I regret to inform you that I’m ending this women’s history series on a bit of a downer with my trip to Salem to investigate the witch trials there. Salem has taken a horrific event from its early history and turned it into a thriving tourist industry which peaks every October. The Salem I encountered on an early spring Saturday morning was quieter, but there were still people walking around with pointy witch’s hats and plenty of witch- and wizard-themed gift shops and restaurants.

The obvious place to start would have been the Salem Witch Museum. I visited years ago, and, while there was a certain educational aspect, it’s also pretty cheesy, with outdated dioramas and narration. I decided watching a life-sized replica of Giles Corey gasping “More weight!” while being pressed to death with stones was an experience I only needed once in a lifetime, so I headed to the Salem Witch Trials exhibit at the Peabody Essex Museum instead.

This is predominantly an art museum, and I wouldn’t recommend paying the $25 admission just for the one exhibit, although that is exactly what I planned to do until I found out that Massachusetts teachers get free admission. The exhibit, although small, was an excellent introduction to the trials, with panels about many of the accusers and the accused and a mural showing a chaotic scene from the trials. It helped me get a sense of the timeline and some of the people involved.

From there, I walked over to the Salem Witch Trials Memorial, which is a simple outdoor memorial with a bench for the victims of the trials, each one engraved with a name, how the person died, and the date of execution. The benches are arranged in a semicircle, and people have left flowers on the benches (or, in the case of Giles Corey, stones, which struck me as true gallows humor). It’s right next to the Old Burying Point Cemetery, Salem’s oldest burial ground, and is surprisingly peaceful.

My final stop was The Witch House, which is not really a witch house, just the former residence of Jonathan Corwin, one of the judges who presided at the trials. It’s not too different from many other historical house tours except for a gruesome exhibit exploring cannibalism and how consuming parts of humans, particularly executed criminals, was considered medicinally beneficial for centuries. Corwin struck me as a powerful, wealthy member of the community who made some really bad choices, but to be fair, a lot of other people made those same choices. Sound familiar?

I chose a visit to Salem this month because of its connection with women’s history–18 of the 25 people who were executed or died in prison were women–but I came away with a sense that witch hunts are an unfortunate part of human history that can include people for any race, gender, age, or other classification. The idea of those in power targeting a more marginalized or disenfranchised group didn’t end in 1693, as a glance through any recent news headlines will reveal.

Last year’s picture book It Happened in Salem by Jonah Winter does an excellent job of asking the big questions around the Salem witch trials: Who started the hysteria? Who kept it going? What were their motivations? And perhaps most important, what would you have done? Maybe speaking up for what’s right won’t cost you your life like it could in 1692 Salem, but it can cost you friends, family, your reputation, your money. Once again, it’s all being played out in our time.

If you know of an example, you can add it to the Salem Witch Museum’s Witch Hunt Wall Project, which invites you to think of a situation that fits the formula “Fear + A Trigger = A Scapegoat.” People have been adding entries since 2017, and it’s a fascinating list. I discovered a good example of this in a new book, Dreams to Ashes: The 1871 Los Angeles Chinatown Massacre by Livia Blackburne, illustrated by Nicole Xu (Carolrhoda Books, 40 pages, grades 3-6). Fear of Chinese immigrants living in Los Angeles was triggered one night in 1871 by a gunfight that left a police officer and another man dead. The scapegoats? The entire Chinese population, who became the targets of a massacre that killed eighteen Chinese men, only one of whom was involved in the gunfight, and destroyed homes and businesses throughout Chinatown.

I’ll end by quoting the last page of this book which again makes a horrific incident relevant to today: “How does a country learn from the past? By remembering. By writing the dark stories back into history books. By shining a light on the consequences of hate and working to keep those fires from sparking again. By embracing change. By loving those who dream of a better life and affirming the humanity of all. By stepping forward. Into hope.”

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Last weekend–on International Women’s Day, no less–I made my way into Boston to take a look at the Boston Women’s Memorial, a set of three statues on the Commonwealth Avenue Mall. Abigail Adams, Lucy Stone, and Phillis Wheatley are the subjects, three Massachusetts women who were also influential writers. The three are at street level, having stepped off of their pedestals, using those pedestals as writing desks (Wheatley and Stone) or for support (Adams).

In an uncanny bit of good timing, I was able to get my hands on a new book called Where Are the Women? The Girl Scouts’ Campaign for the First Statue of Women in Central Park by Janice Hechter (Red Chair Press Books for Young Readers) that details the seven-year campaign that the New York City Girl Scouts and a group called Monumental Women waged to get statues of real women (as opposed to, say, Alice in Wonderland) in Central Park. In 2020, a statue of Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton was unveiled in the park, created by Meredith Bergmann, the same sculptor who made the Boston Women’s Memorial.

As with the Central Park story, the Boston Women’s Memorial took over a decade to bring to fruition, from the first discussions in 1992 to the unveiling on October 25, 2003. Before this memorial, the Commonwealth Avenue Mall had the same number of statues of real women as Central Park did: zero. There was some criticism at the time of its opening that three women were grouped together instead of having individual statues like the men do. While I understand this, I really like the memorial as it is. I felt like it led me to contemplate the connections between the women. The choice of these three seemed a little random to me at first, but as I read the quotations that are engraved on each of their pedestals, I saw their common quests for equality and justice, not only for women, but for all people.

If you’d like to learn more about these women, look for the new book One Girl’s Voice: How Lucy Stone Helped Change the Law of the Land, as well as Leave It to Abigail! The Revolutionary Life of Abigail Adams by Barb Rosenstock (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2020). I wish I knew of a good book about Phillis Wheatley, but the ones I found about her are mostly older and from educational publishers, not trade. I did find one middle grade historical fiction book that looks interesting: My Name Is Phillis Wheatley by Afua Cooper (Kids Can Press, 2023), in which Wheatley narrates her own story.

If this memorial inspires you to seek out more women’s history in Boston, check out the Boston Women’s Heritage Trail website, which is not just one trail, but an organization with a number of tours all around Boston. The Women’s Memorial is part of the Ladies Walk, which I guess is a nod to Abigail Adams’s exhortation to her husband to “remember the ladies.” For the twentieth anniversary of the memorial, in 2023, this organization recorded three contemporary women reading excerpts from each of the women in the memorial: Mayor Michelle Wu read Lucy Stone’s, Attorney General Andrea Campbell read Abigail Adams’s, and Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley recorded Phillis Wheatley’s. There’s a QR code on Stone’s statue that allows you to hear them.