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Well, most 'witches' were just female practitioners of medicine, midwives, inconvenient neighbours, or handy blamehounds for whatever blight was affecting crops or livestock.
Each step towards medicine becoming a respectable (rather than arcane) male calling, and each step towards it becoming science, shoved women further away from it. Since they were precluded by their feminity from acquiring formal 'skill' they weren't able to follow the medical world as it emerged and tromped off into the scientific dawn. So they remained on the edges. They were the ones who helped poor women give birth, or knew the remedies for childhood sickness.
As the skilled world of the physician began to encroach on the women's world, they were pushed further away, and we start to get a slew of very negative images of 'crones' and old women and witches.
The movement of a 'task' to a 'skilled' trade is quite often a masculinising process. There's a brilliant study I read, ages ago, that tracks the changes in brewing, from a ubiquitous female task in the early medieval era, to an all-male skilled trade in the early modern era. From 'brewsters' to 'brewers'. Fascinating stuff.
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