The Real History That Explains the Significance of the Witch’s Broomstick in Wicked

This week Wicked: For Good hits theaters, promising to tell audiences the second half of the story of how a young, talented, green girl of Oz named Elphaba Thropp became the Wicked Witch of the West, while her best friend became Glinda the Good. The first installment of the film, which adapted and expanded the Tony-Award winning musical, made roughly $750 million and has received dozens of awards.

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Central to this story is Elphaba’s broomstick. The first film ends with her bewitching a broomstick and flying away from both her best friend and the Wizard’s plans to cage and silence the talking animals of Oz. The memorable scene of Elphaba flying with her broomstick dressed in her classic hat and cloak has been lauded, marketed, and mocked in popular culture over the past year.

The crucial role of the broomstick in the Wicked movies—and earlier Wizard of Oz stories—reflects a long history of women’s mobility being connected to perceptions of wickedness, as women reclaimed a tool of domestic labor to gain both physical and social liberation.

Accusations that witches rode broomsticks date back to 15th century Europe. As American culture developed, the image of a woman astride her broom became the indelible image of a witch. This image stuck because it illustrated women’s perversion of their domestic, supposedly divinely-inspired gender roles in favor of the power to travel through the night at the behest of Satan. Openly sexualized with stories of “flying ointments” rubbed on staves, brooms encapsulated western society’s fear of women who stepped outside their proscribed roles.

Given this history and the broomstick’s prominence in Wicked, it may be surprising to realize that the Wicked Witch of the West did not carry a broom in L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) — which began more than a century of retellings of this story.

Baum wrote his book in a moment when women were fighting to increase both their physical and social mobility. They organized to secure the vote, and soon embraced wearing pants, as well as learning to ride bicycles and drive automobiles. Inspired in part by his suffragist mother-in-law, Matilda Joslyn Gage, who wrote one of the first historical studies of witch trials as a system of oppression against women, Baum actually created female characters who challenged the earlier tropes about witches and brooms. Baum imagined “good” witches who rivaled “wicked” witches in power. In Oz, society was shaped by the action (or inaction) of women—which could be a positive thing.

In the book, W.W. Denslow drew the Wicked Witch with braided hair, a wrinkled face, and an umbrella. Lacking a broomstick, she was not airborne, did not harass Dorothy and the gang throughout Oz, and certainly was not the story’s main antagonist. Perhaps even more importantly, good witches existed, and their magic was powerful, providing positive images of women with both social influence and physical abilities for millions of readers.

Yet the notion of bad witches who didn’t haunt the skies left a void for audiences conditioned to this traditional image. Within only a few years, the Wicked Witches of Oz had regained their brooms and, with them, became central antagonists in the many spin-off stories and adaptations inspired by Baum’s novel. For instance, in a 1910 silent film, the Wicked Witch Momba bursts into the scene astride a broom to “assert her power over the Wizard of Oz.” There was also a racial component to this stereotype. Louis Weslyn and Charles Albert wrote a horrifically racist blackface minstrel song called The Witch Behind the Moon that included lyrics about a Black witch who lived behind the moon and could fly down on her broomstick to snatch up children.

Each of these adaptations emphasized witches’ ability to travel quickly and surprise unsuspecting victims as a core aspect of the terror they imposed. The message of was clear: women, particularly Black women, who cast aside domestic and maternal roles in favor of controlling their own mobility represented a threat to others.

The role of the broom as an indication of the witch’s evil nature solidified in the 1938 adaptation of The Wizard of Oz by MGM. Working to condense the storyline and identify a singular enemy, writers like Noel Langley reoriented the tale around a menacing Wicked Witch. Crucially, Margaret Hamilton’s iconic Wicked Witch used her phallic broom to stalk her prey — marking her both deviant and masculine, challenging the wizard through her independence and mobility.

