We started the week with magic, then miracles. Can witchcraft be far behind? Tired yet of rhetorical questions?

I just learned that Sylvia Federici, professor emerita at Hofstra University, renowned political theorist and feminist activist had a new book out: Witches, Witch-hunting and Women (2018). It expands on topics found in her seminal work from about 15 years ago, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (2004), which was formative reading. (I have not yet read the new one, except excerpts.)

I’ll try and introduce the main themes of her work, as far as that is possible in this short space. I’ll then link to a short chapter on gossip that is available online and makes for fascinating reading.

Traditional explanations for the witch hunts of the 16th and 17th century across Europe, and later in South America concerned 2 factors: for one, scapegoating was needed to explain the deaths from epidemics, wars and hunger (it was the Little Ice Age after all). Secondly the catholic church felt its grip slip, particularly during the time of reformation and needed to show some power. Witch hunts were born, (and not the kind that certain presidents prone to cry victimhood claim, either) and cost the lives of between 80.000 and over 100.000 mostly older women, the statistics vary. Many myths about witch hunts are still alive and well.

Sylvia Federici explores different territory. She looks at the transition from feudalism to new capitalistic economic systems, leading up to the industrial revolution . Where before men and women shared agrarian work, a commons and open cohabitation, now laborers were needed for piece work, eventually confined to factories. That meant that (unpaid) domestic work fell entirely to the women who were also supposed to produce ever more children to be subjugated to production’s demands. Women who kept contraception, pregnancy and child birth in female hands were declared witches: midwives, herbalists who provided contraception, abortionists. Their ability to help women control their own bodies was dangerous to the system that needed to expand the labor force. Women, who refused to be confined to newly “private” marriages that subjugated them to reproductive servitude and complete dependence since their labor was unpaid, were also declared witches.

In her own words:

This means that with the advent of capitalism a new sexual division of labor came into existence that deepened the differences between women and men, male and female labor, devalued women’s work, subordinated women to men, and condemned women to unpaid labor. It is significant, in this context, that, by the sixteenth century, in some European towns, women were practically forbidden to work for a wage and in the ideology of the witch-hunt a connection was made between women seeking money and making a pact with the devil: it was the devil that gave witches money in times of need. Also prostitutes were seen as witches, as they sold their services for money.

Anything that could keep women in their place and keep them from finding collective power or solidarity or just emotional closeness to others, was pursued. Here is but one example: gossip used to be a positive term applied to women friends who would get together and chat. During the 17th century it was suddenly loaded with negative connotations – talk outside the house (and its possibility to break the isolation that women felt) had to be stopped. The same courts who pursued witches also tortured and punished “gossips” who were seen as a danger to the hierarchical status quo in male-dominated households. They might teach other women about reproductive issues, they might relate historical knowledge of times when women were on more equal footing, they might suggest ways to rebel. You can read an excerpted chapter here.

It’s not over, either. Just look at how accused rapist Stephen Elliott’s lawsuit against Moira Donegan and the Shitty Media Men list wanted to haul “gossips” into court. 

Violence against women, the killing of women has not abated. It might not be done after trials in church courts, but we see it on a daily basis in the world around us, from domestic violence to the killing of political activists to the slaughter of Kurdish politicians by the invading Turkish army. We see it in selective infanticide across cultures, where girls are aborted or killed for being the wrong gender. No witchcraft involved. No devil either. Simple structural demands from a particular economic system, hunger for power, and desire to maintain a hierarchical status quo, with silent acquiescence enforced.

Just give me a magic wand, already.

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Since witches refused to be photographed and given the associations to the demands of capital and hierarchies within the labor force, photographs are of industrial staircases today. We know who’s up and who’s down….

Music is a witch mix – pick and choose!

Here is a French witch (It is rumored opium-addicted Berlioz wrote this for his infatuation with a Shakespearian actress who wrote him off as crazy and obsessive yet later married him (briefly) when she heard this piece was about her. ) Gossip!

Here is a Czech witch met by Dvorak at noon

and here is a Scottish witch (this was written as a requiem for her, quite recently.)