The Witch as the Mother
According to the argument made in Deborah Willis' Malevolent Nurture, witchcraft and the accusations of witchcraft could be traced in part back to the influence of the mother and the fear of maternal power. For example, she suggests that the imps who supposedly came to suckle on the breasts and live in the homes of suspected witches were, in fact, replacements for children that she had either lost or otherwise no longer had for whatever reason. Regarding the existence of witches amongst the classes, she states that "In gentry-level and aristocratic texts...she is featured, rather, as an enemy of God." (Willis 15) This would actually make sense in context because aristocratic women were more likely to rely on wetnurses and therefore, the malice that a high-class witch would be suspected of would focus more on power and influence than the matters of childrearing.
However, even the aristocrats were not exempt from accusations of hereditary witchcraft. Anne Boleyn, the mother of Eliabeth I, was supposedly accused of witchcraft. When Elizabeth came to power, this was one of many reasons that enemies attempted to align her with the devil. On this matter, Diane Purkiss states that "There was an opportunity in the fact that her mother, Anne Boleyn, had been accused of witchcraft; everyone knew that witchcraft descended in the female line." (Purkiss 186)
Midwives
Midwives were considered to be particularly dangerous specifially because they were women who intruded on the mother in a sense and handled her child before she even did. In this time, they could have done any number of things to child and mother, such as cause injury, sickness, or even death. It was also believed that a midwife had the perfect opportunity to offer up the unbaptized child to the devil while the mother was alone and too vulnerable to protect it, thereby increasing her own power and damning the infant's soul. If something happened to the infant or its mother, the midwife was in a very precarious position that ran a high risk of getting her accused of witchcraft. The Malleus Maleficarum also offers up the idea that the midwife may also cause miscarriage, participate in cannabalism, or otherwise hurt the child while it's still in the womb. According to the authors, this is a woman-specific crime since "the devils do these things through the medium of women, and not men." (Kramer et al. 66) It suffices to say, then, that evil associated with children and the home was also evil associated with the expected homemakers: women.
Deborah Willis, Malevolent Nurture, (New York: Cornell University, 1995), 15
Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History, (London: Routledge, 1996), 186.
Heinrich Kramer, and Jacob Sprenger, The Malleus Maleficarum, (1487), 66.