Ch 15. Women, witches and capitalism
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Terry Leahy 2024
An earlier chapter showed how capitalism and patriarchy intersect to create a particular gender regime. That account focused on the history of this process in the rich world. In this chapter I am going to extend this account by looking firstly at the witch hunts of late feudal and early capitalist Europe. The next chapter will look at the extent to which this history runs in parallel to events taking places in colonized countries of the New World.
Sylvia Federici’s ‘Caliban and the Witch’ is in many ways a comprehensive review of this topic. While I will disagree with some of her interpretation of these events, I have no problems with the descriptive material she sets out. I am identifying her approach as a variety of ‘marxist-feminist’ analysis as it was conceived in the seventies. There are many ways of linking Marxism and feminism and this is only one approach.
Popular rebellions and heresies
The late middle age in Europe is well known to have been a difficult period. The black death, the huge waves of plague that swept through Europe. Wars, both religious and civil. Like the hundred years war. Federici describes the impact of the ‘commutation’ of tribute in kind into paid taxes and tithes. This took place in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Landlords and the church demanded payment in money. Previously peasants had paid tribute in kind. The poorer peasants with small agricultural plots found it difficult to grow more crops to sell than they needed for their own subsistence. They could not pay the monetary tribute. The enclosure of common land used by peasants had a similar impact in later centuries. Many were forced to give up their peasant plots and look for paid work to live. In the cities, increased monetary exactions had a similar impact.
These various crises drove popular discontent. This discontent was expressed first through peasant rebellions. Very typically, demands to wind back taxes and tributes or to free the peasants directly addressed the economic issues. These rebellions had strong popular support but were often led by merchants, landless knights or excommunicated priests. The rebellions have been called ‘millenarian’ because they envisaged and end to the feudal class system. An egalitarian utopia. In the well-known words of John Ball, an English preacher from the popular uprising of 1381 – ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman’. These uprisings took place in all corners of Europe between 1323 and 1573. To take another example, a book written in the early sixteenth century envisaged a millenarian transformation working through Frederick II. He would arrive on a white horse to rule the whole world. The clergy, including the Pope, would be annihilated. The emperor would also execute money lenders, price fixers and evil lawyers. All wealth would be seized and given to the poor. Private property would be abolished and all things held in common.
In some few cases the rebels achieved some successes in getting their demands met. For example, King Richard gave the serfs their freedom after the 1381 uprising. But in all cases, the rebellions were defeated, the leaders and many of the followers executed.
Along with these rebellions, heretical sects also took on the establishment. For example, the Cathars, Waldenses, the Poor of Lyon, the Spirituals and Apostolics. Commonly, these heretical sects took over and defended a land base. For example, the Cathar communities of France, the Apostolics in Piedmont. As historians point out, these sects redefined all aspects of daily life. Work, property, reproduction, the position of women. As Federici puts it ‘posing the question of emancipation in truly universal terms’.
Federici stresses the participation of women in the rebellions and heresies. In the heretical sects, women often had the right to officiate in religious rituals. Men and women might live together communally. There were some women’s communities, such as the Beguines in Germany and Flanders. In the battle for Prague of 1420, the Taborite community fought the establishment. Taborite women dug a long trench, defending it with stones and pitchforks.
I have no doubt that Federici is right to claim the participation of women in the peasant rebellions and the heresies. In so far as the heresies are concerned, they certainly questioned hierarchy and opened up a pathway for patriarchy to be challenged. I suppose what I doubt is that these feminist moments can be claimed as a narrative of women fighting early capitalism. First, there is every reason for popular movements of this period to be fighting the establishment, the church, the feudal order and nascent capitalism. Both women and men had reasons for discontent. The crisis of social order at the end of feudalism created a space for utopian resistance. Second, reading accounts of the rebellions and the heresies it is very clear that they were led by men and that men were the ones doing most of the fighting. The English rebellion was inspired by the radical sermons of John Ball. It was led by Wat Tyler. Other leaders of the movement were Johan Geoffrey, a bailiff, John Wrawe, a former chaplain and Geoffrey Lister. The Norfolk rebellion 0f 1497 was led by a blacksmith, a lawyer and a baron. The Flemish revolt was led by a man, the pseudo-Baldwin. The leader of the Apostolics of Piedmont was Fra Dolcino, whose partner Margherita was burned by the authorities while he was hacked to death.
