Witchcraft as Feminist Activism

Dianic and Reclaiming witches affirm witchcraft as feminist and activist spirituality, a practice bound up with the empowerment of women and with social and political engagement. In this current, drawn especially from the work of Starhawk in the Reclaiming tradition and Zsuzsanna Budapest in Dianic Wicca, the sacred is met chiefly as immanent in nature and community, and magic and ritual are joined to activism for justice, ecology, and the standing of women. Spiritual practice and social action are understood as continuous rather than separate.

Zsuzsanna Budapest founded the Susan B. Anthony Coven No. 1 in Los Angeles in 1971, generally regarded as the founding institution of Dianic Wicca and explicitly organized as a women-only tradition growing directly out of the second-wave feminist movement of the period. Starhawk's 1979 book The Spiral Dance, written after her own training in a Feri-influenced lineage, became the founding text of the Reclaiming tradition, which she and others formally organized as a collective in San Francisco in the following years; both currents emerged from the specific political ferment of 1970s American feminism and drew self-consciously on witchcraft imagery as a vehicle for women's spiritual and political empowerment.