Assignment 06 Silvia Federici Caliban and the Witch degradation of women
The transition from feudalism to capitalism started in the 16th and 17th centuries when land privatization and enclosures began to take place. People were removed from their land against their will and once they were removed they lost their means of production and sustenance.
Before the transition to capitalism women had access to land (commons) and the food they planted. They had control over the land and resources and were able to take care of themselves. They did not necessarily need men to tend to the land and they earned income from the crops the sold. But once the transition to a capitalist society began to take shape “women themselves became the commons, as their work was defined as a natural resource”(pg 97).
The economic and population crisis of the 16th and 17th centuries led to a “bio-power regime” which basically created policies that the state used “to punish any behavior obstructing population growth” (p. 86) which made reproduction and population growth a space where the state exercised control.
Federici argues that control over women’s bodies is linked to this crises. This is where the criminalization of reproduction began. In Europe “severe penalties were introduced in the legal codes to punish women guilty of reproductive crimes”(p87). Repopulization and reproduction of the labor force was what women were reduced to.
The degradation of women and the accumulation of wealth came in the form of state control over reproduction and the construction of women as the non-worker. In constructing the woman as a non worker it relegated them to the home (private sphere) which led to the devaluation of their labor. Women’s work was then viewed as a “communal good anyone could appropriate and use at will”(p.97).
The state controlled women’s reproduction and procreation through strict laws and penalties for using contraception, surveillance of pregnant women by midwives, neighbors and even family members. Women’s was so closely survelled that women were “required to register every pregnancy”(p.88).
Women were viewed as reproductive machines forced to reproduce the labor force. Women’s “wombs became public territory, controlled by men and the state, and procreation was directly placed at the service of capitalist accumulation”(p.89). Women were not only constituted as reproductive laborers without being paid but because they were relegated to the private sphere their labor became invisible while at the same time reproducing the conditions that enabled men to go to work.
Bodies were viewed as “raw materials, workers and breeders of the state”(p.88). The witch hunts were another way that women were degraded. Women were the ones that resisted the enclosures and physically removed many of them. Women are the ones that stood in protest during meat and food shortages. It was these women that were targeted by the witch hunts because they resisted.
Over time women were not to live alone. They could not be seen in the streets alone and even at some point could not even be seen peering out of a window. The state continued to enact strict laws that criminalized any activity women took part in. Prostitution was previously an acceptable practice but as the attack on women continued prostitution too became criminalized. .
The family unit (where a women lost most of her power). Women and children were considered the subordinate class according to the new definition of the family in which the husband was responsible for disciplining and supervising them. Once women married their husbands were generally paid the wages that she worked for even though she worked to produce for the market The Feminization of poverty , male as bread winner, patriarchal wage were the instruments and tactics used by men and the government to strip women of social status, economic opportunity to ensure access to sex and the female body but also to continue to reproduce the labor force.
The rights for women to own land or conduct business or to enter contracts were all taken away, Women declared “legal imbeciles”
