I came home on Halloween night and I had had enough. For days, my Instagram feed had been filled with witch hunt reels. The problem is, this year, I know a whole lot more. It makes sitting through blatant misinformation, even in the name of sisterhood, really difficult. I bit my tongue for days, not wanting to be the "actually" girl in everyone else's comment sections, but on Halloween night, hiding from kids at my desk because I'd eaten all the candy before they got to my door, I posted this.

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The (discredited) story goes like this: The witch hunts targeted midwives and healers because the patriarchy was afraid of female power and the nascent medical establishment wanted to push women out of healthcare to make room for male physicians. The story is often told in a way that extends the category of midwives and healers to women with knowledge of plants, outstanding intelligence and rebelliousness, and/or a mystical connection to nature. Women we'd like to be. The witch hunts become a conspiracy against female power and spirituality.

It's an attractive narrative... but there is absolutely no evidence for it. Let's look at where this idea comes from, why it doesn't hold up and why it's even (God help me) quite problematic.

Murray, Federici, Ehrenreich and English or the feminist reclaiming of the witch hunts

First, a disclaimer: I can't prove a negative. But I can tell you that the proponents of this theory simply never had the receipts.

It all starts with Margaret Murray, an absolute trailblazer of an egyptologist, archeologist and folklorist straddling the 19th and 20th centuries. She was a legend, but she was wrong. Murray was the first to offer a feminist interpretation of the witch hunts, to centre the women's voices rather than their interrogators', and to give them back their agency. She theorised that the accused were members of a "witch-cult", a persecuted pre-Christian, fertility-focused religion that survived underground in medieval Britain.

The problem is that Murray had only superficial knowledge of European history or historical methods and took confessions obtained under torture at face value. She did precious few archival searches and made broad generalisations from a handful of cases. She invented an ancient religion out of whole cloth. It was instantly debunked by academic historians, but, perhaps because that critique was not free of misogyny and elitism, Murray dug her heels in. Her theories only got wilder after that. In a fatefully bad editorial decision, Murray was tapped in 1929 to write the article on witchcraft in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Her theory got pride of place; the academic consensus remained in obscure scholarly journals. That article was on all of our (great)(grand)parents' shelves until 1969.

Murray shaped a generation of second-wave feminists. In 1973, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English published Witches, Midwives and Nurses, a 45-page pamphlet with no footnotes or citations. They saw the witch hunts as a persecution of healers, step 1 in the exclusion of women from medicine, leading to its full professionalisation and masculinisation in the 19th century. Among many historical errors, the work misdates the professionalisation of healthcare by a few centuries (isolated cases do not make a trend), misrepresents the witch hunts as a centralised conspiracy (accusations were grassroots and took hold when the state was weak) and wildly overstates the influence of the Malleus Maleficarum (the rantings of one self-important, rabid incel monk are not a reliable account of the facts on the ground).

Meanwhile, Silvia Federici was coming up with Caliban and the Witch (published 2004 but her work along these lines starts in the 1970s), a Marxist-feminist analysis that frames the witch hunts as a state conspiracy against female bodies to subjugate women and control reproduction in order to establish early capitalism and its division of labor. Women and their midwives were terrorised out of practicing traditional birth control and abortions so that the state could replenish its exploitable workforce, decimated by the Great Plague.

Ehrenreich and Federici continue to be frequent footnotes in popular histories of the witch hunt, and from there inspire social media content that rarely cites them but fully bear their mark.

Midwives were more often – yikes – the bad guys

What more under-the-radar historians have brought to this conversation is less ideology and more systemic analysis of the archival record. The canonical debunking of the conspiracy against midwives was penned by David Harley in 1990. (Yes, we've been trying to set the record straight for at least 40 years.) Harley shows that while midwives were undoubtedly a target of demonology treaties such as the Malleus Maleficarum, which was obsessed with abortion and infanticide, that did not translate in practice into a disproportionate targeting of midwives and healers. In fact, midwives and cunning women (healers) were trusted and respectable members of society. They were called upon to undo the harm caused by witches and – a rather uncomfortable thing to admit – they more often appeared on the other side of prosecutions, as expert witnesses who found the devil's mark on accused women's bodies and testified to it in court.