The enclosure movement
The history of the enclosure movement is largely sourced from the English example, though similar events were also taking place in Europe. Enclosures began as early as the 12th century, there was a boost in the Tudor period, and they continued through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Landlords took over the common spaces used by peasants to supplement their cropping fields. Where they might graze their pigs or gather acorns and firewood. The fallow fields where they might graze their cattle. These common areas were enclosed by landlords, who took them as private property. In Tudor England, landlords moved away from an agricultural system based on mixed farming and local food provision. They started commercial sheep farming, exporting wool. As the historian William Walzer explains, landlords expelled peasants from their land. Sending them off as wanderers on the streets looking for any available work. A volatile population in the cities.
Destroying enclosing hedges was the most common form of rural resistance in the period from the 15th to the 17thcentury. In Norfolk in 1549 a rebellion led by Robert Kett, a farmer and a tanner, involved 16,000 in an armed uprising. As the rebellion was crushed, 3,500 rebels were killed. Federici emphasizes the involvement of women in this rural resistance. During the reign of James 1, ten per cent of these rebellions included women participants. All the participants of some of these protests were women. For example, in 1608 a party of forty women destroyed hedges and fences in Lincolnshire. Federici documents several other cases like that.
Federici explains this involvement as driven by the particularly severe consequences of enclosure for peasant women. It was more difficult for them to leave their homes looking for work than it was for their husbands. Paid employment for women was between half and a third of the male wage for similar work in this period. Relating this to issues discussed in the previous chapters, the continuation of patriarchy through the transition to a market economy was achieved through a process that ended up with men as the more highly paid wage earners. In turn, as this account suggests, this relates to the disadvantages in power conflicts that reproduction imposes on women. Federici’s analysis of women’s participation makes good sense. However, this is clearly not a resistance to enclosure led by women because of women’s greater disadvantages in a nascent commercial economy. Her own evidence indicates that it was mostly led by men and men were the most likely participants in these acts of resistance. Small farmers whose livelihood was being threatened by enclosure. These men were very likely to end up unemployed and wandering the streets, rather than ensconced in a paying job.
The witch hunts of Europe
The last of these European episodes was the witch craze. It is very difficult to understand what was going on. The witch burnings were associated with the end of feudal society and the introduction of the capitalist system in Europe and North America. From 1540 to 1750. Up to eighty per cent of the people accused and burned for witchcraft were women. They were often single older women — widows. In terms of likely work roles, they were typically women who were local traditional healers. Herbalists and midwives. They were tried by courts with religious leaders officiating. The aim was to prove the women were witches, communicating with the devil. Between 40,000 and 60,000 people were executed as witches. Of a population of about 70 million. So how can one explain these atrocities?
Federici’s account of the witch hunts can be summarized as a set of points.
- The new capitalist class engineers the witch trials and benefits from this pogrom. The witch hunts “destroyed a universe of practices, beliefs, and social subjects whose existence was incompatible with capitalist work discipline” (164).
- The witch trials divide the subordinate classes, pitting men against women. “The witch hunt deepened the divisions between women and men, teaching men to fear the power of women” (165). The effect was to “break class solidarity” (188).
- The witch trials engineer a decline in the status of women compared to feudal society – “the devaluation of women’s social position with the advent of capitalism” (7).
- The ultimate aim of the capitalist class is the domestication of women, keeping them out of the newly defined productive sphere and the incomes connected to wage work.
