In Silvia Federici’s Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women, two seemingly disparate historical events are shown to be inextricably linked: the phenomenon of witch-hunting and the advent of modern capitalism. With an eradication of communal land ownership, stymied local economic relations, a loss of connectivity to the natural world, and growing impoverishment of the widowed and elderly, women in societies that had been based in subsistence agriculture were increasingly dehumanized and estranged from their communities by accusations of practicing witchcraft. Much was susceptible to “enclosure” during this time—not only the land enclosed as privatization was on the rise, but also the histories, labor, communal wisdoms, human relationships, and commitment to the natural world that had been central to communitarian living for generations.[1] As people became increasingly alienated by the global economic order, the rights to their bodies, their lands, their pasts, and their contributions to their own communities were effectively dissolved. The figure that features most prominently and emblematically in this picture is that of the older woman. The enclosures achieved through witch hunts and the consequent alienation in all its forms can best be conceived when centering the persecuted elderly women; because of their location at the intersections of histories, generations, economic orders, and life and death itself, older women represented the greatest threat to capitalist domination and the strongest preservers of disappearing histories, and therefore were the most likely to be victimized by witch-hunting.
Recognizing the context of disintegrating communal relationships is central to understanding why older women in particular were targeted as ‘witches.’ As land was increasingly enclosed and economies shifted from local to global, older women were placed in precarious positions as they lost their rights to share in land and could no longer rely on the supportive networks of community kin for survival. As they became “disempowered,” many older women began expressing their resistance to impending poverty and exclusion.[2] Most importantly, their memory of “the promises made, the faith betrayed, the extent of property (especially land), the customary agreements, and who was responsible for violating them” made them formidable enemies of the new economic order that was highly interested in repressing histories and relationships that would challenge its advancement.[3] Therefore, those in village communities interested in reforming the market and accumulating wealth at the cost of impoverishing the vulnerable and now landless among them took particular interest in “destroying the past, controlling people’s behaviors down to their instinctual life, and undoing customary relations and obligations.”[4] Elderly women represented the longevity of those customary relations that had been so pivotal to the survival of entire communities before the capitalistic world order.
As such, the intergenerational memory of elderly women—including knowledge of communal histories, wisdom in forms of medicine and healing, as well as recollection of the sustainability of subsistence farming — made them a particular threat and one of the strongest targets of the enclosures. Federici writes that old women served a key role in binding people together; like the depicted blue yarn in the famous Trazando el Camino painting, they held community together, “binding passions and weaving together past and present events.”[5] Older women, therefore, were essential to the preservation of memory, recalling past events and stories of the departed and conveying these to younger generations, which served to maintain “a collective identity and profound sense of cohesion.”[6] This made older women a threat not only to an individualistic capitalistic ideology of competition and self-interest—which denigrated the contributions of older generations, to be discussed below—but also a patriarchal order that could be undermined by women’s prominent role in knowledge production. As a result, a doubled enclosure occurred simultaneously; elderly women were increasingly alienated from their own communities while intergenerational knowledge was enclosed from younger generations. By painting women as harmful to their own communities, not only did witch hunters make them out to be “undeserving of any compassion and solidarity,” but they also estranged them from their own villages and homes.[7] At the same time, by exiling and executing older women as ‘witches,’ witch hunters successfully alienated younger generations of their rich inheritance in communal wisdoms and knowledge of their own histories.
