There are a fair few faux feminist statements I hate, but “We are the daughters of the witches you couldn’t burn” is one of them.
Historically inaccurate understanding of both who was persecuted by the witch trials and how those persecuted were typically dealt with? ✅️
Trivialising the torture and live immolation of real actual people by implying they somehow weren’t strong or clever enough to avoid being burned at the stake? ✅️
Invoking a legacy that categorically does not belong to them in an attempt to claim an oppression they and their ancestors never faced? ✅️
For those who want details on the first checkmark:
The victims of witch burning in north America (the way too famous Salem Witch Trials mainly, but not solely) were people whose crime was “not being liked by whichever person/people wiped up the mass histeria about witchcraft.”
In European witch burnings, victims were more varied and included: Random victims of mass hysteria (like in NA), people suffering from mental illnesses, mentally or physically disabled people, heretics, atheists, Jews, folk healers, early scientists and VERY RARELY actual practitioners of pagan religions which SOMETIMES included traditions and and rituals which the average Tumblr user might recognize as “witchy.”
Alongsides this, I also want to add that for most of history the concept of “witches” (and synonymous words in other languages) was lumped in which other concepts such as balto-german werewolves or the southslavic predecessors to “vampires”. But most important, many of these concepts were unisex, also contradicting the pop-feminst angle
To me “We are the daughters of the Witches you couldn’t burn.” isn’t about some plucky proto-feminist ideal (made up) atheists or wiccan woman someone existing in puritan Massachusetts. To me, that statement brings to mind some poor peasant boy from medieval Lithuania suffering from food poisoning or schizophrenia and getting accused of being a child-eater (for reasons totally unrelated to his grandpa being a converted Jew, wink wink) and the mob demanding he be behaved until the local clergyman rides in and reminds them all that, actually, witches aren’t real.
But sure, let’s pretend that this was a “unisex” persecution and use a boy as the hypothetical face of the witch trial victims (80% of whom were women).
The fact that you screenshotted the Wikipedia summary as your grand comeback only reinforces the above points and my initial issue being the complete lack of interest in engaging in the historical context and nuance of a significantly widespread tragedy in favour of what it actually was rather than how you can use it as a stick to beat marginalised people.
Women were the usual targets. Women - especially midwives and healers of communities - were also often the people doing the targeting.
To look at history ONLY through one lens be it gender, sexuality, class, or region is to not actually look at history.
There is a massive difference between the French 14th century witch-trials and the Icelandic 17th century ones just as an example.
There are better rallying cries uniting and lifting up women than a complete falsehood.
There were no witches, it did not mean “strong independent woman”. It usually meant elderly or disabled or foreign.
