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This is essentially the thesis of Silvia Federici’s tremendous book, “Caliban and the Witch.” Witch hunts were pursued to reorganize familial, gender, and labor

This is essentially the thesis of Silvia Federici’s tremendous book, “Caliban and the Witch.” Witch hunts were pursued to reorganize familial, gender, and labor relations to suit the needs of an emergent Capitalism: >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. Early feudal elites in rural Europe enclosed public land, rendering it private and controllable, and patriarchy enclosed women in “private” marriages, imposing on them the reproductive servitude of bearing men’s children and the emotional labor of caring for men’s every need. Pregnancy and childbirth, once a natural function, became a job that women did for their male husband-bosses—that is to say, childbirth became alienated labor. “Witches,” according to witch-hunting texts like the Malleus Maleficarum, were women who kept childbirth and pregnancy in female hands: midwives, abortionists, herbalists who provided contraception. They were killed to cement patriarchal power and create the subjugated, domestic labor class necessary for capitalism. http://inthesetimes.com/article/21592/capitalism-witches-women-witch-hunting-sylvia-federici-caliban http://inthesetimes.com/article/21592/capitalism-witches-wom...

kimi 6y ago
Frankly, seems rather far off. This is looking at the past through modern (or better, current news) eyes. The peaks of witch-hunting and capitalism are rather well spaced. And there was no need for patriarchy to do anything - they were firmly in control with zero contestants.
ertian 6y ago
Wouldn't it be nice if history were actually this simple? The idea here is that Romans, with their pater familias, or the Confucian Chinese, for whom the father was a mini-emperor, were just preparing the way for capitalism, 2000+ years before the fact? Marriage and home-bound women were not an invention of the late medival world. Women may well have been more free in the preceding period, but that was the exception, not the norm.
- claudeganon 6y ago
  This isn’t a refutation of Federici’s argument. Her’s is specifically that the conditions of European feudalism created an emergent communalism that was then subjugated through witch trials and their mythology in service to the new, Capitalist ordering. She doesn’t argue that gendered forms of subjugation have no prior context in history. And whether or not the changes in women’s social/economic conditions were “temporary” depends on a rationalization of the violence that was used to reorder society and a fallacious appeal to nature that makes little sense in terms of how Capitalism otherwise radically transformed societies.
  - twsttest 6y ago
    The witch hunt as a means of enforcing female subservience in the context of an emergent capitalism is a just-so story that is driven more by a desire to demonize capitalism than anything else. Gender roles have remained pretty static throughout European history so it doesn't make sense to pin down witch paranoia on a changing of gender roles or attitudes that never changed in the first place. The better explanation is the one offered by the OP, that a pre-existing desire by religious authorities to root out heresy found fertile ground in the fervor of the reformation era. The result was witch hysteria.
    - chrisco255 6y ago
      In my reading of history, hysteria is often driven by plagues or famines. Look at the Mayan culture of human sacrifice. It's very similar to witch hunting. I think when a formerly thriving society is struck by a series of disasters that threaten the social order, false enemies get created as scapegoats. Either it's an angry god or a witch's curse.
    - pasabagi 6y ago
      >Gender roles have remained pretty static throughout European history I've generally heard the inverse statement. Compare the women in Chaucer to the women in Shakespeare, and you'll immediately notice a huge difference in behaviour. Usually, people say that women's rights took a precipitous dive in the 1600s, with the invention of things like brutal punishments for 'nagging', and so on. Which would fit with the idea it was related to primitive accumulation. I don't really agree with the grandparent thesis, but I think the chronology is correct.
scarecrowbob 6y ago
You're going to have a tough sell with that for folks who haven't read her work. I have, and it was more or less the first thing I thought of when I read the title of the article. I mean, if "primitive accumulation" isn't a thing you're curious about, then her work is just gonna not make a lot of sense... but I personally find her ideas quite convincing. So I am not surprised when folks who aren't in that political discussion reject theses like those out of hand. So, yeah, I think it's relevant. Sorry you got folks who don't seem familiar with the material responding as if they were.
- cbHXBY1D 6y ago
  I find that most people are amenable to a materialist conception of history if you just phrase it without the Marxist specific terminology. No need to go into primitive accumulation or explaining dialectics.
jonfw 6y ago
Women and men have significant biological differences, and from my understanding of our evolution, they've had these significant differences for a much longer time that capitalism has existed. Evolution suggests that these biological differences result from differences in selection criteria, which supports the idea that men and women have served different roles over the majority of human existence. Very high mortality rates associated with child birth meant that ability to birth and care for children used to be a highly selective trait. It's modern medicine that has made child birth and caring for children a much easier and safer endeavor, and allowed women to prioritize other roles in their life.
- claudeganon 6y ago
  There’s little uniformity in women’s social and economic roles across the entire spectrum of human civilization, cultures, and history. Women have been equal members of communal tribes, religious and political leaders, agricultural and industrial laborers, fully subjugated and fully autonomous. Any attempt to place the diversity of these experiences into narrow, erroneous appeals to nature is so reductive as to be almost meaningless.
  - epsylon 6y ago
    I love that you're being downvoted for saying something so utterly non-controversial. It's almost as if the fact that there were large matriarchal societies inhabiting America for centuries (arguably millenia) before the first European man set foot on the continent has never been taught to the average HN reader..
    - jonfw 6y ago
      "I know of many exceptions to your evolutionary argument, which makes it entirely worthless" It's not controversial, but it's missing the point. Nobody is arguing that ever single woman in our history preceding capitalism had to prioritize child care over leadership or labor. If you're talking about the role of women over time, you're talking about how it applies to averages. It'd be impossible to discuss this with any sort of scale if you had to reconcile every generality with it's various exceptions.

