Women are controlled, have always been. Their bodies, their minds, their agency—all are always up for someone’s taking, always up for negotiation. As Grady Hendrix’s Witchcraft for Wayward Girls explains:
“We’re loathed and despised in every time, in every country, in every culture. In New Guinea they say we dig up the bodies of dead babies and eat them. In Zambia they say we sleep with our brothers and fathers and murder newborns. The Hopi say we kill our kin to prolong our lives. In Germany they say we steal men’s penises and hide them in birds’ nests. (…) They say we spoil milk and steal children. That we murder the innocent and ruin crops. That we bring disease and eat human flesh. You know why they say all this?”
“Because you’re witches?”
“Because we’re women. Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Jew—the one thing they all have in common is that they hate us. For hundreds of thousands of years, they’ve hated us.” (p. 219)
The horror in this world needs no monsters kicking up a storm. Instead, it stems from authority, and from its supposed guardians: parents, social workers, doctors, the “grown-ups.” This isn't Hendrix's first exploration of girls under patriarchal control, and the novel participates in horror’s larger project of voicing what gets silenced elsewhere. Yet the genre itself has been marginalised, denied critical recognition, despite, or because of, its popularity. The study and recognition of horror remains sparse relative to the attention devoted to fantasy or science fiction.
As Hendrix notes in his history of the genre's ’70s and ’80s boom, Paperbacks from Hell (2017), “...horror appeared nowhere on best-seller lists. Horror was for children. It was pulp. If it was any good, it couldn't possibly be horror and so was rebranded as a ‘thrilling tale.’ Horror seemed to have no future because it was trapped in the past” (p. 16). But then the needle moved. The genre exploded:
Between April 1967 and December 1973, everything changed. In a little more than five years, horror fiction became fit for adults, thanks to three books. Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby, Thomas Tryon’s The Other, and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist were the first horror novels to grace Publishers Weekly’s annual best-seller list since Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca in 1938. (p. 24)
This mutation had roots. As Bernice M. Murphy argues in her essay from Xavier Aldana Reyes’s Horror: A Literary History (2016), “Horror Fiction from the Decline of Universal Horror to the Rise of the Psycho Killer”:
Horror fiction began to enter the literary and publishing mainstream during the post-war era because it had increasingly begun to reflect the myriad anxieties found in everyday life. Authors such as King, Barker, Campbell, Straub, Herbert, Blatty, Ketchum, Thomas Tryon, Joan Samson, Kathe Koja and many others (...) added further depth, sophistication, frank sexuality and outright gore to the genre.
They would do this by variously utilising the four major characteristics of the genre: a tendency to deal with horrors arising from the conditions of everyday life; an accompanying preference for mundane, contemporary settings; a movement away from the supernatural and towards the depiction of aberrant psychology as a source of terror (as epitomised by the soon-to-become iconic figure of the serial killer Hannibal Lecter); and a tendency to depict the supernatural in a much more ‘grounded’, naturalistic manner.
This vision of horror materialized out of a changing nation's shifting anxieties. Steffen Hantke in his essay for the same volume, “The Rise of Popular Horror, 1971-2000,” identifies this: “Not by coincidence did the American small town, the epitome of the conservative vision of the nation, become the prime setting for 1980s horror fiction: a sunny, cheerful place of white picket fences and apple pie where something would always be really, really wrong.”
The genre's commercial success followed from this shift: horror that respected no authority, broke taboos, and took risks mainstream literature might not even touch. In Paperbacks from Hell, Hendrix shows why they worked: “Thrown into the rough-and-tumble marketplace, the writers learned they had to earn every reader’s attention. And so they delivered books that move, hit hard, take risks, go for broke. It’s not just the covers that hook your eyeballs. It’s the writing, which respects no rules except one: always be interesting” (p. 14).
And interesting they were. Hendrix, inspired by that era and its books, carries that sensibility. His horror lies very much in the world around his characters in mundane, ordinary settings. In his homage to 1980s pop culture, My Best Friend’s Exorcism (2016), when Gretchen gets possessed, neither she nor the dear reader is certain if it’s something supernatural or simply puberty’s hormonal chaos. The supernatural always pales in comparison to the complexities of the material realities, particularly when filtered through his characters' skepticism.
Likewise, in Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, even after successfully “transferring” a sickness to a condescending doctor, the girls remain unconvinced. Magic? Coincidence? Their own mistake? They don't know. Can't know. This uncertainty is a sign of changing times, changing minds, changing bodies. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s backtrack.
