Witchy women

Witch hunts, Sheroes, and the blessings of age

Today is my 60^th birthday. I’m savoring what I’ve grown into: a deep sense of all the richness that cannot be grasped – emotion, love, energetics, gratitude, beauty.

In 1994, writing in the Boston Phoenix, I reviewed “Power, Pleasure, Pain: Contemporary Women Artists and the Female Body” at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum Organized by Elizabeth Mansfield, the show explored women’s experience of their own bodies. For me, in my early 30s, it was revelatory.

I wrote about myself: “How can it be that a woman born after the publication of Betty Friedan’s ‘The Feminine Mystique’ could be so numb about her own body, so willing to give over her own power to men? Because I grew up looking at images of women’s bodies as the sexual property of men. It’s taken centuries for us to begin to reappropriate our flesh. It may take centuries more before we’ve won the war.”

I don’t think so anymore. In the arts, women and queer folk have long charted the direction deeper into our senses, our bodies, and ourselves, even as society hurtles in the opposite direction.

When I was 30, I could not have dreamed that the threat to essential rights and bodily autonomy would get worse in the 21^st century: the Dobbs decision, attacks on trans health care and drag queens. It’s jaw-dropping and scary. But back then I viewed my reality as static. I took all my cues from society, which is a brutal way to live. My feminism was brittle and binary and tangled up in fear – and fear changes nothing for the better. Truth-telling does. Holding space for difficult things does.

There have been contractions like this before.

The sculptures in Barbara Broughel’s show “Requiem Portraits,” an elegant exhibition about history, fear, and scapegoating at Krakow Witkin Gallery, date from 1991, around the time I started writing art reviews. Broughel discovered that Salem wasn’t the only site of persecution of so-called witches in colonial America; it happened near her hometown of Hartford, too, where she felt the story had been erased. Wanting to honor the victims, she dug into the trial transcripts.

The “Requiem Portraits” combine ordinary found objects and crafted ones. Goody Ayers, we learn, was convicted in Hartford of “offering lace to an accusing child” in 1662. for her portrait, Broughel veils the tines of a pitchfork with lace. In Salem in 1692, Brigid Bishop was convicted of “healing smallpox and having power over the imagination of men.”

Society saw these women as having a power alien to that of the white male orthodoxy and as a threat to the established social order. Sound familiar?

A steel snake coils round the wooden handle in the Brigid Bishop portrait; a brush fans below, covered like Red Riding Hood in a red velvet cape and purse – Bishop was known for wearing a red bodice. There’s no “A” on her back, but Hester Prynne comes to mind.

What’s so frightening about someone in touch with their intuition, sensuality, and interior life? Someone who can create, who is a healer? People who follow their own instincts and know their own pleasure answer to themselves, which makes them harder to police.

Many artists live in that yummy, creative, intuitive zone, which is why Nazis labeled art and culture as degenerate. Artists, then, can show us the way. Thirty years ago women and people of color were not making much art about their own pleasure. Some were; in that 1994 Phoenix review, I also wrote about how gobsmacked I was by Hannah Wilke’s chewing gum vaginas. Now we have Sophia Wallace, who has monumentalized the clitoris, and Nafis M. White, whose work links joy with grief. We have writer and activist Adrienne Maree Brown and Tricia Hersey, founder of the Nap Ministry, who prioritize rejuvenation as a means of resistance.

Mary Oliver in “Wild Geese”: “You only have to let the soft animal of your body/ love what it loves.”

We need these kinds of models.

“Sheroes,” an exhibition from Donna Dodson and friends at Boston Sculptors Gallery, celebrates heroically powerful women and mythic figures. Donna’s majestic wood sculptures speak to the girl in me who needed bold, magical women role models – the girl who watched Lynda Carter spin every week from Diana Prince into Wonder Woman. These are monuments to changeable, angry, loving figures who were true to themselves.

“Autonomous Was a Woman” (the title flips Virginia Woolf’s line “Anonymous was a woman”) stands with hands on her hips, teeth fanged and bloody. Looking at her, I felt protected. I sensed the warrior stir inside me.

Here’s what Donna writes about the piece: “Caterina Sforza was an Italian noblewoman who lived life on her own terms. When one of her enemies surrounded her castle and threatened to kill her children, she called their bluff by lifting her skirts, baring her genitals and saying, ‘Go ahead, I have the means to make more!’”

Decades ago, I needed figures like this because such role models ignited something in me – hope, light, possibility, imagination. They spoke to my spirit. They still do. Imagine if Sforza, who died in 1509, had been on hand at a 17^th-century witch trial, embodying everything Cotton Mather and his ilk most feared. She would have swooped in, teeth bared, and saved Brigid Bishop. She would have been taken as the devil herself.

Society changes in fits and starts. Art’s the beacon I follow, because it invites me to reflect and feel my way into possibilities I couldn’t dream of as a (somewhat tortured) young woman. Now, on my best days, I observe what’s happening in the world, and I listen within. On one level, I may not have been wrong when I wrote in 1994 that it might take centuries for women to reappropriate our flesh.

On another level, I have already reappropriated mine.

Images, from top: Barbara Broughel, “Brigid Bishop,” 1991, Turned wood spindle, wrought steel snake, manila fiber brush, velvet and fur cape and purse, and wrought steel hook; Barbara Broughel, “Goody Ayers,” 1991, Steel hayrake with wooden handle, and hand-crocheted and Carrickmarcross lace; photos courtesy Krakow Witkin Gallery. Donna Dodson, “Autonomous Was a  Woman,” 37” tall, honey locust 2023, photo credit: Brian Wilson.