Legitimacy

According to Abrahamic traditions, one of the punishments given to the first woman was the pain of childbirth; this moment came to define the belief that, for these and many related societies, a female’s legitimacy comes from childbirth and fertility. For sixteenth and seventeenth century Germany, enough time had passed since the Black Plague that concerns turned to overpopulation. As communities struggled with resource distribution, those in power began to exercise measures to control marriage–and, thereby, reproduction–among their citizens (Roper, 2004, Kindle Location 2653). Before long, these measures fed into the continued witch craze; women were frightened enough to turn on one another, weaponizing the constructed frameworks that determined legitimacy against one another. The process of internalizing messaging used by out-group members to attack in-group members and protect themselves has a modern-day analog in the arguments used by trans-exclusionary radical feminists, also known as “TERFs.”

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, early German governments struggled to both protect reproductive health and limit population growth. Worsening conditions caused many poor outsiders to travel to larger towns to beg, and growing numbers of the pre-existing population found themselves more destitute and in need of assistance as well. Seeing this as a sign of a population size growing out of control, early governments instated regulatory practices that limited marriage. These practices functioned as a method to codify a de facto definition of legitimacy; in this system, a person was fit for marriage (and, thus, have children) only when they had acquired sufficient land and money. Societal pressures, governmental regulation, and priest involvement were among the tactics used to enforce these policies (Roper, 2004, Kindle Location 2660). This framework existed in a culture that harshly penalized pregnancy out of wedlock; children born to unmarried parents were considered “illegitimate,” a phrase that survives to this day. These factors created an environment where marriage and fertility were a privilege with controlled access. Women who were young and fertile enjoyed more significant resources, a higher social status, land, and the permission to exercise their sexuality. The veneration of the legitimate woman who lived up to her reproductive duties could be seen in artistic renderings, where pregnancy and breastfeeding were praised, and the ideal female form was visibly fertile (Roper, 2004, Kindle Location 3016).

In contrast, infertility marked a woman with an illegitimate designation. A woman who struggled with fertility (either with problems conceiving or an inability to keep a baby alive) found herself locked in a system that devalued her societal worth from the beginning. To be infertile was seen as a supernatural curse and punishment (Roper, 2004, Kindle Location 3019). Infertile women were barred from the protections that came with fecundity. These women were subject to higher rates of poverty, homelessness, and even physical harm. Previously fertile women could also struggle with fertility later in life; during famine and less crop yield, fertility rates could go down, and infant mortality rates could go up. There is also a natural endpoint to a woman’s fertility and thereby an endpoint to a woman’s status as a protected class: menopause. The cyclical and transient nature of fertility led many women to act out of a well-founded fear of being stripped of their protected status. Any definition of womanhood that stands on a temporal foundation is destined to end in culturally sanctioned punishment for the crime of merely existing beyond the age in which the culture recognizes a woman’s worth. The ephemeral nature of being legitimate only as long as a person is fertile laid the foundation for women turning on one another out of fear. These communities believed that witches lashed out at fertile women out of jealousy. These attacks could take the form of preventing conception, causing miscarriage or stillbirth, causing infant death, and even causing the mother to die. In retaliation against this perceived attack, women often blamed each other for fertility issues by claiming that a jealous witch had hexed her, leading to increased witch prosecution rates (Roper, 2004, Kindle Location 2821). This practice was one of the few ways a woman could exercise control over this system to buy herself a little more time to prove her continued value to the culture.

Ultimately, this tactic would not work. If a woman lived long enough, her age would eventually lead her to be declared illegitimate and sub-standard. In this way, a woman’s lifecycle itself could take her from one side of the Madonna-whore dichotomy to the other. A young, fecund woman enjoyed the mother’s elevated status, but this would eventually give way to the older, sexually debased witch. Built into the construction of the witch identity was the perception of sexual perversion. These communities believed that having sex with Satan turned a woman into a witch. This act constituted an illegitimate marriage; sex was supposed to be limited to a marriage and the act itself solidified the beginning of a marriage. However, engaging in sex with an unholy figure excluded legitimacy by nature. In art, witches were depicted as gnarled, elderly, and thin, with long, flowing hair, often engaging in explicit sexual acts. These representations portrayed how witchcraft inverted a legitimate women’s nature; culture already considered women to be more licentious and weak-willed than men, and so witches were women controlled by lust and envy. This twisted vision was no mistake, as Roper describes:

