups with other women, or simply for having pet cats.

Imagine you are a woman in Europe at the height of the witch hysteria. You want to avoid being accused of witchcraft. You need to make sure you have just the right number of children, only have sex with your husband, don’t socialise with other women, don’t offer an opinion and never argue. Sound familiar?

It is often asserted that women in modern society are naturally compliant, nurturing, disinclined to argue, want children but not too many, and don’t really get along with other women. That women choose a life of constantly having our choices influenced and examined by society. That women and women’s choices fit into a narrow and natural set of behaviours that we refer to as femininity. That women enjoy being sexually submissive and subservient to men.

Dee L R Graham, in her book ‘Loving To Survive‘ examines what she calls ‘Societal Stockholm Syndrome’. She hypothesizes that what we refer to as ‘feminine’ traits – submission, compliance, nurturing, etc – are the result of women living in fear for our lives and trying to ingratiate ourselves with our captors – men – in order to improve our chances of survival. And she suggests that two centuries of witch trials throughout the world created an environment where women learned not only to comply in order to avoid torture and death, but to police themselves and other women in their behaviour.

Choice is a concept that is considered central to feminism. Ask any liberal feminist and she will tell you that all choices made by women are valid. Few will admit that there is clearly a problem when women ‘choose’ an option that causes them inconvenience, financial cost or actual physical pain and also happens to be a behaviour that men prefer. Few will question why it is that suffering for male approval makes them feel good.

When your husband’s impotence could be interpreted as proof that you are a witch and thus a reason for you to die horribly, you are going to do everything you can to make sure he has a good time in bed. But you can’t be too frisky, because that is also a sign of being in league with Satan. So, over several generations, women learned to be sex objects, to focus on male pleasure and never demand our own. And now this is so ingrained in our relationships that it feels natural and we don’t question it, even though it makes no sense for women to be sexually subservient in a supposedly ‘equal’ society.

When being single, socialising with other women, speaking your mind or standing up for yourself pose a threat to your life, you will seek to get married, become socially isolated and defer to your husband in all things. You will get no chance to compare your situation to that of other women, to question the order of things away from the ears of men. 200 years later, what is to stop women from living this life over and over, when we are all struggling to find our humanity under the same feeling of threat? Single mothers, lesbians, and women who don’t perform femininity are derided and ostracised to this day. Men, on the whole, still expect obedience from women. And women are still punished for not delivering it.

The witch trials shaped the behaviour of women all over the world and continue to do so. We stand by and let men make decisions that affect our bodies and our futures. We accept being paid less, doing nearly all of the unpaid caring and domestic work, being underrepresented in the media. We avoid making rape allegations, we feel uncomfortable saying ‘no’ to men. We present ourselves in ways that men request, even when doing so is expensive, inconvenient and painful. We struggle to assert ourselves.

But seen in this context, our behaviour is not weakness, it is adaptation. It is survival. When they say ‘we are the granddaughters of the witches you weren’t able to burn’, they usually ignore the other edge of the sword. The edge that continues to cut into our collective psyche. But in order to resist we must understand what we are up against. We need to realise why it is so hard to demand the respect that we deserve as human beings. We are, after all, the grandaughters of the compliant women who survived.

Persecution for witchcraft has continued sporadically into very recent times, with more than 3000 people reportedly killed by lynch mobs between 2005 and 2011 in Tanzania for allegedly being witches. Women are still under threat, even in so-called civilised modern society. We still live in fear, punished for our alleged wrongdoings, blamed for the harm and trauma we endure, and reprimanded for speaking up.

But burning witches is frowned upon these days. We are beginning to crawl out from under the huge weight of compliance that we have been saddled with for so long. We can forge our own destiny, rather than negotiating permission to stay alive. We can resist and speak up and shake off the shackles of femininity.