I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.


Anne Sexton paints out string imagery through the poem showing how women throughout history have been enduring pain both mentally and physically. From calling witches for breaking the norms to being abused women have endured so much. She is that kind of woman because she is somebody who chooses to be herself. There are no good or bad women just human beings who are different. Writing throughout the Cold War, Sexton was keenly conscious of the financial importance of American housewives in the 1960s. "Her Kind" concludes with an "[un]ashamed" confession of suicide-desire that individualizes death against a twentieth-century backdrop of genocide and survival anxiety.