The Real History Behind 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.

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…