The Return of the Witch
In the 1970’s there was an autonomous women’s movement in Italy with particular focuses on wages for housework, struggles against violence and unpaid reproductive labour. As they marched through the streets, a repeating chant could be heard. “Tremate, tremate, le streghe son tornate!” “Tremble, Tremble, the Witches have returned!”
It was the return of the witches. It was also, in a sense, a reawakening of an historical consciousness about what happened to a huge number of women during a century and a half of persecution and how the processes of Women’s Liberation had to take into account the importance of capitalism in the process of patriarchal domination.
The witch trials are an often overlooked global genocide that have been glossed over and re-marketed to lessen its impact. Over a period of nearly 150 years, from the late 1500s to the early 1700s, an estimated 50,000 people were executed in witch trials. Witch trials happened everywhere; there were Basque witch trials in Spain, witch trials in Germany, witch trials in Scotland, in Sweden, France, Spain. England gave us the Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins. From the colonies in the New World, we have the most indelible imagining of the witch trials: Salem, Massachusetts.
These poor souls were usually executed in the most horrific of ways and over 80% of them were women over the age of 40. They were women with agency, women with knowledge and women with property. Most importantly they were women with a varying degree of liberation from a male dominated society who had transmutable information to give to the next generation of women.
In Silvia Federici’s ‘Caliban & The Witch,’ she contends that in Capitalist Society the body has been for women what the factory has been for the male wage workers, that is, the primary ground for both exploitation and resistance. The female body was appropriated by the State and Men, and forced to function as a means for the reproduction & accumulation of labour. She contends that the process of the making of the modern world was a violent one that came from the of removal of Women with agency, women with knowledge, with property, with a varying degree of liberation with transmutable information to the next generation of women.
It’s not difficult to imagine that in the streets and demonstrations happening in Italy that the return of the witch, and the voice of the witch, was a reclamation of female power as well as an acknowledgement of the dispossession of female power during the witch trials.
Fast forward nearly 50 years where the U.S. Supreme Court landed a devastating blow against women that was decades in the making. By overturning RoeVWade, the Conservative Right of America has attacked women’s bodily autonomy, their privacy, their freedom and their opportunities. It has reached into their citizenship and taken away the very protections put in place to support them and keep them safe.
It feels like a radical step, one that seems steeped in religious ignorance. It feels like conservative panic. Reasoning for the advocation of this brutal reclamation of rights makes more sense when we peel back this decision looking for the Why’s.
For decades, the birth rate of both the U.S. and the West, in general, has been on a steep decline. The ability of a society to flourish is intricately tied to how it replenishes itself. The U.S., after decades of financially crippling wars and fiscal irresponsibility, with its infrastructure crumbling, on war footing against its greatest old adversary and preparing for the looming economic war with its great new adversary, is finding itself facing into a future that requires caring for the Baby Boomers while reinvigorating a torn nation with no money. Cruel efforts to eradicate Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid have failed so far and Immigration reform, ever a thorn in the side for Government, has become a battleground as Conservatives will do anything to curtail what is a growing trend in the U.S. and the West in general; a diversifying population that is no longer as homogeneous as it once was.
By overturning RoeVWade to allow States to ban abortion and to heavily criminalise women, conservative America has guaranteed a baby boom of indeterminate length. It creates the boom in a majority of States that are overwhelmingly white in population, while at the same time creating incredible hardship for the minority populations that do live there by providing them with less opportunities and political agency.
At the same time the Left has attacked Women under the guise of inclusion and fairness by advocating for the removal of boundaries and self determination, by eroding Women’s Rights through the removal singular definitions that protect only their sex class and by eroding fairness in sport. For decades the Left has promoted a version of femininity hugely influenced by the male gaze, resulting in a mass exodus of young women who are trying to opt out of the unfair ideals and promises.
Young women are told that things like slut walks, sex work & dehumanising, graphic porn are good and virtuous and that kindness is paramount. However, objecting to males in their spaces is the worst kind of hatred that must be violently eradicated.
In this world they can not exercise bodily autonomy with the permission of either side. They have no one to vote for to change this. The Left says “birthing bodies” and “people with uteruses” while the Right says “pregnant vessels.” What’s the difference when the contempt is the same?
The Gay community, long a target of the Right for conversion by conservative Christians, are now converted by an aversion to being called bigots for not accepting the opposite sex as sexual partners. The Left demands acceptance, both socially and legally, that inner belief and augmentation are more important than bodily autonomy, boundary and self determination.
Women are under attack and those that speak out are branded heretics, reactionaries, dangerous and obsolete all at once. They are hounded in the streets, at work, at meetings, at lunches where they are called the very worst names humanity has coined. Every possible word hurtled in abuse at them drips with the same venomous intent that has been around for centuries: Witch.
Destroy the agency, destroy the witch, destroy the opposition. That’s how it worked in the 1600’s. While the stake has been replaced by Twitter and the fire by Legislation and political disenfranchisement, the public venom against women who speak out and who show younger generations of women the power of their voice, remains. Let’s hope the witches are indeed back, because we definitely need women with agency.
