Witches, Witchhunting and Women, Silvia Federici
Witches, Witchhunting and Women, Silvia Federici
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Witches, Witch-hunting and Women

Author: Silvia Federici

Narrator: J. Lee Craig

Unabridged: 2 hr 38 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/15/2021

Synopsis

We are 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 relations. In this new work that revisits some of the main themes of Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici examines the root causes of these developments and outlines the consequences for the women affected and their communities. She argues that, no less than the witch hunts in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe and the “New World,” this new war on women 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, what we discover behind today’s violence against women are processes of enclosure, land dispossession, and the remolding of women’s reproductive activities and subjectivity.As well as an investigation into the causes of this new violence, the book is also a feminist call to arms. Federici’s work provides new ways of understanding the methods in which women are resisting victimization and offers a powerful reminder that reconstructing the memory of the past is crucial for the struggles of the present.

About Silvia Federici

Silvia Federici is a New York-based scholar, teacher, and feminist who wrote Caliban and the Witch. She is a professor emerita and teaching fellow at Hofstra University in New York State, where she was a social science professor. She also taught at the University of Port Harcourt in Nigeria.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Hannah on October 19, 2018

This is a small book consisting of a series of articles written by Silvia Federici. She begins with a summary of her research into the 16th and 17th century witch hunts in Europe and America which killed and tortured thousands of women. Her thesis is how witch hunts occurred in the context of the de......more

Goodreads review by Mckenzie on November 20, 2018

First time reading Silvia Federici, and I’m not sure how. Caliban & the Witch has been on my ‘to read’ list for several years. Apparently Witches, Witch-Hunting, & Women condenses a lot of the former’s arguments, or at least provides an introduction to them. Some of the essays seem to be laying grou......more

Goodreads review by Colleen on August 22, 2019

Silvia Federici is a long time activist on a range of human rights issues, co-founder of the Wages for Housework movement, and a radical Marxist feminist and scholar. I've always learned from and been inspired by her work, from Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, to Re......more

Goodreads review by Louise on July 28, 2019

I decided to read this short book before reading Caliban and the Witch, and it has seriously whet my appetite for the more detailed exploration of the violent transformation from feudalism to capitalism achieved over the bodies of women. The essay regarding the meaning, and devaluation, of the word......more

Goodreads review by Julia on February 22, 2021

A fantastic collection of essays, this book brought Federici to my attention and she has since become one of my favourite thinkers. The blend of sociology, history, cultural theory, and socialist politic in this book provides a captivating read that will send you into deeper contemplation when you a......more

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