Salem_Witchcraft_,_Issue_Four

Salem witchcraft, issue 4 Issue four was about the Salem Witchcraft Hysteria caused by a Fear of Women' The issue in the Puritan culture was that women were being accused of performing witchcraft. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there were over 100 witchcraft trials in New England. Over forty percent of those trials ended up in execution. The beginning of this era was a group of three girls, one being assistance of Parris’s West Indian Slave, Tituba, were trying to see into the future by submerging egg whites in a glass, this lead to tragic results in the Salem community. One of the girls believed she saw the image of a coffin in the egg whites. Following this incident, the girls began to show out of control symptoms of the possessed. Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborne were accused of practicing witchcraft and were arrested. Paranoia soon followed the girl’s arrest. Many were arrested and accused of performing witchcraft. Out of those hundreds, many accused were women. 19 were convicted and hung. Out of many, only one man was accused and murdered because he would not admit to being guilty or admit he was innocence. The issue is that most of the ones accused were based on gender. Or was it just a coincidence that most of the ones showing signs of witchcraft were women' Two women disagree with one another about which one is true. Yes, Carol Karlsen says. She says that the beliefs that women were evil existed in the Puritan culture and were threats to the society. On the other hand, Laurie Winn Carlson says no. She believes that the witchcraft was the product of people’s responses to physical and neurological behaviors caused by encephalitis. Carol Karlsen believes that it was the fear of women that caused the witchcraft hysteria. She says that women were perceived to be innately evil by their male counterparts. The Puritan men saw women as their slaves, and when women rebelled this caused men to react in such ways to call them the devil and that they were evil. The idea of a rebellious wife did not fit with the other ideas that Puritans believed. For Puritans, hierarchy and order were the most respected values. People who did not accept their place in the social order were the very embodiments of evil. Disorderly women cause a bigger threat than disorderly men because the male should be on top. Men were supposed to be in charge and the fear of women rebellion against order caused men to become hysterical over idea of witchcraft. Cotton Mather published Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion in 1692. His purpose for this book was to promote the fear of god in women. He was concerned both with women’s behavior and with their relationship with God. That same year he also wrote Wonders of the Invisible World. This book was the focus of the trials and executions of Salem’s witchcraft. Here, he focused on the behaviors of the witches and their relationships with the devil and their envisioned attempt to overthrow the churches of New England. Karlsen says affected women experience an inner conflict between good and evil. The outcome revolved around whether or not the young women would later lead moral lives or fall into sin. Laurie Winn Carlson disagrees with Carol Karlsen. She says that it was encephalitis that caused the women to act like they were possessed. She believes that the hysteria was something more than just a gender issue. In late winter and early spring of 1692, people in the town Salem began to suffer from a strange physical and mental problem. Hallucinations, temporary paralysis, and rampages were suddenly occurring. Not only were the villagers affected but so were the livestock. The randomness of the victims and the unusual symptoms that were seldom showed not the same, led the villagers to suspect at bizarre danger. With there being limited resources then, physicians who were consulted could only offer witchcraft as an explanation. Examinations of the afflicted individuals at Salem have focused on the young women, basically placing the blame on them instead of exploring a whole cause for their behaviors. But in the autumn of 1692, the witch hunts stopped, and there were no more complaints the following year. An encephalitis epidemic would have vanished in the fall because the air and water would become too cold for mosquitoes survival. Epidemics are contagious and often recede for years. Either the agents mutate and disappear to return, or they run out of hosts. Carlson believes that there was more than just the gender affecting the hysteria, that some epidemic was the answer to the Salem witchcraft. After looking at both the yes and the no topics, I agree with Carol Karlsen. She makes a stronger point that women were the cause of the Salem witchcraft hysteria, and that they people thought they were evil. Though Laurie Carlson has a good point about encephalitis, she does not go into detail about why women were the only ones who were affected. Carol Karlsen uses many resources to back why she thinks that women were targeted and makes her case a lot stronger than Laurie’s.