Genna G’s Reviews > In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial > Status Update

[...] By giving some credit to their feelings, whether disgust, anger, rejection, or resistance, by listening to the alarms going off in their bodies and minds, victims may find the strength to defend themselves, especially when the voice of reason is just a front for the debilitating, intimidating voice of authority.

In short, our emotions don't always lead us astray. On the contrary, when we listen to them, they can save us. This can work not only when people are trying to make us live on the edge of radioactive landfill sites but also in situations of harassment and abuse [...].

[...] It has also taught me to value the lessons of survival as well as my own perceptions. I feel more deeply, value those feels more and can put those feelings together with what I know in order to fashion a vision of and a pathway toward true change."

[...] "Contrary to media picture, I find myself as a woman of insight, ascending to my highest powers, my greatest psychic strengths and my fullest satisfactions. I am freer of the constraints and fears and indecisions of my younger years and survival throughout these years has taught me how to value my own beauty and how to look closely into the beauty of others. [...]

Despite the censure of society, with age we do gain a strength which sometimes allows us to reconfigure life's trials. In 1978, suffering from breast cancer at the age of 44, the very years where women are portrayed in the popular media as fading and desexualized figures, African American poet and essayist Audre Lorde commented, [...]

Most problematic about women's aging is their experience. This is what led so many old women to the pyres. Spell craft was an art which is, they had to work at their lessons, to learn their knowledge, to gain experience. Older women therefore naturally appeared more suspect than younger ones Guy Bechtel explains.

[...] Given these conditions, how could this body not appear ugly.

[...] At least according to the dominant criteria. It makes you a rebel however unintentionally. To age is to awaken the fear that a woman always inspires when she exists not only to create and nurture others but to create and nurture herself, as Cynthia Rich writes. The aging female body acts like a clear reminder that women have a self that exists not only for others. [...]

All rebels are "ugly" according to David Le Breton's analysis. But the American philosopher Mary Daly has observed that the beauty of strong, creative women is ugly by the misogynistic standards of beauty. To age is to lose your fertility, your seductive powers, and your role as the care provider for a husband and children. [...]

Ultimately, given the current cultural norms, only one kind of woman can peruse her life with absolute peace of mind enjoying both her own satisfaction and society's approval: the woman who has one or more children she wants to have who feels enriched by this experience and has not paid too high a price for it. [...]