During another time of troubles in the relations between the sexes, Sigmund Freud once remarked to his friend and colleague Marie Bonaparte: “The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is, what does a woman want?” Freud was convinced that men's desires and concerns are always more clear and straightforward than women's. What would he have said, one wonders, about the confused and distraught men of Salem Village? Here were men who were still in charge of household and market, of church and of state. Yet often enough, they did not behave that way.

From the late fifteenth to the late eighteenth century, an era in Western history in which intermittent witch hunts were only the most dramatic feature of what has been labeled a concerted male drive to control and repress women, historians have also singled out an apparently contradictory trend toward increased autonomy and responsibility for women. So far I have argued that an underlying cause of both of these developments, although still unrecognized as such, was the distinctive Western family pattern, and especially women's late age at marriage. This eccentric set of arrangements, by the early modern era, had put women's and men's lives on increasingly converging tracks. At the same time, however, men's continued control over wives, households, and society at large was never in doubt, which is what makes their anxious behavior so very puzzling.