Women protested food shortages in the streets of seventeenth-century France and Spain. And women carried pitchforks and scythes in riots against English landowners. They tore down fences and dug up hedges at night. They set fields on fire to protest the enclosure of the commons as private property. While women participated in real rebellions—class rebellions—the witch hunts were fueled by an imagined conspiracy among women, in league with the devil. “The witch,” Federici writes, “was the communist and terrorist of her time.”
