What type of people were most likely to be suspected of witchcraft in Salem?
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It's quite simple: people would accuse anyone they didn't like. False accusations of horrible crimes that are very difficult to disprove (heresy is another one, and these days it's sexual abuse of children mainly) has always been a great way to get rid of people.
In the USSR, much later, this took the form of accusing people of being Mensheviks or Trokskyists. The accusation, especially in the days of Stalin's terror, but going on for decades after, was just about enough to guarantee at least a life sentence in the gulag for the accused, and often a death sentence.
The Salem witch trials were little different.
Upvote:3
Most of the executed people at the Salem Witch trials were women. There were only six men (out of 19).
Most of the accused, at least initially, were poor, or social outcasts. Sarah Good was a beggar. Sarah Osborne had remarried an indentured servant. Tituba was a slave from the Caribbean who told strange, "witch" stories to young girls.
Many of the accusers were upper middle class girls. Some of them, at least, appear to have been going through the onset of "menses" or other "pubescent" activities, and perhaps projected their latent, repressed, sexuality, on the unfortunate women mentioned earlier. Essentially, a number of women were charged, not with "witchcraft," per se, but of "corrupting" these young girls. So were at least two men, John Proctor (who seduced Abigail Williams), and George Jacobs Jr. (accused by his daughter in law and granddaughter).
And there were a number of economic quarrels about boundaries of farms, etc., that led to various accusations. The statement, "jealously motivated the poor to accuse the rich" isn't really true. What was true was that once the process got under way, some of the original (upper middle class) accusing girls turned around and made accusations against others that were slightly wealthier, instead of just "poor people."
The executions took place from June to September 1692. Of the six men (five hanged, one "pressed" to death), four were killed in August, and two in September, after the executions of women had begun. (And women were mostly accused earlier.) On a "time-weighted" basis, women suffered more than 13/19 of the opprobrium, after allowing for the fact that they were indicted, and executed earlier "on average."
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