Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women

Author: Silvia Federici
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 1629635847
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 120

Book Description
We are witnessing a new surge of interpersonal and institutional violence against women, including new witch hunts. This surge of violence has occurred alongside an expansion of capitalist social relations. In this new work that revisits some of the main themes of Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici examines the root causes of these developments and outlines the consequences for the women affected and their communities. She argues that, no less than the witch hunts in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe and the “New World,” this new war on women is a structural element of the new forms of capitalist accumulation. These processes are founded on the destruction of people’s most basic means of reproduction. Like at the dawn of capitalism, what we discover behind today’s violence against women are processes of enclosure, land dispossession, and the remolding of women’s reproductive activities and subjectivity. As well as an investigation into the causes of this new violence, the book is also a feminist call to arms. Federici’s work provides new ways of understanding the methods in which women are resisting victimization and offers a powerful reminder that reconstructing the memory of the past is crucial for the struggles of the present.

Caliban and the Witch

Author: Silvia Federici
Publisher: Autonomedia
ISBN: 1570270597
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 286

Book Description
"Women, the body and primitive accumulation"--Cover.

In Defense of Witches

Author: Mona Chollet
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 125027222X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 155

Book Description
Mona Chollet's In Defense of Witches is a “brilliant, well-documented” celebration (Le Monde) by an acclaimed French feminist of the witch as a symbol of female rebellion and independence in the face of misogyny and persecution. Centuries after the infamous witch hunts that swept through Europe and America, witches continue to hold a unique fascination for many: as fairy tale villains, practitioners of pagan religion, as well as feminist icons. Witches are both the ultimate victim and the stubborn, elusive rebel. But who were the women who were accused and often killed for witchcraft? What types of women have centuries of terror censored, eliminated, and repressed? Celebrated feminist writer Mona Chollet explores three types of women who were accused of witchcraft and persecuted: the independent woman, since widows and celibates were particularly targeted; the childless woman, since the time of the hunts marked the end of tolerance for those who claimed to control their fertility; and the elderly woman, who has always been an object of at best, pity, and at worst, horror. Examining modern society, Chollet concludes that these women continue to be harrassed and oppressed. Rather than being a brief moment in history, the persecution of witches is an example of society’s seemingly eternal misogyny, while women today are direct descendants to those who were hunted down and killed for their thoughts and actions. With fiery prose and arguments that range from the scholarly to the cultural, In Defense of Witches seeks to unite the mythic image of the witch with modern women who live their lives on their own terms.

The Witches

Author: Stacy Schiff
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 0316200611
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 718

Book Description
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Cleopatra, the #1 national bestseller, unpacks the mystery of the Salem Witch Trials. It began in 1692, over an exceptionally raw Massachusetts winter, when a minister's daughter began to scream and convulse. It ended less than a year later, but not before 19 men and women had been hanged and an elderly man crushed to death. The panic spread quickly, involving the most educated men and prominent politicians in the colony. Neighbors accused neighbors, parents and children each other. Aside from suffrage, the Salem Witch Trials represent the only moment when women played the central role in American history. In curious ways, the trials would shape the future republic. As psychologically thrilling as it is historically seminal, The Witches is Stacy Schiff's account of this fantastical story -- the first great American mystery unveiled fully for the first time by one of our most acclaimed historians.

Witchcraze

Author: Anne Llewellyn Barstow
Publisher: Harper San Francisco
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Book Description
Explores the annihilation of seven million women of spirit and intelligence under the guise of 'witch hunts' in Reformation Europe

Witch Hunts

Author: Govind Kelkar
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108883435
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 287

Book Description
Witch hunts are the result of gendered, cultural and socioeconomic struggles over acute structural, economic and social transformations in both the formation of gendered class societies and that of patriarchal capitalism. This book combines political economy with gender and cultural analysis to explain the articulation of cultural beliefs about women as causing harm, and struggles over patriarchy in periods of structural economic transformation. It brings in field data from India and South-East Asia and incorporates a large body of works on witch hunts across geographies and histories. Witch Hunts is a scholarly analysis of the human rights violation of women and its correction through changes in beliefs, knowledge practices and adaptation in structural transformation.

Witches and Witch-hunts

Author: Milton Meltzer
Publisher: Scholastic Paperbacks
ISBN: 9780590486309
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 128

Book Description
Traces the origins and progression of hysteria, fear, and persecution associated with witches and witchcraft in western societies.

Re-enchanting the World

Author: Silvia Federici
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 1629635855
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 333

Book Description
Silvia Federici is one of the most important contemporary theorists of capitalism and feminist movements. In this collection of her work spanning over twenty years, she provides a detailed history and critique of the politics of the commons from a feminist perspective. In her clear and combative voice, Federici provides readers with an analysis of some of the key issues and debates in contemporary thinking on this subject. Drawing on rich historical research, she maps the connections between the previous forms of enclosure that occurred with the birth of capitalism and the destruction of the commons and the “new enclosures” at the heart of the present phase of global capitalist accumulation. Considering the commons from a feminist perspective, this collection centers on women and reproductive work as crucial to both our economic survival and the construction of a world free from the hierarchies and divisions capital has planted in the body of the world proletariat. Federici is clear that the commons should not be understood as happy islands in a sea of exploitative relations but rather autonomous spaces from which to challenge the existing capitalist organization of life and labor.

Witchlight

Author: Jessi Zabarsky
Publisher: Random House Graphic
ISBN: 0593120019
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 107

Book Description
Love -- loss -- witches -- this YA fantasy graphic novel has it all! This thoughtful, emotional story will entrance you with its moving story and organic artwork. Lelek is a witch. That's all Sanja knows when she meets Lelek in the marketplace. But Lelek is hiding something -- and as her life begins to intersect with Sanja's, all that she's kept to herself starts to come to light. Secrets, friendship, and magic all come together as Lelek gets closer and closer to uncovering the truth about her past. . . . Witchlight is a wonderful queer adventure filled with friendship, family, falling in love, and dealing with the hardest bits of your past all along the way.

The Witches of Fife

Author: Stuart MacDonald
Publisher: John Donald Publishers
ISBN: 9781906566838
Category : Trials (Witchcraft)
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
Along the coast of Fife, in villages like Culross and Pittenweem, history records that some women were executed as witches. Nevertheless, the reality of what happened the night that Janet Cornfoot was lynched at Pittenweem is hard to grasp as one sits by the harbour watching the fishing boats unload their catch and the pleasure boats rising with the tide. How could people do this to an old woman? Why was no-one ever brought to justice? And why would anyone defend such a lynching? The task of the historian is to try to make events in the past come alive and seem less strange. The details of the witch-hunt are fascinating. Some of the anecdotes are strange. The modern reader finds it hard to imagine illness being blamed on the malevolence of a beggar woman denied charity, or the economic failure of a sea voyage being attributed to the village hag, not bad weather. Witch-hunting was related to ideas, values, attitudes and political events. It was a complicated process, involving religious and civil authorities, village tensions and the fears of the elite. The witch-hunt in Scotland also took place at a time when one of the main agendas was the creation of a righteous or godly society. As a result, religious authorities had control over aspects of people's lives which seem as strange to us today as beliefs about magic or witchcraft. It was not accidental that the witch-hunt in Scotland, and specifically in Fife, should have happened at this time. This book tells the story of what occurred over a period of a century and a half, and offers some explanation as to why it occurred.