Misogyny Made The Witch

Once upon a time,

there was a woman with captivating beauty and sharp brilliance.

She knew which roots to boil to calm a fever, which winds foretold rain,

and felt the quiet shift of each season.

Her knowing wasn’t strange, only as natural as the turning of the Earth.

Somehow, it still came with a price.

If her voice rang louder than a whisper, it was called defiance.

When her beauty drew eyes or her solitude held peace,

it was called temptation.

They could not name her power, so they named it sin.

They failed to hold her freedom, so they forged a cage and called it

protection.

And thus— the ‘witch’ was born.

Not from the forest, but from fear.

Not with her cauldron, but with man’s judgement.

In the margins of history, they wrote her with a warning:

the woman who cries is manic,

the woman who speaks is a liar,

the woman who desires is greedy.

They trimmed her identity like a garden henge, told her to smile through

the pruning, and when she bled they called it proof.

Fairytales then became sermons,

and women were banished or burned for evil that wasn’t theirs.

So-called sorcery was simply survival and the grace of understanding

what others feared to feel.

Truth is, the wicked weren’t witches, and the witches weren’t women.

They were forbidden to tell their story because man already inked the

illusion, dipped the pen in superstition, and called it scripture.

Misogyny painted women with a dark tint throughout history, yet they still

endured and stayed connected with their own creations.

Through recipes passed down without names, mapping of stars, looms

that clothed towns, and math equations scribbled at dawn.

The true light of women can’t be dimmed.

And that, perhaps, was the real magic all along.

Strike out,

Dahya Goolsby, Writer

Strike Magazine Chattanooga