Gender Profiling

Salem Witch Trials

Were the Salem Witch Trials guilty of gender profiling?

It is known that men were accused of witchcraft, however, they were far less than the accusations against women. Women were predominately the victims of the hunt that ultimately led to trials and death. They were viewed as disposable with very little evidence or none at all to back up claims against them.

For my research paper I will be focusing on the views of those involved in the witch hunts and trials. Why women were predominately the focus and how the trials led to so many of their deaths. Furthermore, I will also be focusing on the Puritan sexism that helped create a link between women and the accused witches. This will help to explain the historical causes for today’s conventional image of the female witch.

I will be using many resources which include these:

Starkey, Marion Lena. The Devil in Massachusetts: a Modern Enquiry into the Salem Witch Trials. Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday, c1989.

Benson, Ed. “Witchcraft.” The Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History.(2008). (OR)
Gibson, Marion. “Retelling Salem Stories: Gender Politics And Witches In American Culture.” European Journal Of American Culture. Vol. 25, Issue 2 (2006): 85-107. (ASC)

1) Your paper (including notes) must be 5 or more pages in length. Title pages and bibliographies don’t count. Illustrations, graphs, and charts count within reason and the instructor decides what is within reason.

2) You must use a reasonable font, i.e., one that is no smaller than Times Roman 10 and no bigger than Courier 12.

3) Double-spacing is required with three exceptions: notes, bibliographies, and extended quotes (ones that last longer than two lines). These should be single spaced.

4) Extended quotes should be indented on inch from the normal left hand margin.

5) You should cite a source for all direct quotations and anything which you paraphrase from another author. Any facts, statistics, or ideas which are not common knowledge should also have a source cited. One way to determine what common knowledge is to see if something comes up in more than one source in your research. There are exceptions, but usually that is a good rule of thumb. Another method is to use the following test: anything you didn’t know before you started your research is someone else’s idea and a citation should be given.

6) Footnotes or endnotes are fine. Internal citations (Copp, pg.43, etc.,) are unacceptable.

7) If most of a paragraph comes from a single source, a single note at the end of a paragraph is fine.

8) Note numbers should be Arabic (e.g., 1, 2, 3, etc.,..) not Roman (e.g., I, i, II, ii, etc.,…). Don’t use the same number over and over by referring to a book in your bibliography. Each citation is a different entity and a page number must be given each time.

9) Give a bibliography, not a “works cited” page. Bibliographies include all works cited plus anything else which influenced your work but which you did not cite such as the text, some book which you looked at but which didn’t have any information which you thought was worth citing, a movie, or even your high school history book. Separate each entry from the one before by inserting an extra line (like I have done in this list).

10) Cite internet sources the way you would any other. If there is an author, list the author. If not, then treat the website as the author by listing the web address of the site. More specific guidelines can be found in any recent edition of a style manual.

11) Use a variety of sources in your research, but don’t use the text or a general encyclopedia like EnCarta. Those are too general for college work. Subject specific encyclopedias like the Encyclopedia of Political Science are fine.

12) Internet sources are fine, but remember anyone can write whatever they want and post on the internet. In addition, they can attribute what they write to anyone that choose, so be skeptical about sources from the internet.

13) Don’t rely too heavily on any one author. Find as many points of view as you can. Remember everyone has biases.

14) No specific number of sources are necessary, three or four are almost certainly too few.

15) Don’t use the word I or my in a paper unless it is part of a quotation. Find another way to give your opinion like, “the evidence suggests,” or “it seems,” instead.

16) Make sure you have a title page. Don’t list the title on the first page of the text. The title page is also not the first page referred to below. The first page of the text is.

17) Number your pages. Don’t number the first page. Start with the number “2” on the second page of the text. The top right corner or bottom center are the best places.

18) “Pretty” doesn’t help your grade. I don’t really care whether you put pictures in or not. They won’t particularly help your grade as far as a research paper is concerned.

19) Research Papers are NOT essays. You should not express a point of view or your opinion when you are writing a research paper. Present the evidence that is uncovered by your research and let it do the talking for you.