December 22, 2024
We’ve been working with philosopher and friend Silvia Federici on the organizing of her paper archive for the last four years. A few days ago, my collaborator @lisolesk and I found the original manuscript for Silvia’s book CALIBAN AND THE WITCH: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (2004), where she argues that the witch hunts served to “restructure family relations and the role of women in order to satisfy society’s needs during the rise of capitalism.”
We were all jumping for joy, it was truly so exciting! Pictured here Silvia is standing in her office with a selection of crocheted doilies that were part of her mother’s craft-making practice.
Here are a few excerpts from the text I just could not resist sharing. I love these shout outs to other feminist explorers.
“In recent times the Feminist Movement has lifted the witch hunt from the historical limbo where it has resided (like all unsolved mysteries) and assigned to it a proper place in the history of women in modern Europe and America. In this process @barbara_ehrenreich._ , Deidre English, and Mary Daly have shown how the witch hunt served to expropriate women from their medical practices, forced them under the patriarchical control of the nuclear family, destroyed a holistic conception of nature which until the renaissance had set limits to the exploitation of the environment and the female body.”
We have already started to deliver Silvia’s papers to the Feminist Theory Archive at the @pembrokecenter_brown at @brownu, but there is much more to come!
Luckily @seen.hanley got it all on film with earlier camera support from @ghostpnctuation, @inneyp , and @mariluetta !
Gratitude to Silvia Federici for writing the foreword to our (w @lisolesk ) forthcoming @punctum_books book Hand Book: A Manual on Performance, Process and the Labor of Laundry.