October 31, 2022 5:00 pm
On October 31, 1968, the day of Halloween, thirteen witches with lots of hats, cloaks and feathers in their hair, showed up on Wall Street and, amidst the stunned gazes of men in suits, threw a curse. “Wall street! Wall street! The most powerful palace there is here! Trick or treat, perfect financier, down on Wall Street! ”, They shouted, and as they arrived they left.
On their cloaks it was written Witch: witch, in English, but also the acronym for Women’s international terrorist conspiracy from hell (WITCH). They were feminists from the experience of New York radical women (NYRW), one of the many feminist groups active in the United States in the sixties, which was fundamental for the movement: the women who were part of it coined slogans that went down in history, such as sisterhood is powerful“Sisterhood is powerful” and “the personal is political”.
Two factions clashed within the NYRW: the radical feminist not socialist feminists (o politicos). The former affirmed that the enemy of women is first of all patriarchy and it is therefore against patriarchy that we must fight by choosing separatism, while politicos they believed that the women’s liberation movement should broaden its objectives by allying itself with the other souls of the US left, including men: against patriarchy, yes, but also against capitalism, consumerism, racism, class oppression.
The day after the Wall Street raid, news spread that the witches had caused the New York Stock Exchange to lose 13 points. of financial stocks that had lost value and told reporters they were the ones they cursed).
Given the success of their action, after hitting the heart of global finance, WITCH decided to attack the institution of marriage head-on: during the Bridal fairthe New York Bride Fair, released a hundred mice
in the audience handing out flyers saying: “Women are taught from childhood that their only purpose in life is to become the wives and mothers of men. Marriage is the symbolic ritual of our legal passage from father’s property to husband’s property ”. During the action they sang: “Here come the slaves. Straight to their graves ”.
Wall street, New York, October 31, 1968. Left: Florika Remetier, one of the founders of WITCH Right: Ros Baxandall, an activist cursing Wall street.
(Bev Grant, Getty Images)
Robin Morgan, one of the founders, tells in the collection Sisterhood is powerful that the WITCH structure was so devoid of hierarchy that it was practically anarchic. The lightning actions were theatrical, funny and provocative, a form of protest that was more like guerrilla theater than to the classic events of the time. It was not necessary to be many or to join a particular political organization to participate.
Their 1968 manifesto reads: “You cannot join the WITCH If you are a woman and you have the courage to look inside yourself, you are a witch. You make your own rules. You are free and beautiful. You can choose to make your being a witch visible or invisible. You can form your own coven of witch sisters (13 is a nice number for a coven) and do your actions. ”
This absence of rigidity and hierarchy contributed to the proliferation of WITCH feminist covens in the United States. In Boston as in Washington, where they cursed the inauguration ceremony of President Richard Nixon, and in Chicago, where they unleashed a series of curses: against the dean of the faculty of sociology, guilty of having fired a feminist professor, they scattered nails and hair in the classrooms and corridors of the university; against the transport company, which had raised the price of tickets, they danced around a cauldron and chanted slogans and then disappeared before the police could arrest them; finally during the trial of the so-called 7 Chicagoans arrested for criminal association after the protests against the 1968 Democratic convention, the WITCHs with white-painted faces and black cloaks sang in front of the federal offices: “Our sister Justice lies chained and bound , let’s curse the ground where she died ”.
The acronym WITCH was adapted to the actions and goals of the moment: when the AT&T phone company fired two typists who pretended to be called women and not girls, they became Women incensed at telephone company harassments (women mad at phone company harassment) or on holidays Women interested in toppling consumer holidays (women interested in breaking down consumerist parties).
In 1969, three thousand women gathered in front of the Niantic women’s prison to denounce the treatment of inmates belonging to the revolutionary organization of the Black Panthers. The protest was joined by a coven of WITCH which it became Women inspired to commit herstory (women determined to tell the story from their point of view).
The inmates were held in solitary confinement, with lights on 24 hours a day, and some were forced to give birth surrounded by armed guards with no prenatal medical assistance. Their curse that day read:
The guards will be there
when the children are born
The guards will be there
to take them away
The state will decide
who is worthy and who is not
Guard and be the guardian
of mother and child
So WITCH cursing the state
and declares it unworthy
Oppressors,
the curse of women falls on you
Another curse recited during one of their actions read:
Eye, evil eye, parsley and fennel
When you mess with women, you will get a bang
We curse your empire to make it fall
When you face one of us, you face us all!
The choice of the figure of the witch as a symbol of women’s liberation is always well explained in their manifesto: “WITCH is the awareness that witches were the original guerrillas and resistance fighters against oppression, in particular the oppression of women, in centuries.
Witches have always been women who dared to be: courageous, aggressive, intelligent, nonconformist, curious, independent, sexually liberated, revolutionary (…). Witches were the first to practice birth control and abortion (…), they did not bow before any man, being the survivors of the oldest culture in the world: the one in which men and women lived as equals in a truly just society, before the deadly sexual, economic and spiritual repression of the Imperialist Phallic Society took power and began to destroy nature and human society ”.
Not all WITCHs practiced witchcraft, some were interested in magical practices and others not, they simply considered it one of the many possibilities to participate in the revolutionary movement that shook the country and the whole world while having fun and practicing sisterhood.
The WITCHs appeared in New York on Halloween in 1968 and disappeared two years later, as fast and surprising as their actions. Robin Morgan, who later distanced himself from WITCH by dismissing the experience as “clown proto-anarchism”, is still today one of the most important figures in the US feminist movement.
Nancy Kurshan, Peggy Dobbinse, Naomi Jaffe, who had participated in the creation of the original group of WITCH, joined the revolutionary organization of the Weather underground. Jaffe and Dobbins have never stopped doing politics. Today Kurshan is fighting for the release of political prisoners and against maximum security prisons.
The powerful imagery these women created has left behind some seeds.
With the latest feminist wave, a new WITCH coven explicitly inspired by the godmothers of the 1960s has been active in Chicago, some witch bloc crossed the French squares declaring themselves queer and transfeminist between 2017 and 2020, and several activists practice witchcraft in US queer communities. All recognize in the figure of the witch a symbol of freedom and self-determination.