Over recent weeks, the slogan “ditch the witch” has been featured alongside AI-generated photos of Victorian premier Jacinta Allan. She’s depicted in a dusty and distressed witch’s hat, a fake wart on her chin, on billboards and trucks around Melbourne in the lead up to the state election this November.

Instead of critiquing her policies or governance, the campaign attacked her gender. The brothel owner who partly funded the campaign says the slogan is not sexist.

It’s not the first time the phrase has been used that way. In 2011, then-opposition leader Tony Abbott stood before protest placards that read “ditch the witch”, targeted on that occasion toward our first woman prime minister, Julia Gillard.

In fact, there is a long sexist history of labelling women in power as witches.

So, why is it misogynistic to call a powerful woman a “witch”?

Threatening the patriarchy

Witchy women weren’t always bad.

In early European medieval stories, for instance, the magical woman Morgan Le Fay is described as a healer and scientist. Then, starting around the 12th century she is recast as a vindictive, evil character. Some scholars have suggested the narrative rules of the French chivalric romance literary genre may have played a role; to work, these stories needed a villain to prevent a knight from being with his lover.

From the early 15th century on, it became a very derisive way to refer to women. Texts like German friar Heinrich Kramer’s misogynistic witch-hunting manual Malleus Maleficarum (1486), among........

© The Conversation