The history of witch hunting - Essay Example

Position of women and transition to capitalism Federici points out the issue of witch hunting as a continuous and relevant discourse from the middle ages to the contemporary times. She argues that witch hunting, one of the basest ways of subjugating women, has its roots in the history of capitalism. Prior to the advent of capitalistic concepts, the position and function of women in society were never discriminated from that of men. Federici accounts for the lifestyle of women where they were attributed with work within the house as well as outside.

But as capitalism with the concerted effort of the state and the church sought its way into power, it tended to manipulate, undermine and distort established constructs of reality to meet its ends of ‘primitive accumulation’. According to Federici: “capitalism was the counter-revolution that destroyed the possibilities that had emerged from the anti-feudal struggle—possibilities which, if realized, might have spared us immense destruction of lives and the natural environment that has marked the advance of capitalist relations worldwide”.

Relation between primitive accumulation and oppression on women The basis of capitalism is considered to be primitive accumulation which means accumulating land and labor. . ation of differences and divisions within the working class, whereby hierarchies built upon gender, as well as “race” and age became constitutive of class rule and the formation of the modern proletariat. (Federici, 63-64) Federici points out that one of the main objectives of capitalism was to break the solidarity between the genders that gives a community its strength and nurtures healthy social life.

Devaluing women was made into a discourse and misogynistic attitude was provoked to create mutual distrust and antagonism between genders. Federici argues that the logic behind legalizing prostitution on one hand and decriminalizing rape on the other was purely a capitalistic tactic of deliberately underrating women. From this perspective it could be said that capitalism was formed on the motto of dividing and rule policy and it did not spare human relationships. Repressing women power by dehumanizing women: platform for witch hunt The act of witch hunting, which is nothing but persecuting women on some utterly vague assumptions, points to the desperation of the need to repress women power.

The propagators of capitalism particularly targeted to control women’s power of reproduction to have access to manpower resource. It shows that the role of women was dehumanized to that of labor producing machine. The body-as-machine was made the discourse of the early capitalist era that also explains the medieval ideology of the body-mind dichotomy upheld by the church. Accordingly, any kind of unproductive physical indulgence was tabooed as corporeal sin and women were made its worst victim.

Women were banished from outdoor activities of community life, stigmatized in any attempt to do so and robbed of privacy. Federici, by giving a detail account of how women were not