‘This is the time for getting scary,” the writer Andi Zeisler told Elle magazine on the eve of the 2017 Women’s March. “We need to go full witch.”

At the dawn of the Trump administration, witches were suddenly everywhere in the US. Neo-pagans used blogs and social media to circulate popular rituals for hexing Brock Turner (who served less than three months in jail after he was convicted of sexual assualt), the supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh (accused of sexual assault, which he denies), and Donald Trump himself. The Trump curse was enacted by thousands of people, including the singer Lana Del Rey. “I’m a witch and I’m hunting you,” declared Lindy West in the New York Times; Jess Zimmerman and Jaya Saxena wrote a self-help book, Basic Witches, in which they explained: “If you speak when you’re told to be quiet, take pride when you’re told to feel shame, love what and who you love whether or not others approve, you’re practising witchcraft.” Half the women I know called their group chats “covens”. Trump developed a penchant for tweeting the phrase “WITCH HUNT” in caps whenever he felt persecuted, which the conservative political cartoonist AF Branco dramatised exactly the wrong way around, with the Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi depicted as gun-toting witches on the hunt for a helpless mortal man.

Pop culture exhumed every witch it could find: in 2018 alone, there were high-profile reboots of Charmed, Sabrina the Teenage Witch (Sabrina worships the Devil now; it is very confusing), and Dario Argento’s Suspiria. In the final days of her 2016 campaign, Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton – the first female Democratic nominee – had been accused of participating in ritual sex magic and attending a “witch’s church” with her female friends. By early 2019, rightwing religious groups were accusing Democratic congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of belonging to “a coven of witches that casts spells on Trump 24 hours a day”.

In a way, this was tradition. The witch has always been the feminist monster of choice. In 1968, the group WITCH descended upon Wall Street in black pointy hats and cloaks, semi-seriously intending to hex it. They also released hundreds of live mice into Madison Square Garden during a bridal fair. Marriage was a recurring target of ire; the leaflet announcing the action chummily invited women everywhere to “confront the whoremakers”.

“Witches have always been women who dared to be: groovy, courageous, aggressive, intelligent, nonconformist, explorative, curious, independent, sexually liberated, revolutionary,” read the manifesto. “You are a witch by being female, untamed, angry, joyous and immortal.”

All that, and you didn’t even have to eat a baby. “Because WITCH actions could be done with a small group and were both fun and political, they quickly spread around the country. Boston women hexed bars. [Washington] DC women hexed the presidential inauguration. Chicago women zapped everything,” Jo Freeman wrote in her reckoning of the movement. The subversive idea that powered both the witch-hunts and the 1990s wave of teen witches – the idea that, by gathering together and hatching plots, women might obtain heretofore unthinkable power – has also fuelled much feminist organising throughout history. Men were right to be worried. Feminists weren’t literally going to steal their dicks and hide them in trees, as medieval witches were said to do, but that did turn out to be a surprisingly apt metaphor for their work.

And, although the WITCHes were joking, the witches weren’t. Witchcraft and occultism really were heavily associated with a certain kind of mid-20th-century cool. The Beatles put Aleister Crowley on the cover of Sgt Pepper; David Bowie studied ceremonial magic and Kabbalah; Led Zeppelin incorporated tarot cards into their album artwork; Stevie Nicks sang about ancient Welsh fairy-brides and posed with a seemingly endless array of scrying crystals. Most people’s interest was merely aesthetic (and still is) but, then as now, some found that witchcraft resonated on a much deeper level. The San Francisco Bay area – the centre of boomer youth culture in the US – saw an explosion of neo-pagan traditions, including the witches’ coven that initiated Miriam Simos, or, as she soon came to be known, Starhawk.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Casting their spell: Melonie Diaz, Sarah Jeffery and Madeleine Mantock in Charmed. Photograph: CBS/Katie Yu/The CW

Starhawk’s 1979 book The Spiral Dance quickly became the premier text for self-taught witches. As seen through Starhawk’s anarchist, ecofeminist lens, witchcraft was not just a way to acquire magical powers, but was a deeply political act. “The word witch carries so many negative connotations that people wonder why we use it at all,” she wrote. “Yet to reclaim the word witch is to reclaim our right, as women, to be powerful; as men, to know the feminine within as divine.” Some trashed The Spiral Dance for being a new age self-help manual disguised as a radical manifesto; others complained that it smeared its far-left feminist agenda all over what was supposed to be a spiritual text. Either way, The Spiral Dance sold vastly more copies than your average book on feminism, and had a far greater impact. There is no way to know how many women stumbled across sentences such as, “Women are not encouraged to explore their own strengths and realisations; they are taught to submit to male authority, to identify masculine perceptions as their spiritual ideals, to deny their bodies and sexuality, to fit a male mould”, and emerged radicalised on the other end, but I do know one who did. The Spiral Dance was the book my friends and I moved on to when The Wicca Spellbook lost its allure, making it, by my count, the first book of feminist theory that I ever owned.