Thanks to syndication and, after 1956, an annual airing on CBS, Hamilton’s Wicked Witch produced a long-lasting impression that painted witches as sinister scary figures dashing through the sky astride brooms.

Yet, as second wave feminism took root in the 1960s, many women seized on broom-riding witches as heroes who subverted ideas of domesticity. In the Women’s Liberation Movement, the title of “witch” became the emblem of the quintessential outsider, hated and feared without reason. In 1968, the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy, or W.I.T.C.H., cast a hex on Wall Street, denouncing the oppression of not only women, but of America’s working classes. Radical feminist writings, like Andrea Dworkin’s Woman Hating (1974) and Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology (1978), analyzed the witch as the original Woman (with a capital W). While some people also practiced goddess worship or wiccan spiritualism, for many the witch was simply a cultural display of joy and a rejection of domestic servitude. The witch astride her broom became a symbol for rebellion.

Writing in the aftermath of these feminist reclamations, Gregory Maguire opened his 1995 novel Wicked with the Witch airborne. She was “a mile above Oz,” balancing “on the wind’s forward edge.” Maguire gave readers the witch they expected before flashing back to Elphaba’s rise to infamy, arguing that no witch was inherently wicked. Despite McGuire acquiescing to reader’s preconceptions of the witch, the mysterious flying broom was not a central item in Elphaba’s initial rejection of the Wizard’s autocratic reign. Instead, she went “underground” with a radical anti-Wizard group.

It is only later that she receives a broom that linked her “to her destiny.” Once Elphaba learns to ride it, she extends her reach only to again set in motion her own death. At her fateful meeting with Dorothy, a single burning broomstraw falls into her lap, setting her skirts on fire. Not knowing Elphaba is allergic to water, Dorothy empties a pale of water on her to put out the fire, accidentally melting her. The broom again becomes a fated partner in Elphaba’s story, the tool that helps her soar but also shrivel.

Flying on a broomstick assumes a more central role in Wicked the musical. Pulled down by a life of social expectations, shame, familial demands, and the Wizard’s requests, Elphie requires flight, re-centering her broomstick as the physical embodiment of her growing power. Immortalized in a famous scene where she sings the song “Defying Gravity,” while soaring above the stage gripping her broomstick, she rejects subservience to a tyrant to maintain her own morals. She sees herself as embracing her own and others’ liberation—which marks her as wicked in the eyes of Ozians.

The latest Wicked movies ratchet this iconography up even higher. In the first film released last year, the broomstick becomes a character itself. With a set of twisted vines and gnarled wood, looking all the more like a wizard’s staff, the broom has its own cast member making it float.

Glinda balks at the opportunity to straddle the broom with Elphaba and combine their powers to reach unlimited heights. Alone, Cynthia Erivo’s Wicked Witch leaps from a window and plummets towards the ground only to jerk skyward and ascend to new altitudes. As in the play, Elphie does not simply ride upon the broom but levitates while holding it—perhaps indicating that unlike the sentient broomsticks of other popular culture witches, she herself is the source of power that is channeled into her trusty broom.

While viewers surely know that this atmospheric rise will ultimately result in a similarly spectacular fall, the hopefulness of “Defying Gravity” is what keeps audiences returning to this story. As witches claimed the sky on their brooms in Oz, and elsewhere in American popular culture, they articulated a desire to liberate themselves from the expectations that had long grounded women. Yet, this idea of self-empowerment also explained why witches became classic villains in popular culture. A woman who was able to control her own mobility could not only reshape her own life, but society as well. The threat of these women scared and excited audiences, helping keep the fated broomstick central to the story of Oz for more than a century.

Rebecca Scofield is an associate professor of American History and Chair of the Department of History at the University of Idaho. She is the author of Outriders: Rodeo at the Fringes of the American West and co-author of Slapping Leather: Queer Cowfolx at the Gay Rodeo. Her latest project, Astride the Beast, a cultural history of women riding astride, is under contract with the University of Texas Press.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.

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