Most people know Wicked as a musical. Fewer know it came from the work of a suffragette named Matilda Joslyn Gage. Gage (1826–1898) was a suffragist, slavery abolitionist, and social reformer at a time when women weren't allowed to vote or receive an education. She was born in Cicero, New York, and grew up with parents who actively supported the abolition of slavery. That upbringing gave her a lifelong instinct for justice and a refusal to accept that any hierarchy was simply the natural order of things.
Whilst living in New York, Gage came into contact with the Indigenous Haudenosaunee tribe, the nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. What she saw in these tribes challenged everything European and American society assumed about women and power. The Haudenosaunee society was matrilineal: descent passed through the mother, and the senior women—clan mothers—had the actual political authority to select and remove male leaders. Women were embedded in governance. She realised that if women were governing in Haudenosaunee society, their exclusion in European and American culture wasn't natural. It was a choice—one that had been made, and could be unmade.
This became the centre of Gage's 1893 book, Woman, Church and State. Her research found that the subordination of women in the West was a historical construction, built deliberately by institutions like the Church and the State, which shaped law, religion, and culture to exclude women from public life and isolate them in private life. She found that the witch trials were a technology of control—a systematic way of punishing women who operated outside the roles that those same institutions had sanctioned: women who were too independent, too knowledgeable, too economically autonomous. Women who didn't fit. The accusation of witchcraft was a way of bringing them back in line—or removing them entirely.
L. Frank Baum, who wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, was Gage's son-in-law and lived with her. Baum was directly exposed to Gage's radical ideas about power, hierarchy, and the construction of evil. In his work, Baum posed the question: who gets to be called evil? He wrote Oz with witches who were not born malevolent but were labeled as such by those in power—most famously the Wicked Witch of the West, whose backstory is never fully told in the original novel. Drawing on the ideas Gage had established about the witch trials as a tool of control, Baum questioned whether "wickedness" was an inherent trait or a political label passed by those who hold power.
Passage from Woman, Church and State
The three most distinguishing features of the history of witchcraft were its use for the enrichment of the church; for the advancement of political schemes; and for the gratification of private malice. Among these the most influential reason was the emolument it brought to the church. Although inquisitors and the clergy were the principal prosecutors, this period gave opportunity for the gratification of private malice, and persons imbued with secret enmity towards others, or who coveted their property, found ready occasion for the indulgence of that malice of covetousness; while the church always claimed one-half, it divided the remainder of the accused’s possessions between the judge and the prosecutor. Under these circumstances accusation and conviction became convertible terms. The pretense under which the church confiscated to itself all property of the accused was in line with its other sophistical teaching. It declared that the taint of witchcraft hung to all that had belonged to the condemned, whose friends were not safe with such property in their possession. To make this claim more effective, it was also asserted that the very fact of one member of a family having fallen into the practice of this sin was virtual proof that all were likewise attainted. Under this allegation of the church, a protest against such robbery was held as proof of the witchcraft in the person so protesting. For the purpose of getting the property of the accused admission of the crime was strenuously pressed. In some countries the property was not forfeited unless such confession took place. Persecution for witchcraft was if possible more violent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than at any previous date. By this period it had been introduced into America through the instrumentality of the Puritan Fathers. It was no less wide-spread in Calvinistic Scotland, while it re-appeared with renewed vigor in Catholic countries. In the State of Venice it caused open rebellion against church authority, the Council forbidding the sentence of the Inquisition to be carried out.
(Woman Church and State by Gage is included in our Offline Library - Our e-reader with 1000 classic books and magazines included)