My interest in this research was originally motivated by the debates that accompanied the development of the Feminist Movement in the United States concerning the roots of women's “oppression,” and the political strategies which the movement should adopt in the struggle for women's liberation. At the time, the leading theoretical and political perspectives from which the reality o f sexual discrimination was analyzed were those proposed by the two main branches of the women's movement: the Radical Feminists and the Socialist Feminists. In my view, however, neither provided a satisfactory explanation of the roots of the social and economic exploitation of women. I objected to the Radical Feminists because of their tendency to account for sexual discrimination and patriarchal rule on the basis of transhistorical cultural structures, presumably operating independently of relations of production and class. Socialist Feminists, by contrast, recognized that the history of women cannot be separated from the history of specific systems of exploitation and, in their analyses, gave priority to women as workers in capitalist society. But the limit of their position, in my understanding of it at the time, was that it hat it failed to acknowledge the sphere of reproduction as a source of value-creation and exploitation, and thus traced the roots of the power differential between women and men to women's exclusion from capitalist development — a stand which again compelled us to rely on cultural schemes to account for the survival of sexism within the universe of capitalist relations.--Silvia Federici (2004) Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation, preface, pp. vii-viii (all my references are to the UK edition).
A few weeks ago, I noted (here; echoing diagnosis of MacKinnon) that De Beauvoir treatment of the origin of patriarchy suffers from circularity. She projects backwards the idea of man as inventive Homo Faber, especially of values, who is admired by the more rooted women who then become complicit in their own subordination because they enjoy and admire the activities of the more daring men. And while violence is not contingent here -- the military and hunting exploits of men are especially admired --, and violence toward women is not absent, women's subordination is, in part, sustained by their sharing in the fruits of Man's inventions and, as Marion Garcia has noted in her recent book, the non-trivial pleasures consequent subordination. But as an origin account, this whole approach presupposes, as MacKinnon notes, that patriarchy is already fully functioning (and so circular).
One related problem with De Beauvoir's treatment is that the origin of patriarchy itself gets pushed back into mythic times and so ends up being omnipresent. A consequence of this is that real historical differences matter less than the omnipresence of patriarchy and that because there is no spatially and temporally bounded origin to their subordination, women also do not see themselves as distinct political group (a point noted by Garcia). It also means that the history of feminism itself is either a history of permanent failure, or something very new.
Last week (recall) I was rather critical of Federici's Caliban and the Witch. But it is important to recognize that Federici offers a much more compelling account of the origin of patriarchy than De Beauvoir does. While not denying that women's subordination to men is a historical reality in many times and places, Federici shows that modern feminism is reacting to a form of patriarchy that grew out of the late middle ages and that "peaked in the 19th century with the creation of the full-time housewife." (p. 78) By 'grew' I do not mean she thinks this was an organic or pacific development. She argues that it involved half a millennium of state (sanctioned) violence against women (and heretic), which was inaugurated by several centuries of persecution of purported witches (mostly female).
While, the account presents itself as Marxist (about which below more) and feminist in character, the underlying template for the overall argument is derived Nietzsche. In particular, Nietzsche's account of the use of torture and force for the development of a so-called slave morality (structured around good and evil) and especially of breeding an animal "with the right to make promises" familiar from The Genealogy of Morals. She actually cites and partially quotes the passage, but presents Nietzsche as claiming that "blood and torture were necessary to 'breed an animal' capable of regular, homogeneous, and uniform behavior, indelibly marked with the memory of the new rules."* On Federici's account torture then is a site where "knowledge about the body was gained" and obstacles to the transformation of the modern worker eliminated. (p. 155)*
That is to say, Federici explicitly invites the reader to see several large scale social transformations as essentially linked: the violent imposition of patriarchal norms on women's bodies and lives that are still with 'us in so-called 'developed' nations; the violent rise of capitalism out of primitive accumulation; and the violent rise of a transatlantic, racialized slave economy. One crucial feature these three transformations have in common is the rise of a national state that manages an economy, class relations, and (due to its interest in population) laws and norms of reproduction These three transformation all occur in the centuries after the Black Death in the fourteenth century through the (so-called) age of Enlightenment. I used 'developed' because Federici believes that the linked historical transformations are being repeated today in 'lesser-developed' countries subject to forced capitalist development under the tutelage of international (financial) institutions.
In Federici's argument the persecution of purported witches, a veritable reign of terror over several centuries, is a key mechanism in subduing, primarily rural resistance to the rise of capitalism, and in shaping patriarchal norms on all women, including a major narrowing of women's participation in the waged economy. Some of the most interesting passages are about the ways in which men conspired to remove women as competitors from the workforce as physicians, brewers, and midwives, and the steady erosion of women's rights to enter into contracts or live alone, etc. Unlike De Beauvoir, who treats 'la querelle des femme' as a secondary phenomena primarily a debate among men about the relative merits of marriage to life in the clergy (The Second Sex, trans. Borde & Malovany-Chevallier, pp. 118-120), while Federici sees it in as a highly salient debate over and a source of knowledge about "a new sexual division of labor" (p. 114).
To be sure, Federici never mentions De Beauvoir in the whole of Caliban and The Witch. And as the extended quote from the preface suggests, Federici is engaging with the question about the origin of patriarchy in light of an American debate. I assume that by radical feminists she has in mind people like Firestone and Millet and by socialist feminists people like Eisenstein. While De Beauvoir has a tendency to efface past feminists, Federici has a tendency to efface her intellectual targets (not, of course, her political target which is clearly transnational Capital). However, that debate was prompted in no small part by De Beauvoir, so I hope that the compare and contrast element of this post is not seen as a non-sequitur.
