The And The Witch By Silvia Federici - 1259 Words

Women have played an extremely important role in the growth of society around the world. Along with that role, women have been ridiculed, persecuted, and considered inferior to men. Why has inequality between the classes and sexes been so ubiquitous for so long? Caliban and the Witch is a historical book written by Silvia Federici, an Italian-American scholar, that discusses this question along with the growth of capitalism and the reformation of society itself. Silvia Federici compares different eras and the role of women in them. She looks at the Middle Ages, and the Early modern period. She draws from different sources from around the world and combines them to form Caliban and the Witch. The first example that Silvia Federici uses†¦show more content†¦Again and again the idea that men were superior to women was placed into people’s subconsciouses, whether through workload or witch-hunts. Many aspects of this book relate subjects we have studied as a class such as slavery, Native Americans, women’s rights, and Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Serfdom in the 5th century was the first recorded sense of inequality between men and women. Even then, there was a strong sense of patriarchy among society. â€Å"Women were [...] excluded from the offices to which the better off-male peasants were appointed, and, to all effects, they had a second-class status [...] Nevertheless, female serfs were less dependent on their male kin, less differentiated from them physically, socially, and psychologically, and were less subservient to men’s needs than ‘free’ women were to be later in capitalist society† (24). Women’s dependence to men relied on the fact that they were bound to each other by law. â€Å"It was the lord who commanded women’s work and social relations, deciding, for instance, whether a widow should remarry and who should be her spouse† (25). Inequality was much less prevalent among the lower classes. Every person, man or woman, worked for their living and to please their landl ords. â€Å"[M]ost of the tasks female serfs performed were done in cooperation with other women, we then realize that the seual division of labor, far from being a source of isolation, was a source of power and