Silvia Federici

Works

• 1975Wages against Housework

  A pamphlet arguing that demanding wages for housework would make visible the unpaid work on which capitalism rests and open a struggle against it.

• 2004Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation

  Reinterprets the transition to capitalism from the standpoint of women: the witch hunts disciplined women’s bodies and reproductive work as part of primitive accumulation.

Position

Federici belongs to the autonomist Marxist feminism that emerged in Italy and the United States in the early 1970s. Its starting point: housework, care and childbearing are not a private service of love but work that produces and reproduces labour power, on which capitalist accumulation depends. Demanding wages for housework was less a claim to payment than a lever to make this work visible and to refuse it as women’s nature. “Caliban and the Witch” carries the argument into history: taking up Marx’s account of primitive accumulation, Federici argues that the transition to capitalism also required a new sexual division of labour, the confinement of women to unpaid reproduction and control over their bodies, and that the witch hunts in Europe and the American colonies were part of this process. Against Michel Foucault, the book holds that a history of the disciplining of bodies cannot leave out the witch hunt. Later essays link this history to debt, land enclosures in Africa and the politics of the commons. Angela Davis objected in “Women, Race and Class” (1981) that wages for housework would tie women more firmly to the home and argued for socialising housework instead. Historians of witchcraft have questioned some of Federici’s sources and the broad link between the persecutions and capitalist development; the book has nevertheless become a reference for social reproduction theory.

Life & context

Silvia Federici was born in 1942 in Parma. After studying modern languages and literature at the University of Bologna, Federici moved to the United States in 1967 with a Fulbright scholarship, studied philosophy at the University at Buffalo and completed a doctorate on György Lukács there in 1980. In 1972 Federici was among the founders of the International Feminist Collective, with Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James and others, which launched the international Wages for Housework campaign; from 1973 Federici helped to set up groups in the United States, and the pamphlet “Wages against Housework” appeared in 1975. “Il grande Calibano” (1984), written with Leopoldina Fortunati, was a first study of the body in the transition to capitalism. Teaching at the University of Port Harcourt in Nigeria from 1984 to 1986 brought Federici into contact with the debt crisis and structural adjustment; in 1990 Federici co-founded the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa. Federici taught political philosophy and international studies at Hofstra University on Long Island from 1987 and has been professor emerita there since 2005. “Caliban and the Witch” (2004) was followed by essay collections such as “Revolution at Point Zero” (2012) and “Re-enchanting the World” (2018). Federici lives in New York.

Further main works

• The Great Caliban (Il grande Calibano, with Leopoldina Fortunati, 1984)
• Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (2012)
• Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women (2018)
• Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (2018)