å Monday, September 11th, 2017

In Silvia Federici’s book “Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation ,” Federici explains the consequences of land privatization in Europe in the late 1500’s. In this chapter, “The Accumulation of Labor and the Degradation of Women”, Federici lists several events that relate to the history of degradation that women have received. In “The Devaluation of Women’s Labour ” women lost the opportunity to work through land privatization and a commercial agriculture. (67) In the late 15th century capitalist merchants employed women for a lower wage than men. This increased the profit for merchants and caused businesses to compete. Businesses who were not in favor of this socio-economic change protested and petitioned the employment of women. They even pushed to limit women to their households. A result of the loss of employment to women resulted in the rise of prostitution. (67) This event in this chapter represents the beginning of the degradation of women. Women’s independence was stripped from them as employment was barred. They were confined to the daily tasks and ideology of a domestic house wife. Restraining women and ranking them below white men made them inferior. Through the limiting of women economically merchants were able to keep their businesses afloat, constructing a new career for women that would last for centuries. However the aftermath of these decisions display a more vivid picture of the degradation of women. (90) The rise of prostitution in Europe showed the strict nature of white men towards women. Unlike the Middle Ages which prostitution was normalized, harlotry was banned and met with harsh punishments. Women were flogged, imprisoned, banished, ridicule, etc. Sexually assaulting prostitutes were reoccurring and met with little or no care. Prostitutes were even considered witches and whores. This consequence caused by the failure of adaption of women laborers was met with a demeaning response. This again points to the harsh nature of white men in the late 15th century, the degradation of women due to land privatization, and the idea that women were no longer in authority of their autonomy as Federici states. (113)

In Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation Silvia Federici portrays the oppression of women in relation to economic and social changes. Federici references an event known as Kett’s Rebellion, which plays an important role in discussing how women came together to revolt against these changes and later became demeaned for their actions. Kett’s Rebellion occurred in response to the beginning stages of land privatization and directly correlates with the ongoing degradation of women during the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries. Kett’s Rebellion sprouted due to the belief that “common” land could not be privately owned and maintained by the wealthy for profit. It was during the 1500s that Kett and his followers were able to successfully revolutionize against their government using warfare and other non-violent forms of protest. This includes a program constructed by Kett himself to eliminate the abuse of private common land ownership (Federici 83). Though the rebellion itself had later failed and discontinued, its influences did not. This was observed throughout the following years, after land privatization once again became a forthcoming threat to society.

The penalties that followers of the anti-enclosure movement faced due to Kett’s Rebellion and the emergence of a capitalist society imposed degradation on women after the 1500s. Women were subjected to the consequences of capitalization the most, seeing as how they had been forced to rely on their male counterparts for freedoms and support for most of their history. The common lands were once a place where women were free to embrace their ideas and such. But even that liberty was slowly being striped from them. It was women who became unable to support themselves because of their inability to become migrant workers, insufficient wages, and a lack of opprotunity. Instead, they experienced many limitations when it came to what type of work they were able to perform. In some cases, women supported the military by becoming cooks, washers, wives, and even prostitutes. Not a single woman was granted a combat position, let alone even permitted near the battlefield. All these restrictions and forms of economic and social control go on to prove that women faced the greatest loss of dignity.

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.

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.

Silvia Federici mentions multiple events throughout the chapter, The Accumulation of Labor and the Degradation of Women, in order to convey how the political and economic conditions brought along a new trend of labor force, impacting the population of lower working class, and in particular, the female population.

The start of this movement towards capitalism began with the Enclosure and the tendency of land privatization, a trend among wealthy lords and farmers of Europe. This was the act of taking away the system of public land ownership (used for agricultural purposes) and taking control of these lands for their own profit (Frederici, 2004: 79). The result was disastrous, because it destroyed entire villages and communities, depriving the people of what seemed to be their only way of survival; it destroyed their way of living. With no other source for food, many within the peasant community became very poor and this further broke down the solidity of the rural population. People begged for jobs, and young family members left home to become wonderers known as vegabonds. Moreover, these people were forced to become dependent on others for survival, particularly to their landowners and employers, because wage became a type of enslavement.

