[En attente de traduction] WITCH

WITCH A feminist organization that sprang into existence
in the late 1960s in America and flourished briefly
among young women at college campuses across the country.
WITCH originally stood for Women’s International
Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell, though on occasion the
name changed to fit various political activities. The organization
was formally launched in 1968 on Samhain, All
Hallow’s Eve, the sabbat most strongly associated with
witches in the public mind. The year was a peak for protest
movements: civil rights, the war in Vietnam and women’s
liberation. In that year, Martin Luther King and
Robert Kennedy were assassinated. College campuses
were hotbeds of demonstrations against the military, big
business, big government and authority in general. Interest
in mysticism, the occult and witchcraft was high.
WITCH was strongly feminist and viewed itself as a
political, revolutionary, guerrilla organization. Witches
and Gypsies, the WITCH literature stated, were the original
guerrilla fighters against the oppression of women
and of the oppression of all. Dressed in rags and pointed,
conical hats, and carrying brooms, members of WITCH
conducted demonstrations.
376 witch
Some outsiders saw the group as more comic than
serious. Andrew Greeley, Roman Catholic priest, novelist,
lecturer on sociology at the University of Chicago
and program director of the National Opinion Research
Center at the university, called WITCH “a combination of
the put-on and the serious, the deliberately comic and the
profoundly agonized, of the bizarre and the holy.” When
three members of WITCH appeared in the university’s social-
science building to shriek curses upon the sociology
department (“A hex on thy strategy!”), Greeley himself
responded in comic fashion by offering to sprinkle holy
water in the departmental office. His offer was turned
down.
WITCH was not regarded as legitimate by many other
Witches. WITCH maintained that any woman could become
a Witch by saying “I am a Witch” three times and
thinking about it—rather than being initiated by another
Witch (see initia tion)—and that any woman could start
a coven of Witches simply by declaring so.
Further reading:
Adler, Margot. Drawing Down the Moon. Revised ed. New
York: Viking, 1986.