This is just a story.

Quotes from Diane Purkiss

Early representations of The Witch in the twentieth century: Alternate radical feminst histories

The enormous changes in the standard feminist narrative of the witch and her place in history reflect feminisms attempt to ask and answer questions about what history is, what feminist history is, what might count as authority and authenticity, and where the intersections are between history and texuality, history, and politics…

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Originally, women’s history was inspired by the wish to uncover the truth about women, and this led to a yearning to find oneself in the past, to locate real women who share our natures and problems…feminist histories are no more “bias� than those male historians who have taken up the figure of the witch and reformulated it according to their needs and fantasies.

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…Where the shaping power of those questions in determining radical feminist historical narratives is acknowledged, the acknowledgement often take the form of a refusal of historicity, an insistence that the past must be mapped in a certain way because such a map still applies in and to the present.. This tension between past and present is expirenced in all feminist histories, but only radical feminism resolves it by dinying the difference. Radical feminism offers its narrative not as a reconstruction of the past, but an account of the way things always are.

Radical feminist histories make more conventional historians uncomfortable because of their closeness to what we wish to hide.

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History indeed becomes hystery when the unspeaking body is the only site which can be recollected, and when events become reduced to occasions for extended fantasies about other peoples tramas.

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Daly wants women to be Hags, but she also wants to say that what happened to Hags once is happening to the again. Indeed, one way of recognizing Hags-defining their identity-is by persecution…
Seeing yourself as eternally oppressed is not really liberating unless you are also presented with some inkling of a solution.
Telling women that they must be Hags and also that Hags are doomed to suffer since the dawn of recorded history is not encouraging. The soloutions Daly postulated are psychological and internal, rather than public and political; to become a hag is to survive the experience of learning or reading…and acknowledging one’s own pain and fear.
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The myth reminds all of us that we want to find ourselves in the past, that we scan the past looking for confirmation of who we are, who we want to be. We search for something to aim for, and for something to aim against. We look for stories about our own journeys, battles, passions. We search for real women, women as real as ourselves, perhaps more real that we can manage to be.

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Her Kind
By Anne Sexton

have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind

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