The core of how this event relates to the degradation of women stems from how this movement completely destroyed women’s independence. When this movement struck, women were at a disadvantage because their lives weren’t suited to become vagabonds or migrant workers. Several limitations they faced include having to care for their children and being subject to male violence; this prevented them from adapting a nomadic life style (Frederici, 2004: 83). Furthermore, women were ostracized by society by often being excluded from waged occupations, and earning less then men even while doing the same work. As a result, the only place they could work was at their homes doing reproductive labor. However, the problem was, because the trend was turning towards monetary values, there was a heavier value put on actual production of market commodities rather than the reproduction of workers. Therefore, even the one thing that they were allowed to do, which was procreation, was deemed utterly valueless. This may have been the cause of women being under-acknowledged within society and being viewed as weak, dependent beings who can’t survive without their husbands. The society and government made it so that women would be powerless without men, and this act of taking about their ability to become, or rather, remain capable individuals is the defining instance where women suffered degradation.

Silvia Federici explains how the privatization of land had a very specific and calculated impact that affected not just the economy, but women as well. The privatization of land through enclosure forced women into a position where they felt the need to riot. It was explained that communal farming land was one of the places where women could share information, advice, and consult the men working and have almost equal footing. By abolishing open land farming, women lost this privilege and in turn, lost a lot of what gave them power (Frederici, 2004:81).  Later, during the Jacobean period, riots led predominantly by woman surged. The reason for this was because it was largely believed that women were above the law as their marriage offered them protection because of their husbands. However, this protection would quickly be removed when men were caught being disguised as women to avoid punishment. (Frederici, 2004:83). Women were the most affected by the removal of community lands as they could not become nomadic workers due to violence by men as well as the burden of children and pregnancy. All of these issues made it hard for women to find independence and not rely on men. And all these issues were largely brought on by the privatization of land. The only other options left were to join the military as cooks, prostitutes, washers and wives. But this too would no longer be an option by the 17th century when the armies became further regimented and women were expelled from the battlefield (Frederici, 2004:83).The limiting of options,  the change in lifestyle, and the forcing of women to feel as though they had no other option but to riot and protest the changes that were happening are obvious signs that women suffered at the hand of economical shift from communal land owning to a more capitalist approach.

The beginning of sixteenth culture was very difficult for the entire world. It was a time when countries like England, France, Portugal and Spain began their expansion. Colonization began all around the world and it had effects. Some of the consequences still didn’t resolve in a modern world. However, the colonization was an issue of a colonized new worlds at the same time people of these power countries experienced local problems too.

Silvia Federici in the chapter “The Accumulation of Labor and the Degradation of Women” explains that government started to privatize the land and forced people into labor. Enclosing of a land had a huge impact on people’s lives because before that people could provide for themselves. They grew food and sold it to others. After privatization, people lost their old way of life. Now they had to work for somebody and get a payment. At the same time, in the other parts of the world, slavery started to emerge. Going back to England and other countries, men found themselves working for the government but women lost their purpose. Women’s task was trimmed to just reproductive labor. Land privatization harmed women more that men because the old way of life crushed and they found themselves moving from place to place and it became a thread. Women were unprotected from hunger and especially male violence. Unfortunately, it was a time when misogyny was at rise. Also, women had to care for children and protect them somehow. Some women found a job in military services as cooks or nurses but later on even these jobs were taken from them. And, if we move to the other countries that were colonized, people were enslaved into labor. There were a lot of struggles and rebellions but it didn’t make an impact and only degraded their lives.  Many men were killed by colonizers and women were left without husbands, protectors and providers. So, they and their children were exposed to even more violence from cruel masters.

Thus, from sixteenth century to twenties century people did a lot of good things as exploration and inventions as well as bad things such as colonization and enslavement of people for unpaid and unjust labor. And, only people who suffered from this were other less privileged people, who were only a different race or gender.