A highly illustrative way in which older women were alienated from their rich contributions to their communities was the vilification of these women as being burdens upon the young, and more importantly, the association of elderly women with sterility.[8] Because older women could no longer produce children, they were “believed to pose a special threat to the reproduction of their communities, by destroying crops, making young women barren, and hoarding what they have.”[9] In a less literal sense, too, elderly women represented a time long past, not only irrelevant to modernity but also harmful and antagonistic to it.[10] The irony of seeing those who produced younger generations as sterile and unproductive cannot be overstated and speaks to the repression of even the most recent histories that would claim otherwise. Rather than recalling the generations-long history of women as creators of wealth, knowledge, and kin, a strategic amnesia allows for the alienation of those women who carry these histories to occur, which in a vicious cycle, exacerbates the community’s loss of its own history, in turn making it more callous towards its older women. This is what leads Federici to describe the witch hunts as representing a “complete perversion of the traditional conception of value creation.”[11] Alienated from their lifelong labor, these women were deemed deserving of nothing, “a drain on resources.”[12] The foulest manifestation of this is the way that children in Ghana were “encouraged to stone the old women accused.”[13] Associating older women with harm for the young and with sterility served a political function of denying older women’s contributions to their communities.
Therefore, Federici’s broad conceptualization of the enclosures produced by the new capitalistic order are very consistent with Marxist and socialist conceptualizations of alienation—not only alienation of the laborer, but as socialist feminists show us, the unique alienation of women in patriarchal capitalism. Alison Jaggar, for example, points to the ways that “women do not have final or total say about when, where, how, or by whom their bodies will be used.”[14] In its violence, witch hunts exemplified this very embodied alienation, with exile and death the ultimate ways in which older women’s bodies fell to the enclosures. Additionally, Ann Foreman’s notion that “women’s alienation is profoundly disturbing because women experience themselves not as selves but as others” is particularly apt as women conceived of as witches were depicted not as the multiply productive individuals that they were, but as sterile, dangerous, and burdens on the economy, an identity truly other than themselves.[15] Thus it can be said, as Robert Heilbroner has written, that alienation is a profound form of fragmentation. “Things or persons that are or should be connected in some significant way are instead viewed as separate.”[16] In no other place could this fragmentation be more felt than among older women who had held community together with the natural world and witnessed its disintegration firsthand.
Capitalism enclosed much more than land over the past few centuries. As intergenerational knowledge, history, home-centered production, and communal commitments were dissolved by a globalizing economy, older women, more than any other group, faced estrangement, death, and a dehumanization equal to the threat they posed to the new economic order and those who wished to deliver it. Importantly, the alienation of older women—those who weave together generations, pass knowledge to the youth, retain memories of broken promises, and are most harmed by a loss of communitarianism—impacts entire communities, fragmenting them irreparably. The loss of women’s lives means irrevocable loss of memories, histories, and a permanent severing of that yarn holding people together and to the earth. Younger generations too are impoverished as they become estranged from their own pasts. Alienated from their lands, their bodies, and their histories, older women are the paradigm of all that is lost through enclosures.
Bibliography
Federici, Silvia. Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women. Toronto: PM Press, 2018.
Tong, Rosemarie, and Tina Fernandes Botts. Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Introduction, 5th Edition. New York: Westview Press, 2018.
[1] Silvia Federici, Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women (Toronto: PM Press, 2018), 21. Federici proposes a wider application of the “enclosures” as “a broader phenomenon than simply the fencing off of land. We must think of an enclosure of knowledge, of our bodies, and of our relationship to other people and nature.”
[2] Federici, 25.
[3] Federici, 32.
[4] Federici, 32.
[5] Federici, 32.
[6] Federici, 41.
[7] Federici, 82.
[8] Federici, 76. Federici writes on the double meaning of sterility: “But the charge most often moved against ‘witches’ is that they are sterile and produce sterility, both sexual and economic, in the people they bewitch.”
[9] Federici, 75.
[10] Federici, 74. Federici gets to the heart of what the elderly woman embodies: “I argue that many older women and men in Africa today are hunted as witches because they too are seen as dead assets, the embodiment of a world of practices and values that is increasingly considered sterile and unproductive.”
[11] Federici, 75.
[12] Federici, 65.
[13] Federici, 72.
[14] Rosemarie Tong and Tina Fernandes Botts. Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Introduction, 5th Edition (New York: Westview Press, 2018), 89.
[15] Tong and Fernandes Botts, Feminist Thought, 79.
[16] Tong and Fernandes Botts, Feminist Thought, 78.
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