Silvia Federici is an Italian American scholar who wrote a book about witch hunts that turned out to be a book about capitalism, patriarchy, and the theft of women’s labor. One of the most important feminist books of the last 50 years. Not nearly as widely read as it should be (which tells us something).
the witch hunts were not about superstition. They were about stealing. The shift from feudalism to capitalism required destroying women’s control over their own bodies and labor. Midwives who knew about birth control and abortion were prime targets. Women who lived alone or owned land were targets. The witch hunts were a campaign of terror designed to drive women into the home where their unpaid labor could be exploited for free.
Caliban and the Witch (2004) connects the witch hunts to the enclosure of common lands, the colonization of the Americas, and the slave trade. All part of the same machine. Capitalism needed to crush every alternative way of living and force people into wage labor or domestic servitude. It was not an accident. It was a plan.
Federici is also behind Wages for Housework. Her logic being domestic labor is the engine of capitalism. Without women cooking, cleaning, and raising kids for free, the whole thing collapses. Paying for housework would not fix everything but it would expose the lie that women’s work is not real work.
Starter book: Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (2004). Read the introduction and the chapter on the witch hunts.
