Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation

Silvia Federici is a scholar and activist who holds a doctorate in philosophy and has published multiple books on women, labor, and capitalism. Marxist feminist theory characterizes her work, including Caliban and the Witch, and has influenced her activism. Federici is the cofounder of the Wages for Housework movement, launched in the 1970s, the Anti-Death Penalty Project, and the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa. She has also worked with transnational feminist organizations such as Women in Nigeria.

Federici’s scholarship and activist work intersect in this monograph. Her inspiration for writing Caliban and the Witch was the debate among second-wave feminists during the 1970s about patriarchy’s origins. Furthermore, Federici’s time teaching in Nigeria during the mid-1980s allowed her to see connections between modern land privatization and past practices. She also laments the “enclosure of knowledge” that prevents “the historical sense of our common past” (10). Caliban and the Witch thus confronts and fills these voids by examining the “transition to capitalism” in Early Modern Europe via a global and comparative lens while also spotlighting its negative impact on working-class women, an aspect of Marxist theory that had previously been disregarded by most scholars. Her book’s final goal is to “revive among younger generations the memory of a long history of resistance that today is in danger of being erased” (10).