The idea of the church fathers that women were, at best, a necessary evil and at worst the form most often assumed by the Devil of temptation, made it seem that all divergence from the purely domestic type was proof of collusion with evil powers.
And all nervous ailments were once deemed a sign of the witches compact with Satan.

Hence, since the unmitigated drudgery and the hard conditions of the lives of most women made them not only prematurely old but also given to nervous prostration (before that title appeared in the medical lists), the numbers of old women tortured, burned, drowned, beaten, and stoned to death, and otherwise destroyed, seems almost incredible to modern ideas, although so well authenticated in history.
=Old Women and the Witchcraft Delusion.=--The young woman, being necessary for the bearing and rearing of children and the carrying on of important, although despised, labors, might escape active ill treatment.

The old woman, old at thirty-five or forty, often, was not only considered a useless burden but a positive nuisance if she were at all "highstrung" or "meddling." Hence the natural conception, in a time of superstitious fear of evil spirits, of her complicity with those spirits made her seem a danger to society.

The history of the witchcraft delusion and the cruelties that were a part of that delusion show that aged women almost alone suffered from that nightmare of human ignorance.
Doubtless, however, there were even in those days grandmothers beloved and protected, busy even to the last with caretaking of childhood and the rites of hospitality; grandmothers whom their sons and even their sons-in-law revered for some quality of gentleness and sympathy found useful in family emergencies; grandmothers whose shrewd wisdom of experience and fine gift of understanding made them invaluable members of the family circle.

Folk-lore and ancient song give hint of these.
The waste of old age in women, however, is, as has been indicated elsewhere by the writer, the greatest of all social wastes since time began.