The period of U.S. history that covers post-Civil War to the Great Depression fascinates me, and Harrow’s The Once and Future Witches, set in 1893, hits many of the big issues of the time – women’s suffrage, race, the rise of the labor movement – while adding a look at the fear of female power that drove the original Salem witch trials.
Harrow hits on all the usual suspects and provides a lens through which we as readers can look at the 1890s. She acknowledges the whiteness of the original suffragette movement, the isolation of various groups within the labor movement, and the fierceness of the reaction from the forces of capital and authority. More interestingly, she looks for connections between those movements, and while her alliances feel like ones we would expect, they are welcome nonetheless, as they describe historical moments from the perspective of power and agency.
The lines that Harrow draws between what happened at Salem and the ways that women were (and continue to be) oppressed are coherent and well-described. Moreover, they provide the type of qualitative look that makes movements of resistance resonate, even if the stories that appear are set in a fantastical landscape. Magic as a metaphor for cultural power is a useful literary device, and Harrow’s utilization is a fun read as well.