Feminist Witch Quotes

It is your father who has insisted on calling me a 'witch'. That's is simply a term that men give women who are not afraid of them, women who refuse to do as they are told.

The witch is the ultimate feminist icon because she is a fully rounded symbol of female oppression and liberation.

The witch is at once female divinity, female ferocity, and female transgression. She is all and she is one. The witch has as many moods and as many faces as the moon.

The witch is undoubtedly the magical woman, the liberated woman, and the persecuted woman, but she can also be everywoman.

Witches. These are strong women that are often misunderstood by the world.

The idea of the witch has always been about subversive feminine power that doesn't align with conventional norms.

Witches have always been women who dared to be: groovy, courageous, aggressive, intelligent, nonconformist, explorative, curious, independent, sexually liberated, revolutionary. -W.I.T.C.H

There were just four things a woman could be (five at most): daughter, wife, mother, widow, and slut. That was it. There were no other roles for them—no free and independent women, no feminism, no selfsufficiency. If you didn’t like it, you could be branded a witch and executed.

Better to embrace what lies within yourself than search for happiness in another,’ she says. ‘Don’t be feared to discover your own power.

The most humble domestic items are always overlooked, especially by men. No wonder witches flew on brooms.

The witch is notorious shape-shifter and comes in many guises. More than anything, though, the witch is a shifting and shadowy symbol of female power and a force for subverting the status quo. She is also a vessel that contains our conflicting feelings about female power: our fear of it, our desire for it, our hope that it can and will grow stronger despite the flames that are thrown at it.

You will experience the triple Goddess—Maiden, Mother, and Crone. These phases are symbolic to, not just your own life, but life as a whole. Birth, life, and death. As women, it is important to understand you are the cycle.

There's a reason why men didn't see fit to allow women equal rights for so long, and why women were put through medical and sexual torture, force-fed, starved, lobotomised, incarcerated, why they were even burnt at the stake as witches, before basic human rights were granted to them. Something's gone wrong with men-kind. whether it's nature or nurture, time will tell, but their fury and violence towards non-submissive women is a chronic epidemic that comes in waves. This is your wave. We need you to fight in our corner, not theirs.

Ask any woman & she’ll tell you why Eve bit into that apple. Why she chose the universe instead of you.

But wield it with care, lass, do not go blasting out your fury and letting all know it was you. They fear it.

If people are going to call her a witch, she’ll tell them she’s Hermione Granger.

The Witch represents notions of a strange, unconventional, frighteningly, powerful womanhood. She is a servant to no one.

We see that whether one is doing ritual, engaging in magical practice, cooking, studying, painting, writing, sculpting—it’s all holy work.

I suppose in America a compassionate woman would be burned as a witch, a woman who does it not for money and not out of passionate love for the man, but simply out of pity for masculine nature.

Across ideological differences, the femjnists have realized that a hierarchical ranking of human faculties and the identification of women with a degraded conception of corporeal reality has been instrumental, historically, to the consolidation of patriarchal power and the male exploration of female labor. Thus, analyses of sexuality, procreation, and mothering have been at the center of feminist theory and women's history. In particular, feminists have uncovered and denounced the strategies and the violence by means of which male-centered systems of exploitation have attempted to discipline and appropriate the female body, demonstrating that women's bodies have been the main targets, the privileged sites, for the deployment of power techniques and power relations. and power-relations

A strong woman is a woman in whose head a voice is repeating, I told you so, ugly, bad girl, bitch, nag, shrill, witch, ballbuster, nobody will ever love you back, why aren't you feminine, why aren't you soft, why aren't you quiet, why aren't you dead? A strong woman is a woman determined to do something others are determined not be done. She is pushing up on the bottom of a lead coffin lid. She is trying to raise a manhole cover with her head, she is trying to butt her way through a steel wall. Her head hurts. People waiting for the hole to be made say, hurry, you're so strong.

