Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women

The world is witnessing a new surge of interpersonal and institutional violence against women, including new witch hunts. This surge of violence has occurred alongside an expansion of capitalist social relation. In this new work, Silvia Federici examines the root causes of these developments and outlines the consequences for the women affected and their communities. She argues, that this new war on women, a mirror of witch hunts in 16th- and 17th-century Europe and the “New World,” is a structural element of the new forms of capitalist accumulation. These processes are founded on the destruction of people’s most basic means of reproduction. Like at the dawn of capitalism, the factors behind today’s violence against women are processes of enclosure, land dispossession, and the remolding of women’s reproductive activities and subjectivity.

• Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation
• Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (KAIROS)
• Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers (Contemporary Classics)
• Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Common Notions)
• Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive
• Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto
• Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times (Anarchist Interventions)
• A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Forerunners: Ideas First)
• Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence
• Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval