Delving into the provenance of Glinda’s character reveals a lineage of thinkers who saw the witch as a symbol of female autonomy. Though witches have most often been treated throughout history as evil both in fiction and in real life, sentiments began to change in the 19th century as anticlerical, individualist values took hold across Europe. It was during this time that historians and writers including Jules Michelet and Charles Godfrey Leland wrote books that romanticized witches, often reframing witch-hunt victims as women who’d been wrongfully vilified because of their exceptional physical and mystical capabilities. Per Michelet’s best-selling book, La Sorcière of 1862: “By the fineness of her intuitions, the cunning of her wiles—often fantastic, often beneficent—she is a Witch, and casts spells, at least and lowest lulls pain to sleep and softens the blow of calamity.”
The ideas of Michelet and like-minded writers influenced Matilda Joslyn Gage, an American suffragist, abolitionist, and theosophist. She posited that women were accused as witches in the early modern era because the Church found their intellect threatening. “The witch was in reality the profoundest thinker, the most advanced scientist of those ages,” she writes in her feminist treatise of 1893, Woman, Church, and State. Her vision of so-called witches being brilliant luminaries apparently inspired her son-in-law, L. Frank Baum, to incorporate that notion into his children’s-book series about the fantastical land of Oz. (Some writers have surmised that “Glinda” is a play on Gage’s name.)
Like Gage, Baum was a proponent of equal rights for women, and he wrote several pro-suffrage editorials in the South Dakota newspaper he owned briefly, the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer. Although his book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published in 1900, is titled after a man, it is fundamentally a female-centric story: a tale about a girl’s journey through a land governed by four magical women. There are actually two good witches in Baum’s original version: Glinda is the witch of the South, not the North, in his telling, and she doesn’t appear until the second-to-last chapter. The book states that she is not only “kind to everyone,” but also “the most powerful of all the Witches.”
