Having and Being Had

by Eula Biss

Witches were old women who could no longer produce children, midwives who facilitated birth control, childless women who remained unproductive, loose women who refused to be held as property, and prostitutes who sold themselves. Witches were, notably, poor. Among their recorded crimes were cursing the people who refused them food. 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.” Women in medieval drawings and stories were headstrong, rough, and lusty. They rode men and lashed them with whips. They married five husbands, one after another, and would happily take a sixth. Women were insatiable and domineering, or so they appeared in the cartoons of that time. But after the witch hunts, on our side of history, women were drawn as meek and weak. And a new ideal woman emerged: “sexless, obedient, submissive, resigned to subordination.” A woman, under capitalism, was no longer considered dangerous—she was helpless.

Helple-e-ess...