Patriarchy is male supremacy over women. The Me Too movement fighting sexual assault and harassment is a modern battle against this centuries-long phenomenon. In Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women (PM Press 2018), Silvia Federici connects patriarchy to the rise of a cash society, or capitalism, in western Europe between the 15th and 18th century, a process proceeding in the so-called developing world of the Global South now.”
Why speak of witch-hunts in 2018? Federici’s themes are straightforward in her two-part book of essays. One theme is the process of peasant removal, or enclosing of the common lands in Europe, that disrupts the social status of men and women. What Europeans did to Africans and indigenous Americans in the so-called “new world” undergirded that old country pattern of conquest and theft that created poverty, immiserating women. Then the patriarchal state criminalized them. It was and is a one-two punch. Federici continues. In Africa and India now, for instance, such land dispossession is underway to benefit transnational corporations.
Communal property relations end violently. With-hunts and homicides are symptoms of this dislocation. Whether it is by the bullet or fire, dehumanizing women as witches is a violent process. Federici shows how the language, replete with the patriarchal-structures of male-centered religious demonology, facilitates the maiming and murdering of independent females.
Federici unpacks male demonizing of women as…