I think that women who know their own power are witches,” Biller told New Jack Witch, “and also women who are artists are witches. I was not raised with any religion, but I believe in magic as a real force in the world.

We spend too much time telling girls that they cannot be angry or aggressive or tough, which is bad enough, but then we turn around and either praise or excuse men for the same reasons.’ – CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE, WE SHOULD ALL BE FEMINISTS

We must be clear that, once again, white American feminists seem to have been reinventing the wheel. On the one hand, descended from slaves, black American women had never been subject to the domestic ideal denounced by Friedan. They proudly owned their status as workers,

In Woman, Church and State (1893), she offered a feminist reading of the witch-hunts: “When for ‘witches’ we read ‘women,’ we gain fuller comprehension of the cruelties inflicted by the church upon this portion of humanity.”42 Gage inspired the character of Glinda, the good witch in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which was written by her son-in-law, L. Frank Baum.

However, what stores like Urban Outfitters—and every mall goth’s favorite, Hot Topic—offer is unprecedented access to subcultures often out of reach for young people. Those in rural areas without a local witch shop or knowledge about the occultic side of the internet can be introduced to an entire subculture through these stores. Perhaps they will pick up a tarot deck first as a gag gift, and then look further into the ancient practice of divination, and maybe even learn about the feminist history of Pamela Coleman Smith, a member of British occult society the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, who is responsible for creating the iconic images on the ubiquitous Rider-Waite deck. Where democratic dissemination ends and exploitation begins is tricky territory.

And so, with their first public action on Halloween of 1968, the feminist activist group called W.I.T.C.H. was born. Its members donned witch costumes, replete with brooms and pointy black hats, and did a public ritual performance of hexing the New York Stock Exchange. Did it work? Well, as Gloria Steinem wrote about the incident in New York magazine, “A coven of 13 members of W.I.T.C.H. demonstrates against that bastion of white supremacy: Wall Street. The next day, the market falls five points.” (The glue that the witches added to the locks of the NYSE doors also added a bit of whammy, no doubt.)

What’s occurring now, with the fourth wave of feminism crashing, is that many female artists are using occult images, ritual gestures, and witch iconography to not only connect to the divine, but to continue to make space for themselves in a field which is still dominated by men. They’re utilizing herbs, candles, ceremonial garb, and goddess imagery, and mashing it up with digital treatments and modern technology. As such, they’re turning themselves into witches: women who create things and shift perception, who trust their intuition, and who have the power to change the world. Their work is spiritual and political at the same time.

IF W.I.T.C.H. IS an example of feminist politics borrowing from the realm of mythos, then it should come as no surprise that feminist spirituality began to get more civic-minded in turn. Though there is evidence that some American Pagan covens existed as early as the 1930s, and Gardnerian Wicca had reached the States by the 1960s, the 1970s brought about a new style of witchcraft that was intent on “combining political and spiritual concerns as if they were two streams of a single river,” as Margot Adler put it. It took the framework of Wicca but gave it a much fuller emphasis on worshipping goddesses and honoring the female body. It also more blatantly reclaimed the witch as an icon of resistance against the patriarchy, following the sentiments of earlier pro-witch thinkers like Matilda Joslyn Gage and Margaret Murray, and the writings of radical feminists like Mary Daly and Andrea Dworkin.

Donald Trump is rape culture's blathering id, and just a few days after the Access Hollywood tape dropped, then Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton (who, no doubt, has just as many man-made scars as the rest of us) was required to stand next to him on a stage for a presidential debate and remain unflappable while being held to an astronomically higher standard and pretend that he was her equal while his followers persisted in howling that sexism is a feminist myth. While Trump bragged about sexual assault and vowed to suppress disobedient media, cable news pundits spent their time taking a protractor to Clinton's smile - a constant, churning microanalysis of nothing, a subtle subversion of democracy that they are poised to repeat in 2020. And then she lost. (Actually, in a particularly painful living metaphor, she won, but because of institutional peculiarities put in place by long-dead white men, they took it from her and gave it to the man with fewer votes.