'Federici’s latest, Witches, Witch-Hunting and Women, updates and expands the core thesis of Caliban, in which she argued that ​“witch hunts” were a way to alienate women from the means of reproduction.

In the transition from feudalism to capitalism, Federici argues, there was an intervening revolutionary push toward communalism. Communalist groups often embraced ​“free love” and sexual egalitarianism — unmarried men and women lived together, and some communes were all-women — and even the Catholic church only punished abortion with a few years’ penance.

For serfs, who tilled the land in exchange for a share of its crops, home was work, and vice versa; men and women grew the potatoes together.

But in capitalism, waged laborers have to work outside the home all the time, which means someone else needs to be at home all the time, doing the domestic work. Gender roles, and the subjugation of women, became newly necessary.'

https://inthesetimes.com/article/capitalism-witches-women-witch-hunting-sylvia-federici-caliban

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