10/05/2026
Today's A Mighty Girl Community Pick: "How to Kill a Witch: The Patriarchy's Guide to Silencing Women" by Claire Mitchell and Zoe Venditozzi. In 16th-century Scotland, when crops failed and babies died and neighbors quarreled, the explanation given was often that a woman nearby had made a pact with the Devil. In 1563, the Scottish Parliament made this suspicion into law. The Witchcraft Act codified violence against women as an act of state -- and over the next hundred and 73 years, it would be used to accuse more than 4,000 people, to execute some 2,500 of them by strangulation and burning, and to hollow out communities of the women who healed, midwifed, quarreled, owned property, or simply lived alone. Roughly 85 percent of those killed were women.
Human rights lawyer Claire Mitchell and writer Zoe Venditozzi -- co-founders of the Witches of Scotland campaign, which won a formal apology from Scotland's First Minister in 2022 -- have spent years reading the court records most of Scotland would rather forget. "How to Kill a Witch" is the book that grew out of that work, and it is written with the fury of two women who have looked, name by name, at what was done. What they document, instead, is the bureaucracy of the killings -- how a legal system, backed by a church and a crown, went about identifying a woman as a witch, extracting a confession from her under torture, trying her in a proper courtroom with evidence and judges, and putting her to death.
They tell the stories of individual women drawn from the historical record -- healers, midwives, servants, widows, the outspoken, the inconvenient, the poor -- and they follow the thread from those trials to the ways women who step out of line are still discredited, punished, and silenced today, from the courtrooms of Britain to the parts of the world where women are still being killed as witches. Sharp, angry, and often surprisingly funny, "How to Kill a Witch" is at once a history, a memorial, and a working manual for recognizing the same patterns the moment they reappear. Highly recommended for adult readers.
"How to Kill a Witch" is available at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9781464241253 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/4AH7duz (Amazon)
To learn more about the Witches of Scotland campaign, visit https://www.witchesofscotland.com/
To support the campaign, you can order clothing in the official Witches of Scotland tartan -- a memorial design that Mitchell and Venditozzi created to honor those persecuted in the Scottish witch trials, and had registered with the Scottish Register of Tartans in 2025 at https://witchesofscotland.myshopify.com/
For an excellent book about an 11-year-old girl who leads the drive to build a memorial to women accused of witchcraft in her Scottish town, we highly recommend "A Kind of Spark" for ages 9 and up at https://www.amightygirl.com/kind-of-spark
For a Newbery Award-winning novel about a teen girl who stands up against witch hysteria and mob mentality in early colonial America, we highly recommend “The Witch of Blackbird Pond” for ages 9 and up at https://www.amightygirl.com/the-witch-of-blackbird-pond
For more books for children and teens about Mighty Girls taking a stand against hate and prejudice of many kinds, visit our blog post, "Standing Together: 50 Mighty Girl Books Celebrating Diversity and Acceptance” at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=13481
