To be a woman is to exist in a world that wasn’t designed for you. Like being queer, it’s to exist in a world that has spent decades, millennia, trying to erase you from the face of it, and to get up every day despite that.
It’s to be all of the things that men tell you that you shouldn’t be, sensual, sexual beings, not merely objects of a man’s desire.
It’s to be successful, not despite you being a woman but precisely because you are a woman, with a body that is capable of creating lives, a mind that is capable of changing lives, and a heart that is someone’s reason to stay alive…
I have just finished reading ‘Bright I Burn’, a novel of gripping historical fiction by Molly Aitken, and despite knowing how women have historically been treated owing to the patriarchy I, perhaps naively, wasn’t aware of the full extent of the treatment that women had to endure, particularly surrounding the witch trials in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Aitken, however, shines a light on this, giving a voice to Alice Kyteler, the first recorded person to be accused of witchcraft in Ireland.
Dame Alice Kyteler was born in County Kilkenny, a ‘town built upon the church’, where religion held a stronger power over its people than anything else, in 1280. The only child of wealthy parents, her father, Jose de Kyteler was a banker, a career path that Alice herself would embark upon along with her first husband, merchant and moneylender, William Outlaw, whom she wed in 1299.
Three years after their marriage, William Outlaw died suddenly under mysterious circumstances, and so Alice remarried Adam le Blund of Callan who was also a moneylender. Like an unfortunate bout of Deja Vu, eight years after her first marriage, le Blund also died, leaving Alice a widow once again. But not for long. In 1311, Alice met landowner Richard de Valle who became husband number three.
Upon meeting his death in 1316, he left his entire estate to Alice, thus making her one of the wealthiest people in Kilkenny. Only the church was wealthier, in fact. Widowed once again and still only in her forties, Alice soon married her fourth (and final, as far as records show) husband, Sir John le Poer.
It was when John le Poer was on his deathbed that Alice was accused of witchcraft.
As le Poer lay dying, his children, along with the remaining children from her husband’s previous marriages, banded together to make the accusation of witchcraft against Alice, perhaps in an attempt to recover their fathers’ fortunes which they believed Alice had wrongly stolen from them.
Her stepchildren, joined by the local bishop of Ossory, alleged that Alice had murdered her husbands and had acquired her wealth through magic. She and a band of “devil-worshipping” co-accused were persecuted, but in 1325, Alice managed to escape. There is no record of her following this.
Despite Alice managing to get away, (it is believed that she fled to England), her maid, Petronella de Meath, wasn’t so lucky (there has to be someone to be made an example of), and she became the first Irish victim of the witch hunts. She was tortured and whipped in place of Alice before being burned at the stake in front of a crowd who relished the opportunity to watch the fall (or rather, the shove) of a successful woman.
This is just the story of one place, Kilkenny, and a few of its inhabitants who were accused of witchcraft. But when for almost four hundred years tens of thousands of people in Europe and North America were executed for witchcraft, and witch hunts still exist today in some regions, there are countless stories just like Alice’s that highlight how people are willing to do anything to discredit a successful woman.
Torturing women who stay silent to force confessions out of them, it’s all about control.
Alice Kyteler broke boundaries when it came to gender norms. A successful businesswoman, she wasn’t just a ‘nepo’ baby living off her father’s wealth.
In 1299, shortly after the birth of her son with William Outlaw, William Junior, Alice expanded her house and founded Kytelers Inn, something that was unheard of in the male-dominated world of business (or rather, in the male-dominated world full stop)…
Alice wasn’t a ‘witch’, she was a woman in power. And when this is a man’s greatest fear, ‘stay in line, woman’, there was only one solution: she had to go.
As Robert Bowes said in writing about the witch trials taking place in 1597, the accused were ‘not only of the meanest sort but also of the best’ (Calendar of State Papers relating to Scotland and Mary Queen of Scots, volume 13, Sept 5, 1597). This is a statement that is supported by official statistics.
According to research conducted at the University of Edinburgh’s Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, where social background was recorded, 70% of witches came from middle or upper-class backgrounds.
A woman can be either beautiful or successful, but never both.
If witchcraft were real, if it were based on anything legitimate, then what explanation is there for old women being persecuted by their neighbours for no reason other than that they ‘weren’t very attractive.’
Why are women always society’s scapegoats?
In 1643, Agnes Finnie, a shopkeeper and money lender in Edinburgh, was accused of having witched several people who became ill after she argued with them. Agnes was found guilty of witchcraft and executed in March 1645.
Why can men argue and they’re ‘strong-willed’, yet when a woman does what a man is celebrated for doing, she is struck down, or in the case of Agnes Finnie, killed?…
What men are overwhelmingly celebrated for being, women are struck down for. They’re not ‘strong-willed’ like men, they’re ‘bossy’, and ‘brash.’ They think they’re ‘it.’
Although it’s true that men were accused of witchcraft too (between 20–25% of those accused were men, they were mostly charged in connection to female witches, ‘guilt by association’ (e.g. the husbands or brothers of the accused), or because they defended a woman accused of witchcraft.
This doesn’t come as a shock, and while it should, (such blatant oppression and misogyny should be shocking to everyone), when it’s so commonplace it’s become ‘just one of those things.’ What is shocking, however, is that the majority of the accusers of witchcraft, i.e. the people making accusations against women, were also women…
Women against women, this is a commonality that we still see happening today, unfortunately. Why? Because it works in men’s favour to pit us against each other since when we are arguing amongst ourselves for a place at the table, we turn a blind eye to the real injustices/the real source of our oppression- men.
By making us compete with each other, whether it be based on the way we look or our job roles, we lack the energy or the headspace to do anything about what really needs changing in our society… What can only be described as systematic misogyny.
It’s where the ‘I’m not like other girls’ trope comes from because God Forbid a woman is like a woman…
‘Too female.’
Portfolio of Hope 