A woman defending herself against accusations of being a witch at the Salem witch trials in 1692 (Photo: Wikimedia commons)
Witches have become feminist icons. Wise women with herbs and potions, older women, unruly women and vulnerable women—all were accused, tortured and murdered by male witch hunters, judges and juries in the 15th and 16th centuries.
Historians have long debated why some 60,000 people, 85 percent of them women, were executed as witches in Europe and north America. In Britain, around 90 percent of the 500 people executed as witches were women.
Many looking for explanations turn to Silvia Federici’s book, Caliban and the Witch, which is required reading on many university courses. Her book is meticulously researched and full of fascinating details.
But she also argues that the witch trials demonstrate the failure of Marxism to understand women’s experiences and the role of their unpaid labour.
But Marxism is crucial to understanding the witch hunts—and the limitations of Federici’s approach.
The persecution of witches occurred in the context of a prolonged social crisis of feudalism. Under the old social order, production was not geared towards the market. Peasants worked the land and lords grabbed a share of the produce.
The crisis was characterised by land enclosures, the destruction of communities and mass peasant rebellions.
Emerging capitalist ways of producing commodities for the market fuelled challenges to long held beliefs and ruptured traditional social obligations.
When the world makes little sense, people search for explanations. The ruling class encourages them to blame scapegoats for the ills they face. The height of the witch hunts took place when monarchs of western and northern Europe were consolidating power and creating unified states out of feudal territories.
Intense class antagonisms were expressed as religious conflicts—for example, during the English Revolution of 1642-49.
As part of the religious tensions in Europe, a new science of “demonology” was established. Once harmless activities—women taking part in fortune-telling, selling charms and administering medicinal herbs—became associated with Satan. Witches became the focus of tensions and insecurities—they were a threat to the community, the family and the Church.
Each witch trial had its own dynamics—family jealousies, disputes over food and land, religious tensions and accusations of immorality.
Natural disasters were blamed on vulnerable and marginalised women. People hoped that driving out the devil might protect against storms and famines.
Women were subjected to horrific torture until they confessed to fornicating with the devil, consorting with “familiars”—often domestic animals—and summoning evil spirits. Examples of witch trials show how class, power and gender interacted to drive women to the stake.
King James I was an energetic witch hunter. He introduced a harsh new law against witchcraft in 1604. Previous laws only targeted “witches” accused of “maleficium”—causing real harm.
James’ new law classed witchcraft as “heresy”—a belief, not an action, which was punishable by being burnt alive.
James married Anna, a Danish princess, in 1589. Huge storms prevented the princess’s ship from setting off from Denmark to return to Scotland.
Rumours began to circulate, and twelve people were tried and executed as witches in Denmark’s capital Copenhagen. James took personal charge of interrogating the accused in a witch trial in Scotland.
Geillis Duncan and Agnes Sampson were tortured into confessing that they sent spirits to sink the king’s ships. They implicated other women in a desperate attempt to save themselves.
At least 13 “witches” were then charged with conspiring to overthrow James and install the Earl of Bothwell as king. When one of them, Barbara Napier, was found not guilty, James put the jury on trial and forced them to change their verdict.
The Earl of Bothwell, the supposed instigator of the plot, was a rich and powerful man. James acquitted him of all charges.
The Pendle Witch Trial of 1612 took place in Lancashire, an area notorious for its lawlessness, sexual freedom and lack of traditional religion. In March that year, a salesperson from Halifax called John Law met Alizon Device in the woods. He refused to sell her some pins. As he walked away, he stumbled and fell.
Later, Alizon, her mother Elizabeth and her brother James were accused of witchcraft.
Alizon confessed that she had sold her soul to the devil. She named two other women, Anne “Chattox” Whittle and her daughter Anne Redferne.
Alizon, her grandmother Demdike, Chattox and Rederne were committed for trial. But the Devize family had held a gathering at their home.
The magistrate, hoping to curry favour with James the witch hunter, arrested eight more people who had attended. Nine year-old Jennet Devize was forced to give evidence in court, condemning her mother Elizabeth, her sister Alizon and her brother James.
One of the eight women, Elizabeth Southern, died while waiting for trial. Another was found not guilty.
Nine “witches” were executed by a church trying to impose authority and a magistrate seeking to please the king.
