Andrea Dworkin - Our Blood - Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics

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R em em bering the W itches

I dedicate this talk to Elizabeth Gould Davis, author of The

First Sex, who several months ago killed herself and who toward the end of her life was a victim of rape; to Anne Sexton, poet, who killed herself on October 4, 1974; to Inez Garcia,

thirty years old, wife and mother, who was a few weeks ago

sentenced in California to five years to life imprisonment for

killing the three-hundred-pound man who held her down while

another man raped her; and to Eva Diamond, twenty-six years

old, whose child was taken from her five years ago when she

was declared an unfit mother because she was convicted of

welfare fraud and who several months ago was sentenced in

Minnesota to fifteen years in prison for killing her husband of

one year while he was attempting to beat her to death.

Delivered at New York City chapter meeting of the National Organization

for Women, October 3 1 , 1974.

We are here tonight to talk about gynocide. Gynocide is the

systematic crippling, raping, and/or killing of women by men.

Gynocide is the word that designates the relentless violence

perpetrated by the gender class men against the gender class

women.

For instance, Chinese footbinding is an example of gynocide. For one thousand years in China all women were systematically crippled so that they would be passive, erotic objects for men; so that they were carnal property; so that they were entirely dependent on men for food, water, shelter, and

clothing; so that they could not walk, or walk away, or unite

against the sadism of their male oppressors.

Another example of gynocide is the systematic rape of the

women of Bangladesh. There, the rape of women was part of

the military strategy of the male invading armies. As many of

you know, it is estimated that between 200, 000 and 400, 000

women were raped by the invading soldiers and when the war

was over, those women were considered unclean by their husbands, brothers, and fathers, and were left to whore, starve, and die. The Bangladesh gynocide was perpetrated first by the

men who invaded Bangladesh, and then by those who lived

there— the husbands, brothers, and fathers: it was perpetrated

by the gender class men against the gender class women.

Tonight, on Halloween, we are here to remember another

gynocide, the mass slaughter of the nine million women who

were called witches. These women, our sisters, were killed

over a period of three hundred years in Germany, Spain, Italy,

France, Holland, Switzerland, England, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, and Amerika. They were killed in the name of God the Father and His only Son, Jesus Christ.

The organized persecution of the witches began officially on

December 9, 1484. Pope Innocent VIII named two Dominican monks, Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, as Inquisitors and asked the good fathers to define witchcraft, to isolate the modus operandi of the witches, and to standardize trial

procedures and sentencing. Kramer and Sprenger wrote a text

called the Malleus Maleficarum. The Malleus Maleficarum

was high Catholic theology and working Catholic jurisprudence. It might be compared to the Amerikan Constitution. It was the law. Anyone who challenged it was guilty of heresy, a

capital crime. Anyone who refuted its authority or questioned

its credibility on any level was guilty of heresy, a capital crime.

Before I discuss the content of the Malleus Maleficarum, I

want to be clear about the statistical information that we do

have on the witches. The total figure of nine million is a moderate one. It is the figure most often used by scholars in the field. The ratio of women to men burned is variously estimated at 20 to 1 and 100 to 1.

Witchcraft was a woman’s crime, and much of the text of

the Malleus explains why. First, Jesus Christ was bom, suffered, and died to save men, not women; therefore, women were more vulnerable to Satan’s enticements. Second, a woman

is “more carnal than a man, as is clear from her many carnal

abominations. ”1 This excess of carnality originated in Eve’s

very creation: she was formed from a bent rib. Because of this

defect, women always deceive. Third, women are, by definition, wicked, malicious, vain, stupid, and irredeemably evil: “I had rather dwell with a lion and a dragon than to keep house

with a wicked woman.. . . All wickedness is but little to the

wickedness of a woman. . . When a woman thinks alone, she

thinks evil. ”2 Fourth, women are weaker than men in both

mind and body and are intellectually like children. Fifth,

women are “more bitter than death” because all sin originates

in and on account of women, and because women are “wheedling and secret” enemies. 3 Finally, witchcraft was a woman’s crime because “All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is

in women insatiable. ”4

I want you to remember that these are not the polemics of

aberrants; these are the convictions of scholars, lawmakers,

judges. I want you to remember that nine million women were

burned alive.

Witches were accused of flying, having carnal relations with

Satan, injuring cattle, causing hailstorms and tempests, causing illnesses and epidemics, bewitching men, changing men and themselves into animals, changing animals into people,

committing acts of cannibalism and murder, stealing male

genitals, causing male genitals to disappear. In fact, this last—

causing male genitals to disappear—was grounds under Catholic law for divorce. If a man’s genitals were invisible for more than three years, his spouse was entitled to a divorce.

It would be hard to locate in Sprenger and Kramer’s gargantuan mass of woman-hating the most odious charge, the most incredible charge, the most ridiculous charge, but I do

think that I have done it. Sprenger and Kramer wrote:

And what, then, is to be thought of those witches who. . . collect

male organs in great numbers, as many as twenty or thirty members together, and put them in a bird’s nest, or shut them up in a box, where they move themselves like living members, and eat

oats and com, as has been seen by many and is a matter of common report? 5

What indeed? What are we to think? What are those of us

who grew up Catholics, for instance, to think? When we see

that priests are performing exorcisms in Amerikan suburbs,

that the belief in witchcraft is still a fundament of Catholic

theology, what are we to think? When we discover that Luther

energized this gynocide through his many confrontations with