Throughout Escaping Salem, Richard Godbeer highlights how women who disrupted strict Puritan gender norms were considered a danger to the social order of these early American communities. Godbeer argues that such women were blamed for other people’s wrongdoings—or for things that could not be explained—just because it was an easy way to punish and demonize them for subverting gender norms.
Godbeer first examines how uncommon or aggressive social behaviors in women were literally demonized throughout Puritan society. Elizabeth Clawson and Mercy Disborough are established early on as women whose grouchy behaviors earned them the ire of their neighbors. Both Goody Clawson and Goody Disborough (the honorific “Goody,” short for “Goodwife,” was the 1692 equivalent of addressing someone as “Mrs.” or “Ms.”) came under fire in their communities of Stamford and Compo for reacting negatively to quarrels or bad business deals with neighbors. When a neighbor’s daughter stole from Goody Clawson’s orchard, Goody Clawson reacted angrily and chastised her neighbor, Goody Newman, for permitting such bad behavior in a child. Goody Clawson also became entangled in a feud with the Wescots—one of Stamford’s most powerful families and the employers of Katherine Branch, the young servant girl who accused both Goody Clawson and Goody Disborough of being witches and possessing her. After a bartering deal over a supply of flax traded between the Clawsons and Wescots went poorly, Goody Clawson publicly attacked Abigail Wescot at least twice: once by throwing rocks at her in the street and once by calling her a “proud slut.” Goody Clawson’s rage didn’t conform to the gender norm, and people in the community wanted this abnormality to be dealt with. When Goody Disborough felt that one of her neighbors, Goodman Grey, gave her fewer apples than she paid for in a bartering deal, she, too, reacted publicly and angrily. Years later, she appeared to stiff Goodman Grey on another bartering deal for a tin kettle. Her accusers claimed that the dingy kettle she gave Grey was evidence of her ability to transform objects—which indicated that she was a witch. While both women’s reactions seem relatively normal by today’s standards, they were unnatural and shocking at the time. When these women spoke out about quarrels with their neighbors, stood up for their own property, or voiced their dissatisfaction with certain communal rules, they were perceived as angry and deviant. Their attempts to call out unfair deals—or, perhaps in the case of the kettle, to retaliate against insufficient payment—were seen as unacceptable. Both Mercy Disborough and Elizabeth Clawson were accused of witchcraft due to their deviation from social norms.
Godbeer then examines how society further demonized both women for their reactions to being labeled witches. “Both women reacted to the allegations against them,” Godbeer writes, “in ways that seemed to incriminate them further.” Goody Clawson spoke roughly to Daniel Wescot in public, while Goody Disborough sarcastically told a visitor to her cell in the county jail that she would not be “such a fool as to hang alone.” These women’s inflammatory, indignant remarks in the wake of accusations of witchcraft only made them appear even guiltier of being beholden to dark forces. For women to express angry, indignant, violent, or retributive emotions was taboo and suspect in Puritan society. In expressing their anger and frustration with their circumstances, Goody Clawson and Goody Disborough unfortunately played right into the hands of their accusers.
Godbeer also demonstrates how Puritan society criminalized and literally demonized bodily anomalies in order to punish women who subverted gender norms. When Goody Clawson and Goody Disborough became the subjects of a formal inquiry in the summer of 1692, the court appointed a group of “faithfully sworn” women, or women who were faithful not only to their word but to the court’s ideas of gender norms, to inspect both women’s bodies for any “suspicious signs or marks.” Witches were believed to have an extra breast from which they fed animal familiars (special “pets” taking the shape of dogs, cats, or other creatures but believed to be possessed by demonic spirits). An inspection of Goody Clawson revealed no physical aberrations—but when the group searched Goody Disborough’s body, they found “a teat or something like one in her privy parts […] which is not common in other women.” “No honest wom[a]n,” one of the women who searched Goody Disborough and Goody Clawson noted, would have a “mark” such as the one Mercy Disborough had. Her comment highlights how women were complicit in othering and seeking to punish other women who did not fit with the social or physical standards of femininity at the time. It is significant to note that both Goody Disborough and Goody Clawson were women in their 50s and 60s. As such, Godbeer adds yet another layer to his argument, suggesting that even in a Puritan society which claimed to value piety and modesty, there was a very narrow and ageist view of what women’s bodies were permitted to look like. Any signs of aging or changing past society’s expectations of how women’s bodies should look, Godbeer suggests, became literally criminal. Rather than attempt to shift or challenge the rigid gender norms that governed Puritan society, most Puritans sought to eliminate any difference or eccentricity in order to uphold constricting ideals of how women should look and act.
In early American communities governed by fear and extremism, women emerged as logical scapegoats for the practical and existential problems that plagued Puritan society. Godbeer illustrates how, for women, any deviation from the gender norms of 1692 Stamford was grounds not just for shunning but even for death. In a society in which people struggled for control over a strange new world, governing women’s behavior was seen as a logical way to seek out and punish any threat to an already-fragile status quo.
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Women, Witchcraft, and the Subversion of Gender Norms ThemeTracker
Women, Witchcraft, and the Subversion of Gender Norms Quotes in Escaping Salem
Kate, as she was known, had been in that tormented state since the end of April. Without warning and for no apparent reason she would suddenly collapse into agonized convulsions, crying out that she was pinched and pricked by invisible creatures, weeping and moaning in helpless terror. At other times she would sink into a paralyzed trance, stiff as a board and completely senseless. She told her master and mistress that during these fits she saw cats that sometimes transformed into women before her eyes and then changed back into animal form. It was these creatures that attacked her, she said.
