5 Assignment 06

Toni Mitchell

Assign 6

In Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici makes a compelling argument stating that capitalism indeed on a constant supply of women’s unwaged labor, not to mention the violence and loss that coms along with it; imposing on them the reproduction of the workforce as forced labors without pay. What I fail to understand is why does capitalism continuously feel the need to degrade women? If it does concern wages; then theres the blame if of the “misbehaving wife.” Federici expresses synthesizes the racist and sexist dimension of discipline that capital seeks to impose in bodies and also the disobedient figures from which they resist it.

It is important the question of reproduction because we are experiencing an unprecedented crisis of reproduction. Sure, The demand for a domestic wage denaturalized female slavery. However is one is to pay closer attention, wage is not the ultimate goal, but merely a strategy put in place to achieve a change in the power relations between women and the capital. Reading Federici, i’ve come to the realization that labor force is not a natural thing, but that it must produce itself. This is to say that capitalism develops

rather in society. That society then becomes a gigantic pie of capitalist relations, as a fundamental terrain of capitalist accumulation. For this reason the discourse of domestic labor, of gender difference, the construction of the female model, would be considered fundamental. Today, for example, globalization in regards to  reproductive labor allows us to understand why, for the first time, women are the ones driving the migratory process

I admit, Feminist struggled for equality under capitalism from the 1960s through the ‘80s (and even before then), but there has been some progress; not much, but some. If we look at the world, and not only the situation in the United States, Europe, or Japan, we see that what we refer to as globalization and the massive entrance of women into wage work is much less uniform than usually imagined.

Witch Hunts for example, Witch-hunts were instrumental to the construction of a patriarchal order in which the bodies of women, their work, and their sexual and reproductive powers were placed under the control of the State and transformed into economic resources. This is to say, the witch-hunters were less interested in punishing a certain transgression than they were in eliminating generalized forms of female behavior that they no longer tolerated and that had to become seen as abominable in the eyes of the population.

While I read Chapter 1 of Caliban and the Witch by Siliva Frederici , her argument of the degradation and accumulation of women was so strong. As I read this story, I began to only picture the suffering, humiliation and women’s mental status during this time.  Frederici points out the witch hunts during the 16th and 17th centuries were her main focus on accumulation of women. It was an important way to keep women under the power of men. The out casting of women was a norm to control them and to continue the process in Europe and the New World. Many women suffered a great deal. Frederici explains that the Christian Church to some extent had control on women’s sexual and reproductive rights. The social power during this time was on a global crisis. Many people died during this time due to disease that nearly wipe out the population. This is when women were highly needed for the reproduction of children to continue labor force.
Also, women were out proportion of their rights (sex and reproduction) by the church and the state.   Prostitution and rape was institutionalize and the decriminalization of rape was introduced. In many cities brothels were legalized, making it a greater means for women to survive was by prostitution.  Many outrageous laws were implanted to keep women in control and full of fear. That is where “witch-hunting”, “burning”, “torturing” and severe punishment were used against women.  Women would use contraceptive or abortion were sentences to death.
The power difference between men and women have changed but are still highly noticeable. Capitalism was emplaced as to control any rebellion. It was a way in getting out women who were against the new capitalism during this time.  Made by man a natural inferiority issue. Men continue to maintain their power using capital by devaluing women’s work and instead disciplining women. As I continue in this class and learn about women’s rights. I am very proud of what all women have accomplished over the centuries. Women still struggle every day to have equal rights.  I guess teaching others what I learn and also using my knowledge in my daily life task will help and continue to make a difference.  Change does not happen overnight. It takes time and patience.

The combination of land privatization, colonial expansion and misogyny were to blame for degradation of women. The expropriation of land occurred because of war or religion, people wanted power and once conquered, killed off majority of civilization, they moved in and took over land controlling whoever remained. Once a land was conquered by a greater force it was rare that people retaliated and succeeded. However in 1549 Robert Kett rebelled against the privatization of the land and successfully overcome an anti-enclosure fight. Kett demanded equal rights for the people, the enclosures were taken down, “The first was that ‘from hence forth no man shall enclose any more’. Other articles demanded that rents should be reduced to the rates that had prevailed sixty five years before , that ‘all freeholders and copy holders may take the profits of all common, and that ‘all bond-men may be made free, for god made all free with precious blood shedding”. Kett’s was later captured and killed. Women also fought for their rights, and tried to end enclosures, also to be seen more than property of their husbands, and reproduction machines. “And these were just a few instances of confrontation in which women holding pitchforks and scythes resisted the fencing of the land or draining of fens when their livelihood was threatened”. Women suffered terribly when the land was enclosed, most became vagabonds which in theory might have worked out for them but with the man being violent and not seeing them as equal, misogyny was on the rise. also women who became pregnant couldn’t travel from place to place as easily. In the reading there is a engraving of ‘Women and Knaves”, which is quite disturbing as t he women are following the soldiers and are muzzled like wild animals. any women who attempted to fight back or against these terrible conditions was killed. As stated, “women suffered a unique process of social degradation that was fundamental to the accumulation of capital and has remained so ever since”. Capitalism and feudalism had a negative affect on women and children; women’s bodies were seen as commodities something to profit off of, man capitalized off of their offspring. A women’s role was in the home, to maintain the house and to reproduce, this division of labor only made it worse for women they depended solely on a man to survive, and this increased the power shift that men had over women and children.

