The book is in three parts and each has a job. The first establishes that witchcraft is real, that it requires a pact with the Devil, and that to deny it is heresy. The second describes what witches are supposed to do, assembled from earlier demonology and from what prosecutors reported hearing under interrogation. The third is a procedural manual for magistrates and inquisitors: how to open a case, how to question, when to use torture, how to secure a conviction.
The third part is the dangerous one. Its argument is that this crime is exceptional, and that the ordinary safeguards of criminal procedure obstruct it. Witnesses who would normally be disqualified should be heard. The accused may be told a promise of mercy will be kept and it need not be. Reluctance to confess is itself evidence of the Devil's protection. Once a court accepts that frame, an innocent defendant has no move left that reads as innocence.
The hostility to women is explicit and sustained rather than incidental, and it is set out most directly in the sixth question of the first part, which argues from their supposed intellectual and moral weakness that they are more liable to the crime. Modern editors and historians treat this as a documented feature of the text. Readers should note that it is the book's claim about women, not a description of who women were, and that the reasoning is circular: the accused were mostly women, so women must be more susceptible, so it is right to look for the crime among women.