Compared to De Beauvoir's account of the origin of patriarchy, Federici's approach has a lot of advantages. It can point to a where and how of the development of modern patriarchy, and explain many of its characteristic features. That is to say, it can explain what we may call the patriarchal template of modern gender relations. ("Gender" is not a word Federici uses a lot, except when explaining her large scale goals.) And it is not implausible that there are many interactions between tools of oppression in the inquisition into witches and the vicious exploitation developed in the context of transatlantic racialized slavery and plantations.
It is, I think, eminently plausible that a few centuries of state mediated terror against particular women left a mark on all women, especially because this terror went alongside great legal and political changes. Federici's account is not circular. It explains how the cause of (what we may call) women's equality was tied up in the historical and sometimes intersectional defeats of rural populations and pre-reformation heretical groups. And it is, incidentally, notable that in her account the broadly protestant heresies that succeed politically were also, simultaneously, defeats for the cause of women.
Let me close with noting three limitations of Federici's approach. First, one problem with Federici's account -- and this is remarkably similar to a problematic feature in Karl Polanyi's account (he is curiously absent from her bibliography) -- is a kind of romanticism about the pre-capitalist village economy. To be sure, to note this is not to deny the violence that destroys the rural way of life. Liberals like myself (although I am more skeptical than most) agree with Marxists that the mercantile development of capitalism is a bloody and violent affair. Mercantilism is evil, and I agree with Federici (and against some Marxists and Liberals) that the rise of Capitalism and liberal society itself cannot justify these evils. There is no secular theodicy.
However, Federici treats the rural or village economy as a "subsistence economy" in which "the unity of production and reproduction which has been typical of all societies based on production-for-use came to end, as these activities became the carriers of different social relations and were sexually differentiated. In the new monetary regime, only production-for-market was defined as a value-creating activity, whereas the reproduction of the worker began to be considered as valueless from an economic viewpoint and even ceased to be considered work." (78) Of course, Federici's focus on how this unity permits more equal gender relations and permits an enlarged space for women's agency goes well beyond Polanyi.
So, while Federici explicitly recognizes that the rural economy is structured by feudal relations and conflict, she ignores (as I have noted before) that it is also -- not in the least due to the absence of circulating coin -- suffused with credit and debt relations. And so this very idea of an organic unity has to pretend away the many social mechanism, which promote their own hierarchies and are often infused with violence, of debt accounting and settlement.** To put this in more ironic terms: while Marxists tend to make fun of those liberals who mistakenly posit a peaceful or natural primitive accumulation (Federici follows the tradition in associating this view -- see p. 61, p. 136, and note 6 on pp. 278-9 -- with Adam Smith's account), Polanti and Federici have a tendency to treat European pre-capitalist relations as thinly disguised gardens of Eden (e.g, Federici's pre-capitalist communities have abundant community wide feasts (etc.).)
Second, throughout the post I have described Federici's position in terms of 'modern patriarchy.' Perhaps, it would be better to call it 'capitalist' or 'Mercantile patriarchy' I do this in the spirit of charity because she is not trying to explain all patriarchy. And she has useful things to say about societies that do not exhibit the modern control over women's bodies. But as MacKinnon noted about De Beauvoir, Federici's argument often presupposes the institution of patriarchy. For, the gendered pattern of defeats she describes presupposes patriarchy's ability to organize militarily, politically, and economically to common ends.
Federici recognizes the point by admitting that in "pre-capitalist Europe women's subordination to men had been tempered by the fact that they had access to the commons and other communal assets, while in the new capitalist regime women themselves became the commons." Even on her account Capitalist patriarchy grew out of a (pre-Capitalist) tempered patriarchy. (It would have been strange for her to deny this since both Feudalism and the Church were patriarchal in character.) So, while Federici's account advances beyond De Beauvoir, it, too, presupposes the patriarchy in order to explain the victory of patriarchy.
And, third, and finally, it is notable that the developments she describes coincide with the growing influence of representative and elective institutions first in important towns and guilds, and, eventually in the nation-states and within (protestant) Churches. These representative institutions are almost uniformly gendered (propertied) male. Federici misses this point because she is only interested in what she calls 'workers democracies' (pp. 46-49) that resisted these representative organs. And this point can explain a peculiarity that her account notes but cannot explain (although predicted by Olympes de Gouges in 1791): that modern patriarchy was further developed and ultimately perfected under conditions of mass male democracy.+
*My previous post on Caliban and the Witch was devoted to Federici's tendency toward creative interpretation and misrepresentation, so I ignore such issues in the body of the post. I checked the old Doubleday Nietzsche edition (a translation by Golffing) which she explicitly cites and mentions in her bibliography and used it for my citations in the body of the text. Federici's reading is not silly because Nietzsche closes the paragraph with the claim that "he must have become not only calculating but himself calculable, regular even to his own perception, if he is to stand pledge for his own future as a guarantor does." And while this is not the modern worker, we're are clearly in the vicinity of the protestant work ethic and especially the capitalist planner who is credit worthy.
** It also has to ignore the existence of a very dense medieval, continental wide network of long-distance trade, but let's leave that aside. The point is Walter Eucken's and undoubtedly it is directed by him, in part, against the Marxist tendency to see the development of long distance markets as an effect of the rise capitalism as opposed to its source (in context the target is Sombart).
+The point was anticipated by Eileen O'Neill (recall).
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