W.I.T.C.H., originally the acronym for Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell, was the name of several related but independent feminist groups active in the United States as part of the women's liberation movement during the late 1960s. The W.I.T.C.H. moniker was sometimes alternatively expanded as "Women Inspired to Tell their Collective History", or "Women Interested in Toppling Consumer Holidays", among other variations.

The first W.I.T.C.H. group was established in New York City in October 1968. Its founders were socialist feminists who had formerly been members of the New York Radical Women group. They opposed the idea advocated by radical feminists that feminist women should campaign against "patriarchy" alone. Instead W.I.T.C.H. advocated for feminists to ally with a range of left-wing causes, to bring about wider social change in the United States.

Various scholars have suggested that in embracing the iconography of the witch, and with the witch trials in the early modern period, W.I.T.C.H. represented forerunners of various forms of feminist-oriented modern Paganism such as Dianic Wicca.

Founding

Within the women's liberation movement of the United States during the 1960s, there was a division between the "politicos" and the "radical feminists". The politicos were socialist feminists and attributed the oppression of women to capitalism, seeking to ally with other leftist causes – such as the New Left, black liberation movement, student movement, and anti-war movement – in a wider socio-political movement to bring about revolutionary change. Conversely, the radical feminists did not view women's oppression as a symptom of capitalism and wanted women's liberation to remain independent of the wider leftist movement.

W.I.T.C.H. was formed when the New York Radical Women (NYRW) split in 1969. The group's main founder was Youth International Party co-founder Nancy Kurshan. Several politicos within the NYRW, most notable Robin Morgan and Florika Remetier, were inspired by the actions of the Youth International Party, or "Yippies", which had been founded in December 1967 and which sought to promote its message by shocking and offending mainstream American sensibilities. Morgan, Roz Payne and Sharon Krebs co-founded the group with Kurshan. In one instance, the group's New York City members entered the legendary restaurant of the era Max's Kansas City, where they distributed garlic cloves and cards on which were written the motto: "We Are W.I.T.C.H. We Are Women. We Are Liberation. We Are We." At the same time they chanted "Nine Million Women! Burned as Witches!" and questioned the women diners on why they were willing to have a man buy them dinner.

In January 1969, a counter-inaugural protest was organized by various feminist groups, taking place in Washington, D.C., to demonstrate against the inauguration of Richard Nixon as President of the United States. W.I.T.C.H. members arrived from New York, appropriating some of the New York Radical Feminists' banners – which were emblazoned with the declaration of "Feminism Lives" – and replacing it with "W.I.T.C.H." in crayon. Rumors circulated at the protest that W.I.T.C.H. members had planned to pull the radical feminist speaker Shulamith Firestone down from the podium when she had been planned to speak; they disagreed with her vocal criticism of those men who were involved in the leftist movement. After the protest, W.I.T.C.H. members subsequently sent a letter to the Guardian repudiating Firestone's calls for women's liberation groups to divorce themselves from the wider left-leaning social movement in U.S. society. In this letter, it described women's liberation as "part of a general struggle; we are as essential to the movement as it is to us". It further reprimanded Firestone for her vocal attacks of men who were part of the movement, stating that "directing ourselves against men ... only reinforces the oppressive pattern of women defining themselves through men".

In February 1969, W.I.T.C.H. members held a protest at a bridal fair at Madison Square Garden. Wearing black veils, they chanted "here comes the slaves/off to their graves", and posted stickers around the area emblazoned with the statement, "confront the whoremakers", a pun on the common anti-war slogan, "confront the warmongers". The protests also involved turning loose several white mice at the event, which fair attendees began scooping up off the ground. Radical feminists criticized W.I.T.C.H. members for reinforcing the sexist stereotype that the assembled women would be scared of mice. They also condemned what they understood as W.I.T.C.H.'s approach of promoting a message of "we're liberated and you're not" to other women, believing that in doing so they were distancing and alienating themselves from feminism's base constituency. Later historian Alice Echols expressed criticism over what she saw as W.I.T.C.H.'s "contempt" for those women who were not involved in broader leftist activism. The bridal fair event resulted in negative media coverage for W.I.T.C.H., and some dissension among members over goals and tactics. After the incident, W.I.T.C.H. moved away from the shock tactics that they had previously employed and instead focused their attention on consciousness-raising.

