How European Folklore Used Old Women as Containers for Everything Society Feared

I have been thinking about this for a while and I want to be clear that it is not a simple story. The witch figure in European folklore is frequently discussed as pure oppression, old women scapegoated and projected onto, the convenient repository for everything a patriarchal society feared. That part is true. It is also only part of it. The full picture is more complicated and considerably more interesting.

What the Witch Figure Actually Is

The stereotype is so familiar it has become almost invisible. Old woman. Hooked nose. Lives alone. Knows things she shouldn’t. Capable of harm. In fairy tales, she is the obstacle, the threat, the reason the protagonist needs courage. For example, in Hansel and Gretel she eats children. In Snow White she poisons one. In Rapunzel she imprisons a girl for reasons that barely get explained.

These figures are doing several things simultaneously, and not all of them are about oppression.

First, the honest historical context. Elderly women in medieval and early modern Europe occupied a specific social position. After menopause, after the deaths of husbands and children, many women lived alone on the margins of villages. They had knowledge from decades of herbalism, midwifery, and accumulated observation of how illness and death worked. They had outlived their social usefulness in a framework that defined women primarily through reproduction and family. So, it comes as no surprise that they were, in the framework of their communities, uncanny.

Communities blamed them when crops failed. They blamed them for miscarriages, mysterious illnesses, and sudden deaths. The witch accusation was a mechanism for externalizing misfortune and managing the anxiety of living in a world where bad things happened without explanation. The accused woman was usually already marginal: poor, old, living alone, possibly difficult in personality. Her marginality made her a plausible target.

What the Figures Were Before

This is the part that gets left out of the conversation most often.

Before the Christian period transformed the witch into a devil-worshipping heretic, many of these figures held very different roles. Slavic traditions preserved this most clearly. The Russian Baba Yaga, the wild forest-dwelling crone who lives in a hut on chicken legs and flies in a mortar, is terrifying and wise simultaneously. She challenges travelers who enter her forest. Those who approach her with courage and the right manners receive knowledge or gifts. Those who approach with fear or arrogance do not return.

Soviet-era folklorist Vladimir Propp argued in the 1940s that figures like Baba Yaga originated as beneficent ancestors or nature goddesses in pre-patriarchal religious systems, and were progressively demoted and feared as cultural power structures shifted. Under this theory, the terrifying hag is a corrupted memory of something that was once a guide.

The herbs, the cauldron, the knowledge of plants and bodies and the rhythms of seasons: all of this belonged to the wise woman tradition before it belonged to the witch. Medieval healers, midwives, and herbalists operated in communities for centuries and were sometimes respected and sometimes feared depending on circumstances. The same knowledge that healed could theoretically harm. The line between the healing woman and the witch was always thinner than the folklore made it appear.