In 2023, Nicola Ring led a statistical analysis for the Royal College of Nursing. Among the more than 3,000 accused people recorded in the rather exhaustive Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, she found a grand total of 10 accusations related to acts of midwifery and 132 to folk healers. Those folk healing practices seem to have been mostly Catholic rituals (such as prayers for the sick) that the new Protestant religion could not abide. Maybe 10% of those used treatments we would recognise as medicine competing with more formally trained physicians. If anything, midwives and healers are underrepresented...

And for what it's worth, not one of the historians I've read or interviewed for the series so far gives any credit to the midwife theory.

The problems with continuing to spread the midwife myth

1. It's not true. We love truth.
2. It seeks a single reason to a phenomenon that occurred in hundreds of communities over hundreds of years. There are hundreds of reasons.
3. It uses history as illustration for a contemporary political point. That's bad history.
4. It assumes the accused did something. Sure, now we like what they did, whether that's empowered spiritualism or medicine of the people, but still the myth does not recognise that people accused of witchcraft were people, not witches, and had done nothing more than exist in ways that made others uncomfortable. We're reclaiming the term of witch to apply it to people who would have been horrified to be called that.
5. It completely misunderstands the power dynamics of the witch hunts and thus fully misses what we could actually learn from them in the present day. The witch hunts were not a top-down conspiracy of the church and state against the lower classes. They were grassroots accusations, neighbour against neighbour, during times of hardship, anxiety and societal chaos, fed by preexisting stereotypes and opportunistic grifters, and made possible by a weak state and failures of leadership. Surely we see the relevance, right? Right?
6. – and I don't know which of this or the next point is my biggest pet peeve – it refuses to acknowledge the spiritual reality of early modern folks. It's comfortable to explain away witch trials as a plot to get women out of medicine or a land grab of the accused's property (another popular myth). That way we don't have to confront the true strangeness of the early modern mind – they believed that stuff! People accused their neighbour of being a witch because they believed their neighbour to be a witch. That simple. Early modern Christians accepted the active presence of the devil in their daily life like you and I accept gravity. It's the first mental switch you need to make when you get serious about history: Stop trying to give your characters a 21st-century mind.
7. It perpetuates essentialist stereotypes about women. It makes us out to be these mystical, archaic creatures with a powerful spiritual connection to nature, walking barefoot in the forest talking to animals and scaring the bejesus out of the patriarchy and capitalism. I get it, it's flattering and yes, I say "we" because the point of these narratives is clearly to claim kinship with past "witches". The German witch hunt historian Rita Voltmer makes a very convincing case that this discourse is just putting a new feminist skin onto old stereotypes devised by male 19th-century writers, who invented the figure of the ethereal folk witch – a romantic but remote vision of a woman who for her own good was kept away from the gritty realities of politics or industry. What if we have no interest in cosplaying as the Lady of the Lake?

People are strangely wedded to this theory. Debunking it doesn't make you popular. One commented along the lines of "sure, we may not have a historical record but we know full well how things work." Which, let me tell you, is not a mindset you want to bring to journalism or history. Another had to be blocked. It's awkward as a feminist woman to tell other feminist women to quit it already with the misinformation. I just like my feminism grounded in truth. The witch panics need no embellishment: they were a horrible episode of patriarchal violence. Let's start there.

Now you know. Save this piece for next Halloween...

What are some other witch hunt theories you've heard and you'd like fact-checked? Let me know in the comments or hit reply on the email, and I'll answer in the next newsletter.

If you're still with me, two quick and accessible academic reads to set the record straight

• David Harley, “Historians as Demonologists: The Myth of the Midwife-witch”, Social History of Medicine 3:1 (1990), pp. 1–26. https://courses.washington.edu/hsteu305/Harley,%20Midwives.pdf
• Rita Voltmer, “Federici’s Witches: Old Male Myths in New Feminist Garb?” Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 20:2 (Fall 2025), pp. 156–71. https://doi.org/10.1353/mrw.2025.a978496. (You'll need access to an academic library or, wink wink, drop me a line.)

Now on the members' podcast

Marion Gibson is a renowned historian of the witch hunts and a wonderful storyteller. Her new book, Witchland, travels to 1640s England, a peak of the witch panics during the chaotic period of the Civil War. Our conversation explores what happens and asks the uncomfortable question: Would you have been accused as a witch... or would you have been doing the accusing? Find it now on the members' feed.