On August 10, 1969, a W.I.T.C.H. group, calling itself Women Incensed at Telephone Company Harassment, gathered at St. Paul's Churchyard in New York to protest working conditions at AT&T.

Spin-off "covens" were founded in Chicago, Illinois, and Washington, D.C., In another instance, W.I.T.C.H. members protested the firing of a radical feminist professor by entering the sociology department of the University of Chicago and leaving hair and nail clippings all over the building.

In February 1970, the Washington coven held a protest during a Senate hearing on population control. They interrupted Texas Senator Ralph Yarborough's testimony by chanting and throwing pills at panel members and people in the audience galleries. Robin Morgan led that women's takeover of Rat in 1970, making a decisive break from what she described as the "male Left", and listed the reasons for her break in the first women's issue of the paper, in her essay titled "Goodbye to All That". The essay gained notoriety in the press for naming specific sexist men and institutions in the Left.

Understanding of witchcraft

In their leaflets, W.I.T.C.H. adopted the witch-cult hypothesis by claiming that those persecuted as alleged witches in European history had been members of a surviving pre-Christian, pagan religion which the Christian authorities then sought to suppress. In their manifesto, W.I.T.C.H. propagated the erroneous claim that nine million women had been burned to death during the witch trials in the early modern period. This claim had originated with the first-wave feminist Matilda Joslyn Gage.

W.I.T.C.H. declared that any woman could become a W.I.T.C.H. by declaring herself to be one, and that moreover any group of women could form a witches' coven. In one of their leaflets, it is stated that:

<blockquote>If you are a woman and dare to look within yourself, you are a W.I.T.C.H.. You make your own rules. You are free and beautiful. You can be invisible or evident in how you choose to make your W.I.T.C.H.-self known. You can form your own Coven of sister Witches (thirteen is a cozy number for a group) and do your own actions ... You are a W.I.T.C.H. by saying aloud, "I am a W.I.T.C.H." three times, and thinking about that. You are a W.I.T.C.H. by being female, untamed, angry, joyous, and immortal.</blockquote>

Notable members

Members of W.I.T.C.H. included cofounder Robin Morgan, a child television star in the 1950s and a member of the Yippies in the late 1960s, who became an important feminist. Yippie co-founder Nancy Kurshan was also an early member, mentioned in the W.I.T.C.H. documents included in the 1970 anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings From The Women's Liberation Movement, edited by Morgan.

The Oxford English Dictionary credits Morgan with using the term "herstory" in print in this anthology. Concerning W.I.T.C.H., Morgan wrote:<blockquote>The fluidity and wit of the witches is evident in the ever-changing acronym: the basic, original title was Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell [...] and the latest heard at this writing is Women Inspired to Commit Herstory.</blockquote>

However, soon after the breakup of W.I.T.C.H., Morgan repudiated her New Left-aligned politics, and embraced a kind of radical feminism that was strongly opposed to "the male left". She later dismissed W.I.T.C.H. as a form of "clownish proto-anarchism" which had not "raised our own consciousness very far out of our own combat boots".

Other notable members included Peggy Dobbins and Naomi Jaffe, who went on to join the Weather Underground Organization. Members staged a ritual in the Logan Square neighborhood in 2015 to protest housing inequalities throughout the city. In 2017, the group's members from the W.I.T.C.H. Chicago Coven group of 2015-2017 intentionally pulled themselves out of the public eye to make space for the creation of an anonymous W.I.T.C.H. chapter in Chicago. They still promote the continuation of the practice of performing rituals to fight against inequality in all of its form.

In response to the 2016 United States presidential election, protest groups formed in Portland and Boston that named themselves after W.I.T.C.H. and took inspiration from their tactics.

References

Bibliography

  • peggydobbins.net
  • Photographs of W.I.T.C.H. actions by Jo Freeman
  • "Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy From Hell" in TeenVogue, October 28, 2021.