kimi 6y ago

Frankly, seems rather far off. This is looking at the past through modern (or better, current news) eyes. The peaks of witch-hunting and capitalism are rather well spaced. And there was no need for patriarchy to do anything - they were firmly in control with zero contestants.

ertian 6y ago

Wouldn't it be nice if history were actually this simple? The idea here is that Romans, with their pater familias, or the Confucian Chinese, for whom the father was a mini-emperor, were just preparing the way for capitalism, 2000+ years before the fact? Marriage and home-bound women were not an invention of the late medival world. Women may well have been more free in the preceding period, but that was the exception, not the norm.

claudeganon 6y ago
This isn’t a refutation of Federici’s argument. Her’s is specifically that the conditions of European feudalism created an emergent communalism that was then subjugated through witch trials and their mythology in service to the new, Capitalist ordering. She doesn’t argue that gendered forms of subjugation have no prior context in history. And whether or not the changes in women’s social/economic conditions were “temporary” depends on a rationalization of the violence that was used to reorder society and a fallacious appeal to nature that makes little sense in terms of how Capitalism otherwise radically transformed societies.
- twsttest 6y ago
  The witch hunt as a means of enforcing female subservience in the context of an emergent capitalism is a just-so story that is driven more by a desire to demonize capitalism than anything else. Gender roles have remained pretty static throughout European history so it doesn't make sense to pin down witch paranoia on a changing of gender roles or attitudes that never changed in the first place. The better explanation is the one offered by the OP, that a pre-existing desire by religious authorities to root out heresy found fertile ground in the fervor of the reformation era. The result was witch hysteria.
  - chrisco255 6y ago
    In my reading of history, hysteria is often driven by plagues or famines. Look at the Mayan culture of human sacrifice. It's very similar to witch hunting. I think when a formerly thriving society is struck by a series of disasters that threaten the social order, false enemies get created as scapegoats. Either it's an angry god or a witch's curse.
  - pasabagi 6y ago
    >Gender roles have remained pretty static throughout European history I've generally heard the inverse statement. Compare the women in Chaucer to the women in Shakespeare, and you'll immediately notice a huge difference in behaviour. Usually, people say that women's rights took a precipitous dive in the 1600s, with the invention of things like brutal punishments for 'nagging', and so on. Which would fit with the idea it was related to primitive accumulation. I don't really agree with the grandparent thesis, but I think the chronology is correct.

scarecrowbob 6y ago

You're going to have a tough sell with that for folks who haven't read her work. I have, and it was more or less the first thing I thought of when I read the title of the article. I mean, if "primitive accumulation" isn't a thing you're curious about, then her work is just gonna not make a lot of sense... but I personally find her ideas quite convincing. So I am not surprised when folks who aren't in that political discussion reject theses like those out of hand. So, yeah, I think it's relevant. Sorry you got folks who don't seem familiar with the material responding as if they were.

cbHXBY1D 6y ago
I find that most people are amenable to a materialist conception of history if you just phrase it without the Marxist specific terminology. No need to go into primitive accumulation or explaining dialectics.

jonfw 6y ago

Women and men have significant biological differences, and from my understanding of our evolution, they've had these significant differences for a much longer time that capitalism has existed. Evolution suggests that these biological differences result from differences in selection criteria, which supports the idea that men and women have served different roles over the majority of human existence. Very high mortality rates associated with child birth meant that ability to birth and care for children used to be a highly selective trait. It's modern medicine that has made child birth and caring for children a much easier and safer endeavor, and allowed women to prioritize other roles in their life.

claudeganon 6y ago
There’s little uniformity in women’s social and economic roles across the entire spectrum of human civilization, cultures, and history. Women have been equal members of communal tribes, religious and political leaders, agricultural and industrial laborers, fully subjugated and fully autonomous. Any attempt to place the diversity of these experiences into narrow, erroneous appeals to nature is so reductive as to be almost meaningless.
- epsylon 6y ago
  I love that you're being downvoted for saying something so utterly non-controversial. It's almost as if the fact that there were large matriarchal societies inhabiting America for centuries (arguably millenia) before the first European man set foot on the continent has never been taught to the average HN reader..
  - jonfw 6y ago
    "I know of many exceptions to your evolutionary argument, which makes it entirely worthless" It's not controversial, but it's missing the point. Nobody is arguing that ever single woman in our history preceding capitalism had to prioritize child care over leadership or labor. If you're talking about the role of women over time, you're talking about how it applies to averages. It'd be impossible to discuss this with any sort of scale if you had to reconcile every generality with it's various exceptions.