5 Assignment 04

In The Caliban and the Witch, Frederici explained that the degradation of women began with the change in economy, from a feudal system to a capitalism. With this shift in economy, the value of work changed as well, leaving women at the bottom in regards with their economic, social and political status. Women were seen as inferior to men in regards to labor, and as such, women were expected to work from home, doing domestic work and taking care of the family. For the women that tried to venture for work outside of the home, they were met with disadvantages such as lower wages than men, unsafe working conditions, and misogynistic treatment by men. This made women dependent on their husbands for income, creating a system where the husbands were the only providers of the household. Instead of being seen as productive members of society, they were viewed as only useful for their reproductive abilities.
The degradation of women contributed to the accumulation of wealth in the capitalist economy as society tried to control women’s reproductive systems. The capitalist system relied on workers for labor, and the women were seen as the means of creating more workers. Society considered this to be the “responsibility” of women, leaving them with few options for autonomy. The government passed several laws that considered using a contraceptive, having an abortion, or any other means of not having a child as a criminal act for women, forcing them to have a child even if they did not want to. Witch hunts also began as a means to further oppress women, intimidating women from seeking independence outside of the household in fear of their lives. Through these methods, society had created a new economic system that relied on a foundation based on women’s oppression and degradation.

In the first chapter of “Caliban and the Witch”, Silvia Federici highlights the transition from feudalism to capitalism. In this major shift, the value of production also changed and the way of life at the time changed significantly. Unfortunately, women were major victims of capitalism, which led to their degradation and dropped their status not just economically, but also socially and politically. In the first chapter, “The Accumulation of Labor and the Degradation of Women”, Federici emphasizes how the new capital system will be built and achieved by using enslavement, violence, war, and colonialism as its foundation, not only in Europe but also in America. Marx’s Primitive Accumulation theory also led to a huge vacuum in labor as well as a growth in human exploitation. The privatization of land forced many peasants and farmers out of their jobs causing massive working populations to be out of the lands where they originally worked. Women especially were severely affected by the shifting economy.

As the new form of economy was developing, women’s labor was not remotely considered as a real job. But when men did the same exact job, it was considered highly productive and was acknowledged by the market. At the time, women were encouraged to stay at home and only serve as a support to their husbands rather than going out and directly participating in the economy. This subordination led to immense drop in women’s status in society and an inclination to their dependency to men as their only support and source of income. This degradation led women to exploit their selves in order to gain access to money or food to live on. This exploitation was usually either through slavery or prostitution.  Not only did these women lose their participation in the economy, but they also lost the right to represent themselves in court, because they were officially labeled as “imbeciles”. The loss of power made women very vulnerable that even their presence in public would lead to their assault or ridicule.

In the Middle age, Europe was using feudal economy system. Emperor was giving territories to feudal lords, and they were having full authorities of that land. However, at the late Middle Age, feudal economy was destroyed, and new system called ‘Capitalism’ exposed to outside. Capitalism is an economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state. This new economic and political system looked like a revolution of economic system because this system was putting emphasis on the equality of people. However, as the time passed, capitalism started to cause many problems. In the Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Frederici state that capitalism created sexism and racism in the society. For example, she showed disparagement of women while capitalism was the economic and social system.

During the transition from feudalism to capitalism, over-exploitation threatened the collapse of the whole system. In addition, the workforce was barely survived. To keep the capitalism, it required the process which was making people in the society like a work-machine, and the conquest of women to the reproduction of the work-force. The subjugation of women was achieved by “witch hunt.” In addition, women were treated badly as labor. For example, Women were paid less than men, and increasingly excluded from most wage work. Furthermore, state policies were exacerbated misogyny within the working class and male craftsmen fought to cut off women who were in many professions, because they were afraid that women’s participation would drop the value of their own work. Women’s activity came to be considered as ‘not workers.’

Eventually, this degradation of women helped capitalism to create wealth. For instance, the sexual division of labor divided and controlled the working class. These processes allowed the capitalist class to secure control over labor.

The Caliban and the Witch is interesting, but I also found it to be a difficult read.
The chapter talks about capitalism and its direct causation of sexism and oppression of people, particularly women, black people, and impoverished people.
Frederici writes about the emergence of capitalism slowly oppressing women especially because they were put into a category of “reproductive beings” with little else available. As capitalism developed taking over feudal society, women’s wages (when they were given them) were pitiful when compared with men’s. They were less mobile since they became pregnant and took care of children and their social power was slowly stripped from them. Frederici writes about their protests which initially had some protection since their husbands were responsible for them legally, but eventually they found a way to arrest women for their protests.
It seems as things progressed from feudal to capitalism societies, poorer citizens who had previously been responsible for only working the land, slowly became responsible for the costs of working the land as well. Whereas before they simply did the labor and the wealthier individuals paid for the tools, and labor, when capitalism came into play, the poor individuals were forced to buy the land they were working and they became individually responsible for a small section of land meaning they were responsible for all monetary items and such. The land became something you could own and be responsible for in a way it had never been before.
Capitalism created lower wages, especially for women, higher prices, and great inequality. Women became almost breeders and were even paid for reproduction, but at a minuscule wage.
Wars became more frequent and violent, and a terrible famine began to hit. The famine caused such extreme hunger that people turned on each other believing that poor people would sell their souls to the devil for food.