“[Fantasies are grown] through the interplay of reality and experience…They do not spring fully armed from our heads to surprise us, though they certainly catch us unawares.” (Roper, 2004, Kindle Location 3158)

It is no mistake that lust and envy, the chief motivating emotions of witches, would encourage behaviors that threatened the community’s power structure. Witches were visually constructed in popular woodcutting and pamphlets to contrast them to the imagined perfect, legitimate woman. This visual came to be used by women against other women in an act of attempted self-protection. This tactic did not work; fertility problems persisted long after the witch craze ended (Roper, 2004, Kindle Location 3154).

In modern times, these are similar examples of movements that internalize messaging used against them to turn on one another to define what constitutes a legitimate group member. One example is the present-day arguments used by trans-exclusionary radical feminists, hereafter referred to as “TERFs.” Both the witch craze and TERF ideology utilize fertility and sexuality to define legitimacy. Their arguments state that an intrinsic part of being a woman is the ability to get pregnant and reproduce. Though this definition excludes many cisgender women and many intersex people, this logic also dictates that a trans woman can never be a woman and must always be a man due to their inability to conceive. Furthermore, TERFs consider a trans man who takes hormones and desires gender affirmation surgery to be a woman who has mutilated their body by stripping it of their reproductive abilities. Surgically removing breast tissue is interpreted as cutting off their symbolic ties to breastfeeding and motherhood. This interpretation is an exact analog to the witch craze era’s emphasis on fertility as the determinant of womanhood’s legitimacy. The fear of in-group betrayal in the form of a witch attacking another woman’s fertility parallels other ways TERFs treat trans men. TERFs often describe trans men as weak-willed women who were tricked into gender confusion and are now fighting against rights and protections for their fellow women. This idea is similar to the belief that witches actively tried to strip other women of their protected status that came from fertility after being coerced into obedience by Satan.

TERFs’ interrogation and sexualization of trans bodies are analogous to the fixation on witch bodies during the witch craze. Transgender bodies are often described in hypersexual ways by TERFs. An emphasis is placed on the genitals of transgender people, investigating what they look like, how they function, and declaring any genitals that have undergone affirmation surgery as illegitimate. The veneration of the pregnant body and the denigration of a witch body’s shape can also be mirrored in TERF ideology; discussions can often involve dissecting physical characteristics of trans bodies under the assumption that “passing” is impossible, and there will always be physical characteristics that betray the “true” gender of a person. These assumptions underlie one of the more prominent arguments TERFs have made in public in their effort to codify their beliefs into law: bathroom bills. The assumption behind bathroom bills is that the male body is hypersexual, violent and poses a threat to spaces that are “supposed” to protect women, such as public bathrooms and changing rooms. This argument is based on the assumption that trans women’s bodies are not legitimate women’s bodies, and by essentialism, they pose a threat to a legitimate woman’s body. This illustrates yet another parallel; the issue of safety and illegitimacy were the underpinnings of anti-LGBT arguments lobbied chiefly against queer people as recently as 5–10 years ago. Gay men were considered unfit to be teachers as they were assumed to be hypersexual and more likely to sexually abuse children. Gay people of all genders were considered dangerous in a changing room, where they might become aroused by the sight of other peoples’ bodies. TERF ideology, when used by lesbians and other queer people, is an example of out-group argument internalized and then weaponized against in-group members. This process is strikingly similar to how women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries accused each other of being witches to protect their own recently acquired respect and rights. In both instances, groups that could show solidarity with one another are instead cannibalizing other in-group members with less privilege and protection.

Reflecting on the witch craze can reveal potential lessons that a modern society could learn. In studying the construction of legitimacy, a narrative emerges when in-group members turn on each other to protect themselves. Instead of protection, these sixteenth and seventeenth-century women ended up perpetuating a system that denigrated their bodies, relegated their worth to a short period, and resulted in a more significant number of deaths for many years. Modern culture may analyze TERF ideology and its goals and decide if this is more likely to help women’s liberation or if, like the historic witch craze that preceded it, it will perpetuate oppression.