When the witch emerged as a contemporary figure of resistance, it was hard to tell where she came from; Hollywood iconography, feminist history, the coming of age of the Craft generation or just the optics of the 2016 election, in which a presumed-to-be-monstrous woman was ritually castigated by a man who led crowds in chants of “lock her up”. Watching the chants take over the floor at the Republican national convention, Rebecca Traister wrote: “I was not the only person in the room to be reminded of 17th-century witch trials, the blustering magistrate and rowdy crowd condemning a woman to death for her crimes.” The new feminist identification with witches seemed to draw from every version of the myth at once: mystical and monstrous, feminist academia and horrorcore aesthetics, drawing them together in one angry, intentionally ugly repudiation of American patriarchy.

This is not to suggest that witch fever was always admirable or never silly. Witchcraft, like feminism itself, went mainstream, and in doing so, lost some of its vital power to shock and disturb oppressors. The “spirituality” tag of Gwyneth Paltrow’s online shop Goop contained articles on tarot. Urban Outfitters stocked spell books. The makeup brand Urban Decay released an “Elements” eye-shadow palette decorated with alchemical sigils; Sephora briefly offered “witch kits” with tarot cards and bundles of sage inside, which were pulled due to public outcry. Pagans accused Sephora of trivialising their beliefs, but Native American protesters also pointed out that smudging with sage – a practice that comes attached to its own long history of religious persecution – wasn’t for witches or luxury beauty retailers to claim. At its lowest points, witchcraft stopped being subversive or frightening and became just another costume.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Members of the feminist group WITCH putting a hex on Wall Street on Halloween, 1968. Photograph: Bev Grant/Getty Images

But the old, dark power – the choice to worship something other than patriarchy’s gods, to reject and read backward the narratives of the dominant culture – was still there. The Trump administration represented a breaking point for many women. After decades in which sophisticated thinkers dismissed patriarchy as simplistic or irrelevant, it was revealed to be alive, well and out for blood – the ethos which still ruled the US government and defined, or ended, countless women’s lives.

The resurgence of patriarchy was partly embodied by Trump himself, whose fear of women, and embrace of sexual violence as a means of correcting them, was never less than 100% obvious; Trump was not only repeatedly accused of sexual assault, he boasted about “pussy grabbing” on tape. But, partly, this political awakening was just a matter of stripping back our denial to realise how we had always been living: yes, Trump was accused of sexual misconduct, but so were several previous presidents. Yes, supreme court justice Kavanaugh was confirmed over reports of sexual assault, but the same thing had happened 30 years ago with Clarence Thomas. Yes, Roe v Wade was going to fall, but in most parts of the US, abortion access had been stripped so far down that it might as well be illegal. Patriarchy had been the truth all along. It was progress that was the phantom.

The witch lives between dark and daylight, the safely settled village and the wild unknown of the woods beyond. The backlash years of the early 21st century revealed to many women something we had always suspected: we had never belonged to that daylight world. We had tried; we had worked; we had been loyal to the rules and values of society as we knew it. But, no matter how far we thought we had come, or how often our mothers told us we could do anything, we still lived within a system that used female bodies as grist to maintain male rule. In the story that patriarchy told about itself, we were always going to be the villains. And if that was the case, we might as well make some magic out of it.

If the village didn’t want us, we might as well head out into the woods.

There is a fire on the horizon. You can see it burning, out on the edges of the world. The violence we have survived can be our guide to what needs to change. The fire that burned the witches can be the fire that lights our way. Our power is waiting for us, out in forbidden spaces, beyond the world of men. Step forward and claim it. Step forward into the boundless and female dark.

• This is an edited extract from Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy and the Fear of Female Power by Sady Doyle (Melville House, £14.99 rrp). To order a copy for £13.99 plus free UK p&p for orders over £15, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846