Silvia Fredericci’s, Caliban and the Witch makes many valid points on capitalism and its detrimental effects on women, both emotionally and monetarily. She disproves the idea that “the women’s place in the home” was something that naturally came about within the economy, and shows that capitalism pushed sexism and female devaluing. Along with the workforce greatly favoring men, it also completely relegated women’s monetary value in labor and further prevented their progression in society. Witch hunts were also used to intimidate women out of work outside their homes, speaking to just how far people went to maintain their gender oppressive way of life.

The workforce of the time oppressed women in a number of aspects. Women were extremely discouraged to work outside of their homes, and were therefore much less valued within the workforce. Reproductive work had been a way some women earned wages in their homes, but it was deemed “natural responsibility” and invalidated as a form of labor. This again displayed the misogyny and disregard for women normalized and promoted by authority. Due to the invalidation of their work, many struggling women turned to begging and prostitution in order to feed themselves and their families. These lines of work were obviously dangerous and hardly ever sufficed in helping women get by.

The Witch hunt also had its ways of negatively affecting women’s monetary stance. The movement allowed for women to be accused of witchcraft for reasons not excluding desire for independence and work outside of their home. The Witch hunt was often used to intimidate women out of the workforce and keep them confined and dependent on men. By instilling a fear of these women with “powers” into society, men were able to be able to accuse women of witchcraft on often vague and elementary observations/suspicions, therefore putting them through trials in which the end result was invariably death.

In this work, Frederici speaks about the presence of Capitalism in Medieval Europe. Slowly, the economic system is being overrun by patriarchy, as a woman’s presence in society is becoming more and more excluded. As Capitalism took over, forcing Feudalism out, the degradation of women soon began as their placement in society changed greatly. Frederici discusses the sudden changes in women’s labor, as they are given unfair wages and unsafe working conditions. Women were continuously seen as housewives and were not given the same opportunities as men when it came to work. By keeping women limited in this sense, they were able to have the advantage by practically forcing women to rely on their husbands for support. Another way of keeping women limited was by pressing societal roles onto them. Soon enough, land and the purchase of it became increasingly popular. However, women were constantly confined to the typical domestic role, which did not allow them to branch out and participate in the buying and selling of land. They did not have enough resources or money to do so, thus leaving them under the control of their husbands.

Frederici continues to discuss the presence of sexual violence at the time as well. Ultimately, it was just another way of establishing capitalism at the time. As the strengthening of the wealthy, male population grew, the female population became more and more oppressed. Naturally, women had to remain inferior to men in order for Capitalism to rise with the male population. Soon enough, prostitution and violence against women became a typical occurrence. It is these situations that create boundaries for women and limit them from breaking free from the clutches of the wealthy white male. Besides the sexualization of women, there was also the accusation of women being witches. Women were considered to be witches if they could not reproduce, and in order to blame someone for this, the male population started the witch hunt. They believed it was their fault that there was a lack of reproduction. Women were unable to voice their opinion, be economically involved, and were seen as nothing more than housewives and child bearers. If they were anything else, they were discriminated against and were stripped of any humanness. Frederici clearly wanted to emphasize the unfair treatment of women during medieval Europe, as it was led by a sudden urge to grow economically that could not be done without tearing down women and keeping them under the thumb of the wealthy white male.

In Silvia Frederici’s, The Caliban and the Witch, she discusses the degradation of women. Women were seen as inferior to men and only seen as wives and ways to reproduce. While women did an assortment of jobs, it was seen as housekeeping or helping the man. Any women who were opposed to this and rioted were quickly arrested.

Since women were paid much less than men, they had little choice but to get married to and rely on men. This, in turn, led to them getting forced into a housewife position and later on, expected to have children and take care of them which took away a lot of their power and freedom. The growth of mercantilism also was a big factor as to why the population needed to grow via women.

Women also began to have little control over their body and childbirth. Many women were expected to get pregnant and keep the children because in the end, it would mean more men to potentially work. This also restricted their work options because since they had to take care of children, they weren’t able to do certain jobs such as production or traveling. Unfortunately, if women were not able to reproduce or were simply uncooperative, they were seen as witches.

All in all, women were degraded in many ways. Whether it was being seen as inferior to men, being paid less and therefore getting stuck in housewife roles or having no control over pregnancy and giving birth, they had little power in this time period and if they tried to rebel, they were put down and further degraded.

In The Caliban and The Witch, Silvia Federici traces the subjugation of  women and the decline of their status in society, which were rooted in the development of capitalism in Europe in the 1500’s. The rise of the capitalist society as a political economy not only expropriated women from their means of production and labor power, it also enslaved women as a domestic non-waged worker, and made them property of their husbands. Women’s participation in society was diminished with the regulations and violence imposed by the sate. Women became alienated from their own species being, and without access to their reproductive rights, they became machine-like entities to produce the proletariat class, the cheap labor for manufacture  that created the surplus value and accumulation of capital for the bourgeois class. These dynamics not only applied for women in Europe, but expanded to the women of the American colonies and the African women that were forced to work in sugar, cotton and rum plantations.

