Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women Quotes

“[V]iolence against women is a key element in this new global war, not only because of the horror it evokes or the messages it sends but because of what women represent in their capacity to keep their communities together and, equally important, to defend noncommercial conceptions of security and wealth.”
― Silvia Federici, Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women

“Witch-hunting in all its different forms is also a powerful means to destroy communal relations, injecting the suspicion that underneath the neighbor, the friend, the lover hides another person, lusting for power, sex, wealth, or simply wanting to commit evil deeds.”
― Silvia Federici, Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women

“In capitalism, sex can exist but only as a productive force at the service of procreation and the regeneration of the waged/male working and as a mean of social appeasement and compensation for the misery of everyday existence.”
― Silvia Federici, Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women

“[W]omen were those most likely to be victimized because they were the most 'disempowered' by these changes, especially older women, who often rebelled against their impoverishment and social exclusion and who consituted the bulk of the accused. In other words, women were charged with witchcraft because the restructuring of rural Europe at the dawn of capitalism destroyed their means of livelihood and the basis of their social poer, leaving them with no resort but dependence on the charity of the better-off at a time when communal bonds were disintegrating and a new morality was taking hold that criminalized begging and looked down upon charity, the reputed path to eternal salvation in the medieval world.”
― Silvia Federici, Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women

“Even the unspeakable tortures to which the accused women were subjected acquire a different meaning when we conceive them as a form of exorcism against their powers.”
― Silvia Federici, Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women

“Typical of the new bourgeois sexual morality was Martin Luther’s injunction to the nuns to leave the convents and get married, as marriage and the production of an abundant prole was in his view women’s fulfillment of God’s will and their ‘highest vocation.’ “Let them bear children to death,” he apparently declared. “They are created for that.”3 No sixteenth-century political or religious authority expressed this sentiment as crudely as Luther, but the restriction of women’s sexuality to marriage and procreation, together with wifely unconditional obedience, was instituted”
― Silvia Federici, Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women

“This involved a historic battle against anything posing a limit to the full exploitation of the laborer, starting with the web of relations that tied the individuals to the natural world, to other people, and to their own bodies”
― Silvia Federici, Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women

“It is essential to emphasize that violence against women is a key element in this new global war, not only because of the horror it evokes or the messages it sends but because of what women represent in their capacity to keep their communities together and, equally important, to defend noncommercial conceptions of security and wealth.”
― Silvia Federici, Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women

“Love is the great magician, the demon that unites earth and sky and makes humans so round, so whole in their being, that once united they cannot be defeated.”
― Silvia Federici, Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women