Witch, Please (A Cultural History of Women Who Wouldn't Behave)

A witty, culturally engaged history of the witch as one of Western society’s most enduring and adaptable figures.

The witch has always functioned as a cultural screen onto which societies project their deepest anxieties about women, power, knowledge, sexuality, and autonomy. She emerges whenever female independence becomes unsettling, intelligible, or in need of explanation. She is simultaneously warning, scapegoat, fantasy, and mirror.

Far from being a straightforward story of spells, superstition, or folklore, Witch, Please takes you on a tour of the many women who have earned the title of Witch, from ancient healers revered for their knowledge to those burned at the stake to modern Etsy witches. Across literature, art, and eventually film and television, the witch repeatedly mutates between monster, crone, seductress, and comic relief, revealing more about each era’s assumptions than any stable “truth” about witchcraft itself.

These competing versions of the witch—radical, commercial, nostalgic, performative—sit uneasily alongside one another, underscoring the figure’s continued cultural volatility. But across these shifts, one argument remains constant: Societies create witches when they need them.