- The intention is to confine women to the sphere of reproduction. The benefit to the capitalist class is to get reproductive work (childbirth, childcare, housework) work done free of charge. So, the capitalist class depends on this work but does not have to pay for it– a super exploitation of the proletariat. The witch hunts ‘were instrumental to the construction of a new patriarchal order where women’s bodies, their labor, their sexual and reproductive powers were placed under the control of the state and transformed into economic resources’ (169). Old women were likely targets, she argues, because the new organisation of family life ‘gave priority to child-raising at the expense of care previously provided to the elderly’ (199).
- The witch hunt attacks these women because they spearhead a resistance to the new capitalist order – feminists ‘were quick to recognize that hundreds of thousands of women could not have been massacred and subject to the cruellest tortures unless they posed a challenge to the power structure’ (164).
- It attacks these women because, as midwives and healers, they are an impediment to a boost to population that is much desired by the authorities. There can be no doubt, she says, ‘that the witch-hunt destroyed methods that women had used to control procreation, by indicting them as diabolic devices, and institutionalized the state’s control over the female body, the precondition for its subordination to the reproduction of labor-power’ (183).
It is these Marxist-feminist aspects of Federici’s account that I want to question. There are other aspects of her account where I am fully in agreement.
An alternative account
The witch trials were not engineered by the capitalist class. In the period in question (1450 to 1680) the nobility was still in charge. Instead, these trials are organized by middle level clerics with the cooperation of the courts.
Federici points to aspects of the new capitalist order that are being established at this time and causing stress for the poor. This is undoubtedly one of the factors leading to discontent and the potential for anti-systemic movements. For example, rent instead of tribute service in kind. The enclosure of common fields and the dispossession of the peasants in parts of Europe. There are other stresses. The plagues and famines. Wars, such as the religious wars between Catholics and Protestants.
Following Marvin Harris, it seems most likely that the witchcraft trials were a pre-emptive strike against the potential for millenarian armed uprisings against the church and nobility. This explanation is also an important aspect of Federici’s account. In this period, these millenarian movements affected every part of Europe. Along with unorthodox religious beliefs, they hoped for a new society with equality and the sharing of all goods. In areas where they took control, they killed priests and members of the nobility. As Harris says, the witch hunts were a diversion from this pathway. The authorities were saving the population from witches. The problems people were experiencing in their lives were down to witches, not the nobility or the church.
The principal result of the witch-hunt system … was that the poor came to believe that they were being victimized by witches and devils instead of princes and popes. Did your roof leak, your cow abort, your oats wither, your wine go sour, your head ache, your baby die? It was a neighbour, the one who broke your fence, owed you money, or wanted your land — a neighbour turned witch. Did the price of bread go up, taxes soar, wages fall, jobs grow scarce? It was the work of witches. Did plague and famine carry off a third of the inhabitants of every village and town? The diabolical, infernal witches were growing bolder all the time. Against people’s phantom enemies, Church and state mounted a bold campaign. The authorities were unstinting in their efforts to ward off this evil, and rich and poor alike could be thankful for the energy and bravery displayed in the battle. (Harris 237)
Trevor-Roper argues a chronology of these trials that fits with this account. The first witch trials occurred in the late sixteenth century in regions where huge millenarian cults had been suppressed – northern Spain, the Alps and the Pyrennees. Later outbreaks fitted with areas that had just been taken over by either protestants or by Catholics. So, England, Scotland and parts of Europe for the first (the late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century) with parts of Germany for the second (the later seventeenth century). In other words, the trials correspond to areas where the newly established authorities were consolidating their control over the rural population.
The de facto and unconscious aim of the trials was to discipline a recalcitrant population with either millenarian, protestant or catholic attachments. Capitalists as such had little to do with this. It was clerics aided by the civil courts. On the other hand, it can make sense to say that the new capitalist regime, as it gradually became established, benefited from this long period of prior pacification.
