Throughout history, when one group or another is the victim of an "othering," we see that the "othering" runs through the path of least resistance; the Red Scare of the 1950s, the Jews and other political undesirables in Nazi Germany, the Indian "savages" in 17th and 18th century America and the European witch hunts do not necessarily align in every respect, but they share at least one common element: they were all aimed at groups which could not easily defend themselves, or who represented attractive targets for other groups with an agenda.
For the women who faced persecution in the witch trials, this was doubly true; old and/or unmarried women presented the most attractive target, as they had nobody to defend them, but their relative independence, without a male figure to whom they might otherwise have owed a kind of subservience, these women would also have represented a threat to the male-dominated order of the day. The targeting of women as witches, then, can be seen in this light as an attempt to reassert male authority over a segment of female society which otherwise rejected it.
Evelyn Heinemann introduces also the idea of male fear of women: these "wise" women had, through their knowledge of herbs, control of their own fertility - a dangerous idea in a society based around primogeniture (Heinemann, 19). When the woman can control her fertility, the woman then also has potential control over whether the male has an heir to whom to pass his legacy.
Heinemann also draws a contrast between these skills and the competition between "female" medicine and "male" medicine. The skill of women healers posed a threat to the male-dominated scientific medical theories (Heinemann, 20), and ths, had to be squeezed out or otherwise made to submit to the male domination of the field.
Thirdly, the topic of fear can also be looped back in with the idea of guilt; often, those accusing women of witchcraft had themselves committed some breach of civility against the women they accused, and the women's (perhaps understandable) discontented reaction stirred up fear in the accusers, that somehow they would be held to account for their behavior (Heinemann, 31). In essence, they worked themselves into a frenzy; sometimes, action itself was unnecessary. Merely intending to commit an immoral act could trigger the guilty conscience.
Heinemann tells of a young man from Regensburg who made the decision to leave his lover and then, in the throes of his guilty conscience, came to believe that he had lost his phallus, and that his lover must have bewitched him. Seeking reparation of his "loss," he took the advice of an old woman and lay in wait for his to-be-jilted lover, choking her with a cloth until she agreed to "heal" him. Upon her touch, he perceived his phallus to be restored to him.
In such a case, we have a classic example of projection: the young man's fear of the repercussions of his own sin was so great that he sought out an external cause for his "incomplete" state. Thus, even as his actions or intentions were to blame for his mental state, he sought as the cause (and the cure) of the harm a female target whom he could blame for his misfortune (Heinemann, 32).
This could even extend beyond one chance instance; the case of Barbell Lauer is such an example. Over the course of 13 years, her run-ins with family and community members piled up such that fear itself was the basis for additional accusations - including an accusation of attempted witchcraft by an individual who claimed to have avoided harm because he had blessed himself earlier in the day! Such an accusation is very Monty Pythonesque when one considers it; "She turned me into a newt! ...I got better." The fear of revenge led people to denounce their rivals as witches, with the idea that as long as conflict existed, they could not be truly safe until the "witch" had been destroyed (Heinemann, 32-4).