In Federici’s The Accumulation of Labor and Degradation of Women, we are given many examples of how women were looked at as second class citizens. They couldn’t make their own decisions, and even their own bodies didn’t truly belong to themselves because it was seen as property of the state for the sole purpose of reproduction. One of the events mentioned that played a part in women being devalued happened in 1624 in York. Women protested by rioting and destroying an enclosure which led to them going to prison. Women were so opposed to enclosures because they were even more negatively impacted by them than the men were at the time . For the women, it was even more difficult to work, get money, and help provide food and shelter for their families. Before this, women weren’t prosecuted for crimes because they were looked at as belonging to their husbands legally. This event helped change how they were treated by the law. We see how women eventually start to be prosecuted at alarming rates for complications with their pregnancies and their babies dying. Another contributor to the degradation of women during this time was the popular literature on the social aspects of the 17th century life which dealt with the power struggle between men and women. In this type of literature, female characters were depicted as aggressive and unruly often times physically hurting their husbands. This led men to want to exclude women from the work force even more out of fear that women will become too powerful. Women who went against the norm of working only in the home were given a bad reputation in regards to their sexuality. The men feared losing their jobs to women who would work for much less than they would. Federici shows us that women always had a specific set of expectations that were given to her by men. When mercantilism became the way of life, and the higher the population the more money the state could make, women were then seen as breeders. Then when the ideals on femininity began to change, women were expected to be passive and suppress their sexuality as a way of being more virtuous than their male counterparts. All of this related to the degradation of women because they were never given the freedom to just do what they wanted to do, and they weren’t treated equally under the law and in everyday interactions.

       In Federici’s work “ Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation” the issue of population decline (Federici, 2004: 86) and its relation to the colonization of America led by Europeans is directly in relation to the degradation of women.  During the earlier part of the 16th century, the population decline was a direct hit on the lower class wiping them out at an alarming rate. If the wealthy wished to keep profiting as they did,  the sustainability of the poor lower class played a crucial role in this. However these vast deaths proved to be problematic only when affecting the higher ups ability to profit. Now this grew to become an economical issue that was a direct fault of their own capitalist influences. Instead the population decline was partially disguised as the fault of women, whom were not reproducing enough hence the decline of the population. (Federici, 2004: 86) This contributed to the degradation of women by rendering the power they have over their own bodies. A women’s ability to create life was now being deemed as rather her duty or economical requirement as a women. However, ability which renders choice seems to be implemented synonymously with obligation, leaving no room for choice. The ability to give brith was now being wrongfully exploited by a capitalist government and  labeled as a reproductive machine that would help aid in the growth of the population. It is alarming that the wavering foundation for which this lie was built upon is accepted as an undisputed truth at this period in time. Its effects prove to be detrimental in relation to the degradation of women by having to relinquishing the rights one posses over their own body. These laws were being implemented in a matter or life or death and were a sole attack on the female sex for two reasons. The first being that women have the ability to create a human being as men do not have that same ability. Secondly, the ruling capitalists were using women’s ability to procreate as a means to fix a problem created by them in the first place. It was not the wombs that created the problem, it was simply used as a mechanism in which to fix it. As well as being an attack on women it was also a demonstration of power. This blame was so easily adopted by society at this time because women lacked economical power in the work force and were inherently viewed as powerless beings that withstood animal like treatment.

No matter where you are in the world, women are constantly being objectified. Although times have changed and women did eventually gain equal rights, back then it was very hard for them to maintain even a simple job. Even today, women are paid less than their male coworkers. The sole purpose of women back than was to serve as housewives. Even today, some may find it hard to believe women are 100% equal. During the reign of James I, there were plenty of riots going around where most of them were female protesting for their equal rights. Thirty seven women attacked coal miners claimed to be a village (Frederici, 83) The women back then would go out and start riots of their own just to have their voices heard, so they can impact their society and make a change within the community. They had to go out and fight for their freedom and rights on their own by starting these movements. The women were the ones who had suffered the most when the land was lost and all the villages fell apart because they were not able to easily adapt to different jobs such as working as a migrant workers and living a nomadic lifestyle (Frederici 83). The women did not have the rights to join the army, so they joined as cooks, washers, prostitutes and wives to please the men. When the land was privatized, women all over found it difficult to even support themselves because of how little rights they were able to have and the money they didn’t have because the lack of jobs that were available to them. There was a huge transition from feudalism to capitalism that took place that impacted the lives and roles of the women. The women had suffered social degradation throughout this transition. The degradation and the social discipline of women had two major factors that took place. The women were considered “non-workers”. Most of the values and jobs the women obtained were taken away from them by men which then led to them not being able to support themselves during the economic change.