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Feminism and Marxism

In chapter one, Federici describes the breakdown of women’s autonomy with the rise of capitalism by elaborating on the shift from self-sufficiency to wage labor that occurred in the middle ages. As the wages increased for the peasants and profits decreased the state had to step in to rebalance the diminishing wealth of the ruling class. Although European society was moving towards a cooperative egalitarian economy, the economy would not be able to sustain itself and the hierarchy. Due to this circumstance the ruling class had to find a way to eliminate competition and manipulate people to work in undesirable conditions, without exploitive labor workers’ would be able to resist and the wealthy would lose their power. Women were essentially driven out of the labor-force, allowed only the lowest paid jobs, by the promotion of witch-hunts or imprisonment until eventually transitioning to unpaid housewife and further dependent on men. Additionally, if a woman was without children and attempted to resist the economic conditions she would be risking physical and sexual violence.

Assisting in further exploitation was the rise of the slave trade, through buying humans or convicting them of crimes and shipping them to other colonies. The revived practice was necessary to make up for the decimated native population that could not withstand the abusive labor practices. Despite the extreme poverty and death, the sexual and racial divides were not easy to overcome. The denial of communal property by landowners was purposeful to control the food supply as well as dependent on the ruling class for wages and housing. The transition to a global capitalist system was filled with starvation, further land privatization and attacks on collective gatherings. Eventually the state intervenes again when the capitalist economic system becomes clearly unstable, not to abolish it like the egalitarian society, but to establish public assistance as a balance for cheap labor, profit margins and social control of the disenfranchised.