I definitely recall a college humanities course that “educated” me on witch hunts and patriarchy. Here’s another take. From the victims of the witch hunt history would rather forget:
Between 1450 and 1750, approximately 110,000 people were tried for witchcraft in Europe and America, of whom 60,000 were executed; the trendy name for this persecution is the “witch craze”. Towards the end of the 20th century, historians fell on these statistics in their own form of witch craze, and came away with the sort of neat and provocative theories that give history a bad name. The witch hunts were produced by mass hallucinations, economic insecurity, early modern state-building or religious fundamentalism. Take your pick.The hypotheses were mutually incompatible, but they usually made room for one central assumption. The witch craze was directed against women, and therefore expressed misogyny and patriarchy. Feminist historians pioneered this approach, then the usual suspects jumped on board: Margaret Murray, Barbara Ehrenreich and Andrea Dworkin. In all this, an inconvenient detail was overlooked. Between a fifth and a quarter of those executed for witchcraft were men. This is not news to historians; they just don’t want to know about it.