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Assignment 2: Silvia Federici

In the chapter “The Accumulation of Labor and the Degradation of Women” by Silvia Federici, she talks about how land was managed throughout the centuries. She starts out this chapter with two quotes and the second one talks about how most men viewed women in that time, which was bodies that were just used for reproduction/sexual pleasure  and could careless for anything else. She then goes into the subject about land privatization and how she considers it as  land expropriation through war and religious reform. She explains how it went on for many centuries and locations. Federici also stated how land privatization  was not beneficial, it did not help out the common people. Furthermore into the chapter she starts to talk about the life of the women  and how it changed when land was privatized. Women did not give up without a fight, they participated in enclosure riots were they fought out the fences. Once their land was lost they did end up suffering the most since they were not “capable” of taking up the job that were mainly for men. Women would now have to depend on men under these circumstances. If woman worked for wages they were working for way less compared to the male wages. Federici also puts an illustration in this chapter where it shows women walking with the armies but the women were wearing muzzling devices. This right here shows the degradation of women due to the fact that they had devices on their faces making them feel like they are some kind of animal. Another point were Federici mentions the degradation of women was when she mentioned how the female tongue was considered an instrument of insubordination, meaning that anything coming out of a female mouth was only negative things/wasteful. Throughout this chapter Federici mentions how woman were only important because they carried a womb, most were considered prostitutes/witches/whores, and basically had no social power.