The key tactic of the witch hunts was taken over from methods used to break the millenarian movements. Authorities put pressure on members of local communities to name suspects. These suspects were then tortured to reveal further allies. Breaking up the solidarity of the community. For example, in Aberdeen, Scotland in 1603, ministers of the Presbyterian church were “ordered to ask their parishioners under oath, if they suspected anyone of being a witch. Boxes were placed in the churches to allow the informers to remain anonymous. Then, after a woman had fallen under suspicion, the minister exhorted the faithful from the pulpit to testify against her and forbid anyone to give her help” (Federici 166).
It is mistaken to think that the targeting of women (80 per cent of the accused) was because older women were the spearhead of resistance. As argued in the previous chapter, the great majority of millenarian movements of resistance were led by men. On the other hand, it is true as Federici argues, that these older women were the worst affected by the enclosures, dispossession of peasant holdings and the monetisation of class relationships. These older single women usually made their livings through a combination of a local profession in herbalism, midwifery and a subsistence food provision. They used the commons to source the requirements for their work and their own plots and the commons for subsistence. They could not replicate this economic niche in a situation where they were being deprived of their land and the commons. They could not readily leave this niche and go elsewhere to get a paid job. Families with a male head of household were slightly less damaged by these changes. The husbands and fathers might sell crops to get money, becoming tenant farmers, or get a paid job. To that extent, these women are the people most strongly opposed to the changes that are taking place.
Their resentments were often clear in the testaments indicting witches. The witch stole pears from a neighbour’s trees. Asked to return them, she threw them down in an angry fit. After that, no more pears would grow on that field. Another woman was accused following an incident in which she was refused some cheese. Grace, the one who refused her, became lame. Witches were blamed for every untoward incident. Older widows and village women were targeted because they lacked social support and were easy scapegoats. Coincidentally, these women were also midwives and herbalists. The trials certainly confirmed the domination of men in these professions but that is not what they were primarily about. In an area where witchcraft trials took hold, the first to be accused were older single women. Later there were children of both sexes, some men and even a few middle-class people. Accusations against the nobility were a miniscule minority. Usually, at that point the trials in that area stopped. The spread of witchcraft accusations was guaranteed by the methods used to find witches. The accused were tortured and asked to reveal the names of fellow witches.
The witches were the people in the village who suddenly find themselves surplus to requirements, without an income and dependent on village support and sympathy. Instead, they get targeted as people who cannot defend themselves. The least powerful people in their communities. Older women, often single. The “witches were usually old women on public assistance or women who survived by going from house to house begging for bits of food or a pot of wine or milk, if they were married their husbands were day laborers but more often, they were widows and lived alone” (170). In a situation where the persecuting clerics were looking for victims and demanding suspects dobbed in by fellow villagers.
They are consorting with the devil. The disruption that is plaguing us must be their fault. They were accused of having sold body or soul to the devil. By “magical means, murdered scores of children, sucked their blood, made potions with their flesh, caused the death of their neighbour, destroyed cattle and crops, raised storms” (Federici 167).
In so far as these trials and executions were organized by the powerful, they acted as a distraction from the real causes of disruptive upheaval. A grim circus. Not so much a glorious instance of resistance to the new economic order. More an example of the way class society responds to a crisis.
One aspect of Federici’s account of the witch craze can make some sense. As we have seen, while feudal society was patriarchal, there were arenas of social action in which women had recognized and respected authority. For example, in small business, especially as widows. In medical work as healers, midwives and herbalists. By the seventeenth century these fields of power were gradually being taken over by men, beginning a process of professionalisation. The organisation of the witch trials had the effect of targeting women who exercized these kinds of authority. Clearing the way for a scientific and masculine re-shaping of medicine. Bacon’s endorsement of the witch trials and his parallel between witch hunting and scientific research is a telling pointer to this connection. Federici is not the first feminist historian or sociologist to make this link. ‘Witches, Midwives and Nurses’ was published in 1973 by the Feminist Press and authored by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English.
