What lead the people of Salem to accuse women of being witches or practicing witchcraft?

by mylolname

I think 200 women were accused and 20 executed, but what caused other people to accuse them?

Were these women doing eastern folk remedies that people mistook for witchcraft? or were their meals just too salty?

Who were the women accused? social loaners that lived on the outskirts of the town? or were they just regular married women going to church every Sunday like the rest of them?

mormengil

Men, as well as women, were accused of being witches, and executed in the Salem Witch Trials.

There were 100 people (not 200, and about 1/4 of them men) put in jeopardy by the Salem Witch trials (though not all of those were formally accused of witchcraft).

Although more women than men were executed during the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts, more than a third of those executed as witches were men.

There were 22 people executed by the Salem Witch Trials. 21 found guilty and executed. One pressed to death during the course of refusing to enter a plea.

14 of these people were women. 8 were men.

So, more of the executed were women than men, but this was not an exclusively gender based event.

5 other people died in prison, one having been convicted but died before being executed, 1 having been found not guilty, but died before being released, 2 died in custody before being tried, and one infant was born and died in prison before her mother was executed.

So, of the 100 people at risk, 27 died. 27% died.

2 people were convicted, but escaped before being executed. 4 people were convicted (or pled guilty), but pardoned. 25 people were tried, found not guilty, and survived. 1 person was released from prison after the trials were ended without having been tried. 11 people were released on bond and never came to trial. 8 people escaped before coming to trial. 4 people were indicted by a grand jury but never came to trial. 6 people were arrested but never indicted. 2 people had arrest warrants issued but evaded arrest. 10 people were named but no arrest warrant was issued.

So, 73 people in jeopardy survived the Salem Witch Trials.

73% of people in jeopardy survived.

Of those actually tried, 21 were executed for witchcraft, 1 was executed in the course of trying to force a plea. 1 died in prison despite being found innocent, 2 were found guilty but escaped, 4 were found guilty but pardoned, and 25 were found not guilty. Of the 54 people tried, 31 survived.

Out of all 100 people in jeopardy, 76 were women. 24 were men.

Women were three times as likely as men to be put in jeopardy by the Witch Trials, but the trials certainly targeted people of both genders.

The witch hysteria started with a group of girls / young women (ages 9 through 25). They were the source of accusations at the start of the trials, and the main source of accusations throughout (the other main source being those who plead guilty or were found guilty and then began accusing others. This was a good survival tactic. The people (all women) who took this route were pardoned).

I'm sure gender based study of the Salem Witch Trials would be interesting. Statistics indicate that simple gender bias hypotheses are likely wrong. Whatever role gender played is probably much more complex and nuanced.

In these trials at least, you had a 57% chance of surviving a trial for witchcraft, and a 73% chance of surviving a (non-formal) accusation.

http://salem.lib.virginia.edu/people?group.num=G08&mbio.n

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_of_the_Salem_witch_trials