Witch executions were used by sections of the ruling class around Europe to variously confiscate property, demonise beggars, control reproduction, enforce social control and gender roles, and exclude women from economic, political and social activity. The trials were used not only to break up old communal forms of life and condemn some traditional practices, but were also a weapon by which resistance to social and economic restructuring could be defeated. The phenomena was spread over so long a time period and such a huge area that there is no single explanation for the trials: there are various differing explanations, which, rather than contradicting each other, serve to show how widely the tool of the witch-hunts was used.

The witches were lower class. Most of the women accused were poor peasant women, and the accusers were either members of the clergy or wealthy members of that same community - often their employers or landlords.

As money, wage work, new professions and urbanisation grew, the witch-hunts were one of the mechanisms to control and subordinate women whose social and economic independence was a threat to then-emerging social order. Mary Daly claims that the witches were ‘women whose physical, intellectual, economic, moral and spiritual independence and activity profoundly threatened the male monopoly in every sphere’.

As women were excluded from economic and political life, ridicule and violence were used to enforce and justify the new gender
relations. Women who were too loud, too confident, or too angry were condemned. Reginald Scott declared in 1601, ‘The chief fault of witches is that they are scolds’. He is referring to women who speak back to their husbands or talk amongst themselves. A scold was defined as a woman who was ‘a troublesome and angry women who doth break the public peace... and increase public discord’. Part of a campaign to exclude women from the workplace and developing professions, these stereotypes made it easier to attack women who fought this tendency and asserted their economic and social independence.