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Assignment #2

In Federici’s chapter “The Accumulation of Labor and the Degradation of Women”, she talks about the enclosure movement in Europe, and the struggles women endured through such a time. Federici notes that many enclosure riots included a vast majority of women (some even led by women). Women would destroy enclosures by taking down fences and ruining hedges, ditches, etc. (pg 83) They were desperate to dismantle these enclosures, even more so than men. The enclosures not only brought on economic hardship to many of these women and their families, but submerged them in a dangerous atmosphere. Once people could no longer support themselves off the land and had to rely on work and money to survive, society labeled women’s only contributing factor to be reproductive labor. Women were responsible for producing the future workforce and were excluded from paid occupations.

This degraded women by not only forcing them to be financially dependent on working men, but also informed them that whatever talents or intelligence they possessed were far less valuable than the talents their reproductive system held. Women could not live nomadically to support themselves like their male counterparts, for their reproductive labor would interfere, whether that be restricted mobility during their pregnancies or having to much responsibility to care for their children. Even if such reproductive labor didn’t interfere with mobility, it was also hard for women to migrate due to violent acts they could encounter from men during travels. (pg 83) I can see how this could make a woman feel helpless, in a world of misogyny and financial turbulence, she did not have the accessibility to earn her own wage and support herself or her children. To demean her and separate her from the capitalist work force, she was stranded on a path only leading to a farther unequal relationship to men.

Cited:

Federici, Silvia. “The Accumulation of Labor and the Degradation of Women.” Caliban and the Witch, readings.elizabethbullock.com/igssf17/federici_caliban.pdf.