The appropriation of land by part of the state and the lost of the means of subsistence for rural families and women workers of the Medieval Europe were the beginning of a number of changes that generated the degradation of the status of women in society. The redistribution of land and wealth favored the bourgeois class that collected money and products from agricultural workers who were left to live on the streets. Capitalism would generate a rearrengemnt of classes. The capitalist who owns the means of production, and the proletariat, who has labor power. However, women would not be allowed to sell their labor power under capitalism. Women would be subjugated to work for their husbands without receiving wages, to do the housework without recognition, to prostitute themselves on the streets in order to get food.

Without land to work, women were taken away from their labor power and the production of their own crafts and social life. The commonality of production favored the interaction of women until the new mode of production was imposed by the capital system. Women would suffer poverty, famine, and would revolt against their oppressors and would pay a high price for it. Women were forced to leave the public space and to be secluded into a domestic space where her presence became invisible for society even though the hard work and demands imposed in the house by her husband.

Also the regulations of the state in regard to reproductive rights would impose women to populate Europe and America to generate armies, to replenish the factories with workers, to travel overseas and participate in genocide in the extraction of slaves, goods and materials form the colonies. Women’s  reproductive bodies were the cheapest way to get workers, to sell slaves and to produce surplus value and accumulation of capital. Women were tortured, killed and treated as witches for standing for themselves and for denouncing their unjustified mistreatment and subjugation in society.

In Caliban and the Witch, Federichi reveals the brutal truth about capitalism. I found this appealing, because within today’s society, capitalism and everything it “offers”, is romanticized. And sometimes, we cannot help to believe this, at least one point in our lives, because of the states success in glorifying it. Capitalism is however misconstrued; Capitalism was built on the subjugation of women. Federichi explains this in detail, by reviewing the history and the “transition to capitalism.”

Federichi examines this period in history and first notes that this was not a period of social progress, even though many believed it to be so. When the women’s main role of being a housewife changed, they faced social degradation and as as results they were financially dependent to their husbands. Where women had almost no way of gaining an income, this economic separation of the genders forced women to have no place in their new society. They were viewed instead as property. Women were perceived as incapable and only useful for the means of reproduction. Federichi describes this by dating back to the 1500s of the population crisis. From my understanding of the reading, Europe was so substantial on increasing population because, the economy was so heavily dependent on labor, and labor required people. Therefore, they mandated women as criminals if they chose not to procreate. They viewed them as a necessity, and treated them as property and stole them of their autonomy and freedom. This showed the degradation of women and how powerful the European control was. Women were threatened of their basic rights. They had no control of their own bodies and reproduction. It was even viewed as a crime if there was any proof of birth controls. I found most appalling in the reading when males were apparently viewed as the true “givers of life” when male doctors delivered babies. This just furthered showed how meaningless women were perceived to be. Europe’s coercion of women reproduction was almost this product of capitalism. Because labor expansion was so important, capitalism was fixated on the degrading and exploitation of women, whatever means necessary.

In The Caliban and the Witch, author Silvia Federici believes that capitalism is keen to sexism and racism, as a social, economic system. Throughout the first chapter of her writing, she is able to describe the degradation that women face. The author talks about the exploitation of European workers, the enslavement of African Americans and Native Americans for the “New World”,  the transformation of a body to a work machine, the destruction of women’s power in not only Europe but America as well, and primitive accumulation (Federici, page 63). She puts a great amount of focus on the extermination of the “witches”, also known as the “Great Witch Hunt”, which occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Silvia Federici argues that the Great Witch Hunt is one of the main reasons why it was possible to destroy the power of women in Europe, as well as America. As many would like to relate capitalist accumulation with the liberation of the workers, male and female alike, she believes you could not. Federici argues that instead capitalism has invented more savage forms of enslavement, and creates deeper divisions, especially between men and women (Federici, page 64). The merchant capitalists during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries took advantage of the cheap labor force of that time, and the “informal economy” was built from the labor of women and children, whose work did not match the low wage they received (Federici, page 72). Women also began getting themselves involved in riots, resisting against enclosure, the fencing of land and draining of fens. It was believed that they were strong and confident enough to stand up and speak up because they were technically above the law, legally “covered” by their husbands. However, the government was quick to take that privilege away and started arresting women who were involved in the riots. When their lands were lost and communities fell apart due to the enclosure, women suffered heavily. It was much harder for women to become vagabonds or migrant workers, they were less mobile because they had to take of the children or were pregnant, and the option of joining the army as a cook, washer, prostitute, etc. was taken away by the seventeenth century. It had become more difficult for them to support themselves than men and became increasingly confined to reproductive labor (Federici, page 73-74). Reproductive work continued to be paid, however at really low rates and was then even labelled as “women’s labor”. Women were not given a variety of waged occupations, and if they did happen to find one, their wage was almost nothing compared to the average male salary. These unfortunate changes redefined women’s position in society, left reproductive work as their only option, and increased their dependence on men (Federici, page 75).