Caliban and the Witch

Federici's most influential work argues that the transition to capitalism required not only the enclosure of common lands and the disciplining of the waged workforce but the simultaneous construction of a new gender order through systematic violence against women. The witch hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which killed tens of thousands of women across Europe and its colonies, were not episodes of superstitious hysteria but coordinated campaigns of social engineering. They targeted precisely the women whose autonomy, knowledge, and economic independence threatened the gendered division of labor that capitalism required: healers, midwives, women who controlled their own reproduction, women who participated in communal land management, women whose subsistence did not depend on male wages.