In “The Caliban and the Witch” by  Silvia Frederici, firstly points out how the transition from feudalism to capitalism; privatization of land began an extreme change, where people could not afford their living status and more, creating poverty and a major crisis among the people during the 16th and 17th century. This affected women’s in a major way, and more importantly they were degraded through the capitalism process. Allowing men to have a total control.

For instance, Frederici would argue towards the population and economic crisis, because women were a major foundation and producing children, and during the 16th century, the idea that number of people (citizens) would determine a ‘nations wealth’, a woman’s conduct and paternity were controlled. Penalties had become legal through the legal codes to women who were found guilty of committing reproductive crimes. This was highly placed on marriages, where a family would be normally created, the woman would be penalized if she took any contraception, birth controls or had any abortions and infanticide. A woman would have to register every pregnancy, and would be sentenced to death if the child died before baptism, whether she was found not guilty. The women had lost total control over her procreation process. Over all the women at this time became a tool for the reproduction of labor, work-force and seen as a natural breeding machine.

Federici would also argue on the devaluation of women’s labor in the work-force, that when it came to jobs, women were not respected enough. The Proletarian women in particular carried a low status, any work done by them was not considered actual work, it was considered “domestic work” or “housekeeping” (92). It was suggested that the woman should not work outside but inside to engage in manufacturing to “help” their husband. And although the women work was at times done for the market, she was still declined any financial recognition. And if paid, the money was not enough to live by, including that the women’s work would not be considered ‘work’ because or so because it would not fall into any ‘public relief’, in other words, public aid.

I believe the most contradicting part however was that this had led to women especially in the lower class to fall into prostitution, to avoid government capitalism, and although at some point it was legal, how can such a prostitution work force that was considered low and classless as woman be okay but the labor force women had to deal with during paternity and manufacturing labor be controlled?

Capitalism was extremely sexist and degrading.

In the Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici, she talks about the beginning of land privatization, which occur in Europe. She also analyzes how the progression of feudalism to capitalism took place in the and centuries, the segregation of women becoming prominent.
What caught my attention the most was how women suffered the most because man was superior and had more rights. The system was too strict and didn’t allowed women’s vote, words, or ideas. The first thing that came to mind while reading this was what we talked in class; private phase and public phase. Private phase refers to all women and it (not exactly, all white man with property) meant all women had to stay at home doing wife and mother duties. Public phase refers to “all man”, which meant they had the job and freedom to do anything they want. All of this created woman to become dependable on man and allowed capitalism took place faster because they were taking the accumulation of unpaid women labor. In my opination, the capitalism system was created and design to serve the business men man primary. The addition of women to the business industry system is fairly new, leaving women under paid compare to man and constantly fighting for equal salary is the definition of unfairness. Each reading we do in this class helps me understand how and why things happened and why they are like this now. When women were privatized it let to many problems. The outcome of this was an extremely poverty and 100% dependence on men for anything needed and more importantly economically help. Every decision made put every woman down, which let to reduction of families and women’s bodies were controlled. The state worried about the population size by emphasizing marriage, reproduction, and families’ importance. Its incredible how women were treated; they were blame for anything and had to stay quiet. Having all those laws and rules made women look for another way to survive even if it was illegal they did it. anything done by a man was considered good and productive, but something meaningless that a woman did was considered as a problem to society. In my opinion, we still fighting on equal rights. It’s unfair how women have to prove what they are capable of. Federici’s argument is that capitalism was what put completely women down. This was a very detailed and interesting reading.

The first chapter of Silvia Federici’s highly acclaimed work, The Caliban and the Witch, examines the myriad implications of the transition from a feudal system of production over to capitalism – for women, in particular. This world historic shift, which first occurred in Europe, did not take place swiftly, nor without immense – and highly organized, as Federici demonstrates – levels of resistance.

The reason for this resistance, if it can be boiled down to one thing, rested on the question of land and the autonomy – however limited – it afforded those who toiled it. Because the everyday functioning of the feudal economy depended on the peasantry and its ability to procure foodstuffs and all manner of goods from the land on which it worked, the shift over to capitalism, which required the privatization of that land, upended the way of life of the peasantry and threatened its very survival. In short, it separated them from their land which had previously allowed them to perform subsistence farming to feed and otherwise provide for themselves and, oftentimes, their lords.

