About the author
Italian-American scholar, teacher, and activist (b. 1942), a central figure in Marxist and autonomist feminism and a founder of the 1970s Wages for Housework campaign. Long a professor at Hofstra University, Federici is best known for Caliban and the Witch, which became a touchstone of feminist and anti-capitalist thought.
Synopsis
Extending Marx's account of 'primitive accumulation,' Federici argues that early capitalism depended on the expropriation not only of land but of women's bodies and reproductive powers. She reads the European witch hunts as a campaign to discipline women, destroy their autonomy and knowledge, and confine them to unpaid domestic and reproductive labor — laying the gendered foundations of the wage system that followed.
Core passage idea
Paraphrase · Modern copyrighted workFederici argues that the rise of capitalism required the subjugation of women — the witch hunts among its instruments — to harness their reproductive labor as the unpaid foundation of the wage economy.
By placing women's bodies and unpaid reproductive labor at the center of capitalism's origins, Federici makes patriarchy and capitalism inseparable parts of one history. Her rereading of the witch hunts turned a feminist analysis of housework into a sweeping theory of the system's foundations.
To avoid a bubble
Pair with historians who dispute Federici's causal link between the witch hunts and capitalist accumulation, and with liberal feminists and economists who reject the Marxist framework of 'primitive accumulation' she builds on.
Reading note
A demanding but influential synthesis of Marxism and feminism. Read it as the historical companion to the 'wages for housework' argument, and weigh its bold causal claims against more cautious histories of the period.
Best paired with
Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State; Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race & Class.