The attacks on women represent typical fantasies of patriarchy. The monstrous feminine. Also, that the Devil suborns women to become his helpers. Meaning that the avenging clerics and civil authorities are fighting a powerful male father figure. These fantasies are systematized by persecuting clerics. But they also seem plausible to local men (and women) in the villages. They are confirmed by torture. They make sense in a misogynistic cultural environment where it is not just men who perpetuate these ideas.
While it is true that the new capitalist role for women removes some of the powers of women in the mediaeval period, feudal Europe was also a patriarchal society. From its very beginnings, capitalism threatens to empower women through a wage independent of family authority. Men as a sex-class resist this by fighting to create wage differentials. It seems very unlikely that these witch trials initiated a process of domestication and exclusion from wage work. This only happened much later (mostly in the twentieth century) in capitalist industrial societies. Very obviously, most poor women combined work in reproduction (unpaid) with paid work (at lower wages).
Federici considers the witch craze as driven by the desire of authorities to take control of women’s reproductive power. During the plagues of the Black Death the population of Europe dropped by a third. The consequence was that ordinary paid workers and rural peasants increased their bargaining power. Labour was in short supply. Federici sees this as driving a moral panic about population. Authorities were keen to ensure the quickest possible population growth. A popular panic and changes to the legal system focused on women accused of infanticide. The witch trials targeted women who might aid and abet women in herbal contraception or abortion. Witches were often charged with sacrificing children to the devil. The aim of the witch trials was to break women’s control over reproduction. A control organized through the work of midwives and women herbalists. The aim was to ensure that every birth was attended by male doctors who could ensure that everything was done according to the wishes of the establishment.
It is possible that clerical authorities backed up civil elites by targeting women who might assist with abortions or contraception. To boost population. But it seems a bit unlikely. The charges of infanticide for ritual purposes are a staple of witchcraft scapegoating — meant to show how unnatural and evil these people are. That old women could not do this unless they were in thrall to the Devil.
Conclusions
My analysis of these events fits with a Foucauldian perspective on history. We can see the apparatus of the witch hunts being first assembled to deal with heretical movements in Spain, the Alps and the Pyrenees. The authorities use torture to get members of the dangerous group to indict each other, breaking solidarity. This tactic works and gets replicated. It is then generalized and inflicted on new targets. The terror breaks up the potential for more revolutionary millenarian attacks on class power.
The problem that I see in Federici’s account is that it starts at the end of this process and works back. The end is a subdued population, a gender regime suitable to capitalism, an acceptance of work discipline, the end of peasant control of land within a feudal accommodation, the domination of wage labour as the main form of exploitation. All this is in the future — 1750 to 1910. Federici treats the witch hunts as a capitalist conspiracy to bring about this ultimate outcome. But as a Foucauldian approach suggests, the players at the time have none of this in their heads as they develop strategies that make sense at the time. A largely aristocratic class structure, millenarian resistance to the church and nobility. A strategy that works to contain this resistance. A strategy discovered and replicated rather than planned to achieve a later set of end points.
Looking at this as an example of an intersection between patriarchy and class power we may say this. The witch hunts are a strategy of class power under threat. They target women as scapegoats because they are already a group with less social power. An easy target. They are also the victims because the developing new economy puts them at a particular disadvantage compared to men of their own class. Rather than making war on the whole of the peasant underclass, as also happened at this time, the powers that be made an example of particular members of the subordinate class to terrify the whole class. To an extent we could see this as ‘dividing the proletariat’ by gender to rule them. But it depended on the willingness of the peasant community, as a whole, to treat these older single women as expendable. An existing patriarchal dispensation managed to create a more general effect. The problem with Marxist feminism is that it treats men of the subordinate classes as forever the innocents. It never looks at the investments which men of all classes have in patriarchy. I find it a worry that ultra leftists who would never go near a Trotskyist democratic socialist party so readily become enthusiasts for this kind of account.