The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England

“The story of witchcraft is primarily the story of women, and this I suspect accounts for much of the fascination and the elusiveness attending the subject. Especially in its Western incarnation, witchcraft confronts us with ideas about women, with fears about women, with the place of women in society, and with women themselves. It confronts us too with systematic violence against women.”

In Karlsen’s preface, she situates the topic of her book—the study of witchcraft in 17th-century New England—within the larger scope of American women’s history. One of Karlsen’s major arguments in this work is that the study of witchcraft is the study of women, for all the reasons expressed in this quote. Witches are a figure that, in Western culture, have a long tradition of capturing predominant social fears surrounding women that are rarely explicitly expressed. Karlsen argues that by studying witchcraft, we can gain a better understanding of the history of women’s oppression.

“This book explores some of the sources of this power by focusing on witchcraft in seventeenth-century New England. Like many of my predecessors, I am also concerned with the meaning of witchcraft for New England’s first settlers. But my more pressing concern is why most witches were women. By confronting the definition of the witch in its historical setting, by understanding the ideological and social sources of New Englanders’ preoccupation with women-as-witches, we can better understand why the witch still lives in our imagination today.”

The most important element of The Devil in the Shape of a Woman is Karlsen’s gendered analysis. As she acknowledges here, she is concerned with the overarching history of 17th-century New England just as other historians are. However, the factor that sets her apart from her peers is her decision to read this history through a gendered lens, which few had done before. Karlsen’s methodology as described in this quote set her book apart from other American witchcraft histories and subsequently changed how the topic was researched and discussed.