[Daniel Wescot] wanted the witches responsible for his household's afflictions punished and he wanted to be rid of them. “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” That was, after all, God's Word.
It was on the following day that Kate first named one of the women afflicting her: Goody Clawson. This revelation came as no surprise to the Wescots. Elizabeth Clawson, a woman in her early sixties, had lived in Stamford with her husband Stephen ever since their marriage in 1655. Goody Clawson was suspected by many of having occult powers and of using them against her enemies. She was no friend of the Wescots. The Wescots had quarreled with Goody Clawson almost a decade before over the weight of some flax that she had supplied to them.
"Goody Miller, hold up your arm higher that the black dog may suck you better. Now I'm sure you are a witch for you've got a long teat under your arm." Both David and Abraham had heard that witches fed demonic spirits in the form of animals—just as mothers fed their infant children, except that witches used a third nipple hidden somewhere on their bodies and nourished the familiars with blood, not milk.
According to the clergy, witches had no occult power of their own; demons acted on their behalf, taking on the appearance of the witches for whom they acted. Most people assumed that a specter's appearance matched the identity of the witch who wanted to harm the victim. But might specters appear as innocent people so as to incriminate harmless and virtuous individuals?
Other neighbors, however, portrayed Elizabeth Clawson and Mercy Disborough as argumentative and vindictive. Following the arrest of the two women, a wave of Stamford and Compo residents came forward to relate quarrels with one or the other which had been followed by mysterious illness or misfortune. […] Both women reacted to the allegations against them in ways that seemed to incriminate them further.
"About two years past," confided Goody Newman, "I also had a difference with Goody Clawson and angry words passed between us. The next day we had three sheep die suddenly. When we opened them up we couldn't find anything amiss to explain their deaths. Some of our neighbors told us then they thought the creatures were bewitched.”
As officials gathered evidence, […] there emerged a long history of suspicion and resentment surrounding the two women. Katherine Branch's allegations against Mercy Disborough and Elizabeth Clawson were clearly part of a larger story. But how would the special court react to such testimony? Would these magistrates prove any more reliable than those who presided over witchcraft cases in the past? Surely the overwhelming volume of evidence against the two women would force the court to act decisively. […] Such, at least, were the hopes of those who believed the accused to be guilty as charged.
Several women […] who had cared for Elizabeth Clawson during childbirth came forward […] to testify that she had a physical abnormality, perhaps a Devil's mark. […] The court of inquiry had appointed a group of women, "faithfully sworn, narrowly and truly to inspect and search her body.” […] These women reported "with one voice" that "they found nothing save a wart on one of her arms." They also searched Mercy Disborough's body that same day and did find "a teat or something like one in her privy parts, at least an inch long, which is not common in other women, and for which they could give no natural reason."
On 2 June both women were bound hand and foot and then thrown into the water. According to those present, Elizabeth Clawson bobbed up and down like a cork and when they tried to push her down she immediately buoyed up again. Mercy Disborough also failed to sink. If the test was trustworthy, both women were guilty. But William Jones knew from his reading that this technique, though practiced for centuries, was now extremely controversial. […] Since the Bible made no mention of any such technique having been ordained by God, ducking must be an invention of the Devil.
Katherine Branch claimed that the Devil had appeared to her "in the shape of three women, Goody Clawson, Goody Miller, and Goody Disborough." [….] Many people had heard Kate relate what she saw during her fits, yet she was the sole source for all that information and the law required that there be two independent witnesses for each incriminating incident. In any case, the information Kate gave was highly suspect: a significant number of Stamford residents doubted that the young woman's fits were genuine; and even if she was seeing specters, how could anyone be sure that the Devil was not misleading her?
Mercy Disborough was alive and free, but were her troubles over? A decade earlier a woman in Massachusetts had been acquitted of witchcraft. But a year or so later neighbors suspected her of striking again when an elderly man in the town fell ill. One night a group of young men visited the woman: they dragged her outside, hanged her from a tree until she seemed to be gasping her last breath, then cut her down, rolled her in the snow, and buried her in it, leaving her for dead. Amazingly, she survived, though barely. The law was only one way of dealing with a witch...
To settle on a particular interpretation of Kate's behavior strikes me as problematic, not only because of the lack of evidence but also because people at the time were clearly uncertain and divided as to whether Kate was bewitched and if her allegations against specific women could be trusted. That uncertainty was a key component of the situation and has to be retained if we are going to understand just how perplexing Kate's ordeal was for those around her.
Women known for their magical skills were much more likely than men to be accused of witchcraft. The power wielded by cunning folk was potentially dangerous whether in the hands of a man or a woman, but it seemed especially threatening if possessed by a woman because it contradicted gender norms that placed women in subordinate positions.
Women whose circumstances or behavior seemed to disrupt social norms and hierarchies could easily […] become branded as the Servants of Satan. […] Women who seemed unduly aggressive and contentious or who failed to display deference toward men in positions of authority—women, in other words, like Elizabeth Clawson and Mercy Disborough—were also more likely to be accused. Both Clawson and Disborough […] fit the age profile of most accused witches: Goody Clawson was sixty-one and Goody Disborough was fifty-two. Both were also confident and determined, ready to express their opinions and to stand their ground when crossed. Such conduct seemed to many New Englanders utterly inappropriate in women.
The impulse to find a scapegoat in times of trouble and to demonize those whom we dislike and fear remains very much alive. Jews and other ethnoreligious groups, communists and capitalists, feminists and homosexuals, liberals and conservatives, religious fundamentalists—each group has figured in the minds of its enemies as an evil and alien force that threatens to corrode and destroy. A periodic need for witch hunts would appear to be one of the more resilient as well as one of the least admirable human instincts.