In 1645 the English Revolution was at its height and local state administrations collapsed under Charles I. Persecuting witches devolved to enthusiasts—men such as Mathew Hopkins, the witchfinder general, from Manningtree, Essex.
Hopkins’ first suspect was a disabled woman, Elizabeth “Bess” Clarke. Bess was an obvious target—her mother had been executed as a witch, she had one leg and a child outside of marriage.
Impairment was seen as a mark of evil and immorality was something to be punished. A local tailor claimed to have heard Bess describing meetings with the devil. She was tortured, confessed and named others.
Imperial conquest intensified class antagonisms. In the early 17th century, Finland was being colonised by James I’s brother-in-law, emperor Christian IV of Denmark-Norway.
Witch hunts focused on the Sami, Indigenous people who herded reindeer, spoke their own language and followed their own religion.
The first documented witch trial in Finland was the trial “Kari Finn”, a Sami woman, in 1620. Kari was accused of drowning a man who fell overboard. The man had quarrelled with his servant, who was Kari’s lover.
The jury ordered Kari to be “swum”—thrown into icy water to see if she floated or sank. Kari survived, which proved her guilt. She was tortured on the rack and then burnt to death.
A wave of witch trials followed and the Sami escaped to the north. The trials were “not just festivals of torture and hatred, they also directly facilitated the building of empire”, as historian Marion Gibson has written.
The first woman accused at the famous American witch trial in Salem in 1692 was an enslaved black native American woman, Tituba.
Salem, like all British colonies, was built on violent dispossession and sustained by the labour of enslaved people. The colonies were beset by famine, disease and Indigenous uprisings against the foreigners who stole their homes and food. There could be no peace or security on stolen land.
Tituba was “owned” by Samuel Parris. Parris’s niece, Abigail moved in with family. Abigail was orphaned during an attack by native Americans.
She was the first child who claimed to be possessed by witchcraft. Tituba confessed, named others and a witch hunt took off.
A year later, 20 people had been executed and some 200 were awaiting trial in a settlement of less than 8,000. The sheer scale of the witch hunt created a backlash. Tituba had spent a year in prison and when she was finally brought to trial she was acquitted by a grand jury.
The witch trials were linked social upheavals at the dawn of capitalism—the class and religious tensions it unleashed and how ruling classes found scapegoats to impose order
However, Federici goes further and argues that the witch hunts played a crucial role in the “primitive accumulation of capital”. Karl Marx had described primitive accumulation as a violent process that helped bring capitalism into the world. It created a working class that was forced to sell its labour for a wage in order to make a living.
In Britain, where capitalism first took off, peasants were driven from the land and turned into wage labourers.
The beginning of colonialism saw indigenous peoples violently dispossessed from their land.
The slave trade and plantation slavery allowed the emerging “bourgeoisie”, or capitalist class, to accumulate the wealth necessary for industrialisation.
Federici argues that the witch hunts were as important as the enclosures or colonialism in the transition from feudalism to capitalism.
The enclosures were the process by which the working class was terrorised and starved into existence. Colonialism provided the markets and profits that fuelled industrialisation.
But the witch hunts left no such economic legacy. They were a barbaric expression of how the rich and powerful can turn the fear and insecurity their system breeds against the vulnerable.
As the witch hunts stopped, women continued to labour, to raise families and to rebel, most visibly in the French Revolution of 1789.
Federici shares the approach of 19th century feminist historians who argued that men across classes forged an alliance to reassert control over women’s labour power and sexuality.
She asserts that the authorities coopted men by legalising the rape of working class women and that working class men systematically excluded women from waged labour. But production continued to take place within the home until the industrial revolution of the late 18th century saw an explosion of factories and mills.
Men also suffered violence from the state. Henry VIII reigned for 38 years—during those years 72,000 people were hanged, many for petty crimes.
Federici argues that Marx could not have associated capitalism with liberation if he had adopted the standpoint of women. But Marx’s point was that capitalism was deeply contradictory. It was steeped in violence, cruelty and barbarism.
The revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg described capitalism as a “ravening beast, a witches’ sabbath of anarchy, a plague to culture and humanity”.
But capitalism also created the possibility of a world of abundance. And it summoned its potential gravedigger, the working class, into being.
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