Rich in anecdote, oftentimes exciting and moving, this is one of those books that makes history come alive. It is not only instructive, but also a joy to read.

Gender, Federici stresses, “should be treated as a specification of class relations”.Ĭaliban and the Witch is both a history of the making of the European working class and a re-telling of the birth of capitalism that places women at the center of the story. Medieval “women’s struggles” were not separate from “class struggles” (any more than they are today) rather, they were class struggles in their own right. Federici’s historical analysis brings previously “invisible” (at least, to those who don’t experience them) forms of oppression and resistance to light, exposing the subjugation and oppression of women as central not only to capitalist history, but also to our unfinished quest to find a way out of it. Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation is a welcome addition to a growing list of works that address the oppression of women from an anti-capitalist and anti-colonialist perspective. Reviewed by Karl Kersplebedeb / Issue 2 / Įnding women’s oppression is crucial to the struggle for human liberation, but serious investigations of why women suffer distinct forms of oppression, and why rape and other forms of violence play such an integral role in this oppression, have generally been beyond the scope of most left analysis.

Caliban and the witch federici