The shift to capitalism meant that land became privatized. This is what Federici is describing when she talks about “enclosures” in the initial pages of the chapter. The capitalists, in order to secure the land they were essentially seizing from its previous owners (or, more accurately, toilers), put up fences around it to keep the peasants out.

For women peasants this had a specific and, according to Federici, more detrimental impact than it did on men. This is why, as Federici discusses, women played such a central role in the struggles against the privatization of land. Women (and children) as well as men worked the land under the feudal mode of production. This shouldn’t be too highly romanticized as the labor was brutally intense and a bad crop could mean starvation, disease, and death. But, the shift to capitalism forced women more and more to work inside the home (or domestic sphere) to be relegated solely to reproductive labor. That is, to reproducing the next generation of workers – literally, by birthing them, but also by taking care of and tending to all of their needs as well as their husbands. As men moved into wage-labor (as they no longer had access to their own land, they had to work for someone else on someone else’s property), women were denied entrance to this type of work and were forced either into the home or into prostitution. This complete denial of any autonomy and forced dependence on men, made women much more vulnerable to all manner of abuse.

Federici speaks of the degradation of women in relation to the capital system in the country at that time. She wanted to make a point that even though slavery or the exploitation of labor as she calls it play a big part in the formation of the country its not the only thing that has shaped the country. On page 18 she puts in a quote by Ibid saying that it is a known fact that conquest. robbery, enslavement, and murder are the pillars of making this country what it is today. Through out the text we see how the “woman “goes from having the protection of the law and her husband to leading enclosure riots and being imprisoned. She talks about how woman could no longer be employed by the army and could not support themselves properly because they were confined to reproduction labor. What ever work woman got usually did not pay and if they did pay, the pay was no where near the amount that men received. The 19th century created the start of the full time house wife s major sexual division of labor. This reduced the value of a woman greatly and the sole function was to reproduce the population. Here is when we see a major dependence increase on the man from the woman, with having nothing more to do but tend to the husband and the children and the house. This also allowed the government state and employers to regulate woman’s labor by the male wage. The separation of production and reproduction of labor reduced the income of a woman almost one hundred percent in which they were almost completely impoverished and basically poor. If you have no income you become economically dependent on those around you. In this case it was the husband who gave the woman money if he felt like doing so. Woman were being confined both physically in the home always tending to the needs of the house and to the people in the house and not only being deprived to tend to herself, any dream of wanting to become more than what she was socially like her male counter part was so far in the future she may have lost sight of that completely. She as most authors of this time speak of the acclimation of wealth through capitalism but she neglects to mention the black woman (slave woman) which most authors do too. Yes woman (white women) were reduced to reproduction labor, it was more so the slave woman who produced the labor population which was one of the reason slavery was such a successful operation. The white man could purchase a salve and have them reproduce 5- 10 children as opposed to paying for 5- 10 slaves. These are the true reproduction victims. Yes however it is true that having to be reduced to a baby making machine and nothing more is a horrible state to be in whether white or black. The common factor in both cases are the same, men.

Silvia Frederici analyses the development of a capitalist economy in a different way that Marx did. Marx explains in a logical and historical way the development of capitalism through his concept “primitive accumulation” which is all about expropriation of land from peasantry, exploitation of slaves, the looting in the East Indies which all of it lead to the accumulation of labor never seen in other times . However, he fails to analyze the prominent role of women in the 16 and 17 centuries during capitalism. Frederici argues that land privatization and the price of revolution were not enough to reach the proletarianization, but the degradation of women’s power.

With the expropriation of land women where the ones who suffered the most because since they had no source to work and make money, it was so hard for them to support themselves. “Women’s labor” or reproductive labor continued to be paid but decreased significantly, so it was nothing compare to men’s wage. As a result women become depended on men, and it allowed the state to make an accumulation of capital out of the unpaid women’s labor.

After the general crisis in the 16 and 17 centuries where millions of people died for hunger, reproduction and population growth became an important topic to gain European power again, so the state have total control over women’s bodies. Through the witch-hunt women were not allowed to take any birth control or anything that prevents reproduction. New severe penalties and punishment were imposed for women agains contraception, abortion and infanticide. In fact, in France every woman who became pregnant had to register her pregnancy. If the child died before baptism, the mother was sentence to death whether guilty or not. Consequently,  it was a time of terror for women and midwives who were soon replaced by doctor because they were incompetent in the labor room and furthermore  “complicit”  of the crimes. And therefore male doctors became to be seen as the true givers of life. Women’s wombs were territory of the state at the service of capitalist accumulation (89) , working with their bodies as machines for the reproduction of population and obviously workers for their labor.

