Unknown to us, in her ground-breaking book, Caliban and The Witch, Silvia Federici argues that the witch hunts of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries served to create and enforce a newly established role in society for women, who were consigned to unpaid reproductive labour to satisfy the needs of an ascendant capitalist order. After school we concocted potions, conducted rituals and created secret languages. As ambitious teen girls wary of how we were perceived in the adult world, we sought solace in the idea that we could harness a secret and subversive power to change things. Years before we knew what feminism was, a sense of foreboding had developed among us, about our place in the world and our power relative to adults and to our male peers. In high school, like many young women, my friends and I developed a fascination with witches. Republished from Progress in Political Economy.
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