Federici, Silvia. _Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women_. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2018. # Progressive Summary Capitalist development began with a war on women: the witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe and the New World. Capitalism requires a massive workforce and a more disciplined form of labour. Naming and persecuting women as "witches" paved the way to the confinement of women in Europe to unpaid domestic labour. It legitimated their subordination to men. It gave the state control over their reproductive capacity, guaranteeing the creation of new generations of workers. We are seeing a resurgence in violence against women because globalization is a process of political recolonization intended to give capital uncontested control over the world's natural wealth and human labour, and this cannot be achieved without attacking women, who are responsible for the reproduction of their communities (through physical birth and cultural transmission.) Violence against women is more intense in those parts of the world (sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia) that are richer in natural resources and are now marked for commercial ventures, and where the anticolonial struggle has been the strongest. Brutalizing women paves the way for land grabs and privatizations. # Key Points Witch hunts began in England in the 16th century, and peaked in the 17th. No hard evidence that witch-hunting was caused by enclosures. Witch-hunting was a multi-causal phenomenon. - However, there are strong correlations. - Witch-hunting took place in rural areas, the site of the enclosures. - The main area of witch-hunting was Essex, where enclosures had happened for a century before the witch-hunt. - From 1580-1620, silver coming from South America contributed to economic pressure by increasing the price of grain and other agricultural goods. This coincides with the period of the witch hunt. - Older women were mostly affected by the development of rising prices and loss of former protections. - Old manorial system had given widows the right of free-bench, which gave the widow access to as little as a quarter or as much as a whole of her husband's holding. - If she couldn't cultivate it herself, she could surrender it to a younger member of the family in return for a guarantee of maintenance. - Since the Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest in 1215, widow's right to estovers (ie right to wood from land that one does not own) was guaranteed. But the Reformation and the new commercial spirit forbade the giving and receiving of charity, and begging was only allowed with the granting of a license by the justices of the peace. - Most of the witches were poor women, were accused of bewitching pigs, cows, horses, geldings and mares (precisely the animals that were siphoned off through enclosure) and it was said that the Devil came to them in times of need and promised them freedom from want. - The witches were not just victims, but resisted impverishment and social exclusion. They cast reproachful looks and cursed those who refused them help. They made unwelcome appearances at neighbours' doorsteps and tried to ingratiate themselves by giving gifts to children. - The witch contradicted the model of femininity that was promoted by the law, the pulpit and the reorganization of family that was imposed in Europe during this time. - She was often a healer, and this was seen as a danger to the local and national power structure. By attacking witches, authorities were simultaneously punishing: - Attack on private property. - Social insubordination. - Propagation of magic beliefs (which implied that there were powers that the authorities could not control). - Deviation from the sexual norm that sexual behaviour and procreation were under the rule of the state. Invoking demonic evil was the only way authorities could turn women against women. Witches were a warning to other women who might be tempted to rise up against oppression. It was mostly men who initiated witchcraft charges, and pressured other women to testify. Enclosure is not just about land, but about cutting people off from knowledge, their bodies, and their relationship to others. Capitalism introduced self-control and discipline as the mark of humanity, because these were qualities that were deisred in a labour force. Before capitalism, there was a continuity between men and animals. By the 17th century, Descartes had introduced his theory that animals were nonsentient machines. Touching them, caressing them, and living with them, as was the norm in rural areas, became taboo. Witches were accused of being given animal helpers or familiars by the Devil. Witches were considered irrational and bestial by association. Witch hunts helped to construct a capitalist world that taught women to accept the leadership of men and to accept the place assigned to them in capitalist society. Women were a particular threat to the capitalist class because they were historically associated with shamanic powers due to their role in reproduction. They were credited with a special understanding of nature and an ability to understand the hidden property of things. They were often practitioners of magic (healers, folk doctors, herbalists, midwives, makers of love philters.) --- **From weavers of memory to gossip** The history of the word "gossip" shows how gender oppression functions and reproduces itself. Initially, it meant "close female friend" and was associated with solidarity. It eventually came to mean idle, backbiting talk, sowing discord. The word was derived from Old English "God" and "sibb", which means "godparent". At first it referred to one who stands in spiritual relation to a baptized child. Then broadened to companions at childbirth. And finally a term for women friends. There was no derogatory connotation at this point. Women in the Middle Ages could create their own social network and social spaces. In the 14th century Italy, a woman could still go by herself to court to denounce a man if he assaulted or molested her. By the 16th century, she had lost this standing. This was partly due to the production of Mystery plays sponsored by the guilds, which were becoming male-dominated institutions. The plays showed women engaging in idle talk, or made fun of men who allowed their women to be in a dominating position. In 1546, a proclamation was issued forbidding women to meet together to "babble and talk" and ordering husbands to "keep their wives in their houses." A torture device called a "scold's bridle" or "gossip's bridle" made its first appearance in Scotland