Even for proletarian women it was difficult to find work, even simple work. They could just “work” at home, which was not considered even work, but domestic tasks or housekeeping whereas if a man would the same word it was considered productive. So the only career women could do was marriage. All of this injustices made women unable to support themselves, which leaded them to prostitution the only way to subsidize. Frederici talks about this degradation of women’s work force.

In Silvia Frederici’s work “The Caliban and the Witch” she describes, in various points, how in the transition of feudalism to capitalism between the 13th and 17th centuries, the degradation of women became prominent. It all began when the communal lands and open field systems were closed off and became privatized, so the cooperation of the labor of agriculture was affected. Individual contracts of labor became more favorable than collective ones, thus producing inequalities in wage earnings and spiking an increase in vagabonds. This greatly affected families, which disintegrated, and most predominantly, women. Even elderly women were affected, no longer being able to be supported by their children, having to steal, and borrow to survive.

As the enclosures (privatization of mass areas of land) began to spread, women suffered the most. It became difficult for women to become vagabonds because misogyny was growing and they would ofter succumb to male violence. Women were also less able to do much on account of children and pregnancy. Women could not become soldiers nor help out the army in other ways because they were expelled from following the armies as they have done before. Furthermore, women were not included in occupations for wage and when they were it was reduced to one-thirds of the reduced wage men made. Many women turned to prostitution as a means of survival for themselves and children.

In the later part of the 17th century, to aid in the rapid decline of the population there were laws that were passed that upheld marriage and penalized celibacy. This was where witch hunting was born, where women would be criminalized for exercising control over their own bodies and not using it for the sole purpose of repopulating. Any form of birth control would be demonized: celibacy, contraception, abortion and infanticide, and severe punishments ensued. In France, women were sentence to death if pregnancies and births were not registered and/or if infants died before baptism. During this time, women were executed in large numbers.
Also during this time, woman’s labor was deemed non-work and their bodies were seen as a natural resource. With the continued privatization of land, came a new sexual division of labor. Women were forced and used only for reproductive purposes. Through women there was capital to be made by producing a constant supply of workers. Women were subjected to a double dependency: on employers and on men.

In Silvia Federici’s work, In The Caliban and the Witch, she makes a strong analogy that struck me with powerful imagery. Upon discussing and referencing Marx, she makes a connection between capitalistic development and colossal concentration camps. Automatically, my thoughts drew back on my prior knowledge of Hitler’s sovereignty and concentration camps created to dehumanize Jews, and to ultimately, use in the process of genocide and ethnic cleansing. Federici even mentions later, after using this analogy, that in the seventeenth century, there has never been more exploitation of workers that resulted in “genocidal proportions” (p. 66) than under the Nazi government. The power in her analogy emphasizes the acknowledgement of the enterprise culture, or creation of capitalism, being responsible for its own sort of concentration camps including coerced workers, or slaves, who were/are exploited, and ultimate control over a fabricated hierarchical system. Within this system of hierarchy, women have been and still remain considerably of lower ranking, and yet, are still significant assets when degraded for accumulations of wealth in a capitalist political economy.

During pre-capitalist Europe, women had some social cohesion or connections among other women at “The Commons,” where social gatherings and festivals often took place. Unfortunately, this area and these events were abolished, along with a rapid decline and closing of agricultural labor. As a result, land and property was lost and men and women had to find alternative ways of making a living. Women were “being forced into a condition of chronic poverty, economic dependence, and invisibility as workers,” (p. 75). Women are emphasized as taking on more suffering due to the fact that women were either pregnant, expected to take care of their children, and ultimately could not take on jobs that needed physical strength and skills. Any jobs that were available to them were not even worth it, considering that their compensation was exceptionally lower than that of males, even in a society that solely hired very cheap labor.

 
This transition into capitalism meant a transition into social conflict, impoverished statuses, scarcity of food, lack of labor, production and consumption. There were many rights, many that included and were led by women, against capitalism, but ultimately, this transition also meant a reliance for capitalism’s production, distribution and exchange of wealth and goods. Regarding women once more, there was even more power of authority evident, where the system gained concern about a growth in population, and where women were held legally responsible and were supervised for mass reproduction. At one point, celibacy was penalized, in the interest of maintaining reproduction of the work force, which, obviously, is the responsibility of the only humans who can actually reproduce. “…Procreation was directly placed at the service of capitalist accumulation,” (p. 89). Federici brings acknowledgement to control over and degradation of the womb, to contraceptives, to reproduction, all as a means of an investment and industry for capitalist economies. Women in history were integrated only to serve men and marriage contracts, to carry children and for continuation of humanity, for cheap labor and to contribute to gradual increases in the capitalist economy.