To understand the stakes of Hendrix’s novel, you have to understand the time it’s set in. Witchcraft for Wayward Girls is set in the Baby Scoop Era, a euphemistic label for a system built on forced obedience. In the decades after World War II, stretching into the early 1970s, countries in the English-speaking West saw an exponential increase in pre-marital pregnancies—four million parents between 1945 and 1973 in the US alone—as well as a rampant increase in adoptions. Children could be literally “scooped up” by adoptive couples, hence the name. As always, the burden of that “crisis” fell on women. [1]
Pregnant girls and women were secretly sent to maternity homes across the country, where they were forced to surrender their children in secret. Witchcraft for Wayward Girls is set in one of these maternity homes. Neva Craven, fifteen years old and pregnant, is driven there by a father who no longer sees her as a daughter but as a problem requiring institutional management. She’s told to stay there until she gives birth and her baby is taken away. Then she can return home and go back to being a “good girl.” Hide her, wait for the birth, take the child, send her back. Pretend nothing happened. [2]
For six months, she’d been holding on by her fingernails, but at least she’d been around people who knew she could tell a joke, and made straight As in English, and loved Patty Duke. Now she was surrounded by strangers who only knew one thing about her: she’d been stupid enough to get pregnant. (p. 34)
Every girl carries her own version of the same violence. One embroiders napkins for a wedding that will never happen, still trusting a boy’s broken promise. Another fantasizes about escape, building a future with her daughter that no one will let her keep. One girl dreads returning home, knowing exactly what awaits her—the priest who raped her, waiting to do it again. Each arrives with a different story, but Wellwood erases those distinctions, reducing them all to the same diagnosis—wayward girls. Under the claustrophobic, invasive gaze of the House and its custodians, the girls discover the only power available to them: each other. Bonds have to be formed, resistance built from whatever materials are at hand.
What Hendrix understands is that the supernatural is never the main event. Witchcraft might be the book’s premise, but true magic lies in the friendships, in girls finding each other in a hostile system. Despite the cruelty and hopelessness engineered into Wellwood, this is a story of sisterhood first.
Witchcraft, in this context, comes as an equalizer. Not empowerment, with its sanitized, corporate connotations, but power seized when every other possible avenue has been shut down. “When you are at your lowest, when you feel your least powerful, know that this dark legion is there for you. Witches will catch you when you fall, carry you when you are tired, heal you when you are broken” (p. 223). The witchcraft here is grisly, macabre, nothing like the aestheticized versions sold in bookshops and Instagram feeds. The greater the magic, the more blood, the more pain it demands. The book presents witchcraft as a tool to fight patriarchy, to defy a society that oppresses women at every juncture, to resist a world hell-bent on taming them into docility, to create a world of their own. “A true witch does not fear change. She is in an eternal state of revolution” (p. 184).
Women’s bodies have always been a site where power is exercised. The specifics shift, the system adapts, but the fundamental equation keeps women’s autonomy provisional, always requiring justification, always up for negotiation by someone else. The Baby Scoop Era has a name now, a historical distance. We look back at maternity homes and tell ourselves we’ve moved past that brutality. And yet, women’s bodily autonomy continues to be legislated away. Girls are again being told their choices matter less than someone else’s morality. The system adapts faster than we do, finding new ways to exercise the same control while insisting it’s different this time, better, necessary.
Witchcraft for Wayward Girls sits at that uncomfortable intersection where past and present collapse into each other. Hendrix shows us 1970, but it’s easy to recognize 2026. The architecture that built Wellwood is still standing under different names. And the girls trapped inside it—then, now—have to keep finding ways to say no. Then. Now. The specifics shift. The fight doesn’t.
Endnotes
[1] Hendrix describes this in the novel’s acknowledgments: “whether girls had been raped or sexually abused, believed a promise that wasn’t kept, didn’t have access to contraception, or simply didn’t know it existed, they were told that getting pregnant was all their fault. Doctors and social workers labeled unwed mothers “neurotic,” newspaper columnists suggested they be hounded in Alcatraz, and politicians blamed them for everything from high taxes to crime to the collapse of Western civilization” (p. 475). [return]
[2] In a TIME piece about this period, Kelly O’Connor McNees—the author of another novel set during the era, The Myth of Surrender (2022)—remarks: “Almost no one asked the young women themselves about their wishes. During the Baby Scoop era, an unmarried pregnant woman sent away to a maternity home had no say in whether she would carry her pregnancy to term, no agency over the birth itself and, once the child arrived, no choice about whether she could raise the baby.” This is the ground on which Hendrix plants his witches. [return]