in 1567. An iron frame was placed around a woman's head, and a bridle bit about 2 inches long and one inch wide was inserted into the mouth and pressed on top of the tongue, often studded with spikes so that it was painful to move the tongue. --- Gender-specific forms of violence happened on American plantations. By the 18th century, there was systemic rape, and planters tried to replace the importation of slaves from Africa with a local breeding industry centered around Virginia. --- In the 1920s and 30s, at the peak of the eugenic movement, female promiscuousness was punished with instituionalization in mental hospitals or sterilization. The sterilization of women of colour, poor women and women who had sex outside marriage continued into the 1960s, and was the most rapidly growing form of birth control. In the 1950s, lobotomy was used as a cure for depression, and ideal for women destined for domestic work, which was thought to require no brain. --- Rita Laura Segato talks of "expressive violence" and "pedagogical cruelty" in Latin America, and suggests that the objective is to terrorize women and to send a message to entire populations that there will be no mercy. Violence to women is a crucial part of the operations of mining and petroleum companies that need to displace villages in Africa and Latin America. > It is essential to emphasize that violence against women is a key element in this new global war, not only because of the horror it evokes or the messages it sends but because of what women represent in their capacity to keep their communities together and, equally important, to defend noncommercial conceptions of security and wealth. # Resonances # Quotes > ... as a mode of production positing ‘industry’ as the main source of the accumulation, capitalism could not take hold without forging a new type of individual and a new social discipline boosting the productive capacity of labor. This involved a historic battle against anything posing a limit to the full exploitation of the laborer, starting with the web of relations that tied the individuals to the natural world, to other people, and to their own bodies. Key to this process was the destruction of the magical conception of the body that had prevailed in the Middle Ages, which attributed to it powers that the capitalist class could not exploit, that were incompatible with the transformation of the laborers into work machines, and that could even enhance their resistance to it. These were the shamanic powers that precapitalist, agricultural societies have attributed to all or to special individuals, and that in Europe survived despite centuries of Christianization, often being assimilated into Christian rituals and beliefs. > Gossip today designates informal talk, often damaging to those that are its object. It is mostly talk that draws its satisfaction from an irresponsible disparaging of others; it is circulation of information not intended for the public ear but capable of ruining people’s reputations, and it is unequivocally ‘women’s talk.’ > > It is women who ‘gossip,’ presumably having nothing better to do and having less access to real knowledge and information and a structural inability to construct factually based, rational discourses. Thus, gossip is an integral part of the devaluation of women’s personality and work, especially domestic work, reputedly the ideal terrain on which this practice flourishes. > > This conception of ‘gossip,’ as we have seen, emerged in a particular historical context. Viewed from the perspective of other cultural traditions, this ‘idle women’s talk’ would actually appear quite different. In many parts of the world, women have historically been seen as the weavers of memory—those who keep alive the voices of the past and the histories of the communities, who transmit them to the future generations and, in so doing, create a collective identity and profound sense of cohesion. They are also those who hand down acquired knowledges and wisdoms—concerning medical remedies, the problems of the heart, and the understanding of human behavior, starting with that of men. Labeling all this production of knowledge ‘gossip’ is part of the degradation of women—it is a continuation of the demonologists’ construction of the stereotypical woman as prone to malignity, envious of other people’s wealth and power, and ready to lend an ear to the Devil. It is in this way that women have been silenced and to this day excluded from many places where decisions are taken, deprived of the possibility of defining their own experience, and forced to cope with men’s misogynous or idealized portraits of them. But we are regaining our knowledge. As a woman recently put it in a meeting on the meaning of witchcraft, the magic is: “We know that we know.” > ... both communal land tenure and subsistence agriculture have come under heavy institutional attack, criticized by the World Bank as one of the causes of global poverty under the assumption that land is a ‘dead asset’ unless it is legally registered and used as collateral to obtain bank loans with which to start some entrepreneurial activity. > > In reality, it is thanks to subsistence farming that many people have been able to survive brutal austerity programs. But critiques like the World Bank’s, repeated as they have been in scores of meetings with government authorities and local leaders, have been successful in both Africa and India, so that women have been forced to give up subsistence production and work as their husbands’ helpers in commodity production. As Maria Mies has observed, this coerced dependence is one of the specific ways in which women in rural areas are being “integrated into development” that is itself a violent process. Not only is it “guaranteed by the violence inherent in the patriarchal men-women relations,” it also devalues women, so that the men of their communities view them (especially when they are old) as useless beings whose assets and labor can be appropriated without qualms. > ... witchcraft accusations are more frequent in areas designated for commercial projects or where land privatization processes are underway (as in India’s tribal communities) and when the accused have some land that can be confiscated. In Africa, in particular, the victims are older women living alone off some piece of land, while the accusers are younger members of their communities, or even of their own families, generally unemployed youth, who see these elderly women as usurping what should belong to them, and who may be manipulated by other actors who remain in the shadows, including local leaders, who often conspire with business interests.