Capitalist Patriarchy and the Feminist Program

Continues the discussion of the previous podcast. The changes in the global south with capitalist colonial imperialism. Sylvia Federici’s viewpoint. Gender and the market economy in the majority world. Witches, north and south. Conclusions about liberal feminism and the socialist critique. The psychology of patriarchy as foundational for capitalism and for class society in general. How would a gift economy organize itself to realize feminist goals? 

Transcript

Ch 13: Intersections of capitalism and patriarchy
Terry Leahy 2024

The next few chapters in this part of ‘The Riddles of History’ will be on intersections between capitalism and patriarchy. Contesting views on feminism must be put in the context of a broader overview of the way capitalism and patriarchy interact. My own account is much influenced by one of three perspectives from the early seventies women’s liberation movement. Radical feminism. These days that term seems to be exclusively connected to ‘Trans Excluding Radical Feminists’. This is a bit unfair to ‘radical feminism’ as it was originally developed in the seventies. There are aspects of this position that are still relevant. Radical feminism maintains that men organized as a ‘sex-class’ create and benefit from patriarchy. This is a trans-historical and trans-cultural phenomenon, as discussed in earlier chapters. It is not just restricted to capitalism. 

Radical feminism is more concerned with equality than with free choice. In earlier chapters I have argued that the implied feminist concept of gender exploitation relies on ideas about human nature. That human nature is composed of basic drives. That inequality in a relationship occurs when one party gets more out of that interaction (in terms of satisfying their basic drives) than another party. I have argued that autonomy, the desire to get what you want, is one basic drive. So, freedom of choice is always an issue when we are considering exploitation. But it is only one issue. There are other basic drives to be considered. In other words, people can want things that really are not in their interests. Taking all their basic drives into account. For example, they may see it as a women’s role to stay at home and do housework — their choice. But at the same time a choice that locks them into loneliness, boredom and social stigma — along with a vastly diminished autonomy, because this work is unpaid. See earlier chapters for all this in detail.

In the mid-seventies, the radical feminist position was developed to create ‘dual systems theory’, also called ‘socialist feminism’ at the time. A forerunner of the more recent ‘intersectional’ feminism. In dual systems theory, there are two basic systems operating in current capitalism. One is the market economy of capitalism. The other is patriarchy — the power of men in relationship to women. These two systems interact so we may speak of ‘capitalist patriarchy’. A complicated interaction like this is not unique to capitalism. It is equally an aspect of feudal societies where we may speak of feudal patriarchy. Something quite different to patriarchy in capitalist society. The term ‘socialist feminism’ signals an intention to overturn both these systems of oppression, a task that will be easier if we understand how they interact. 

The interaction of feudalism and patriarchy

Let us start off by talking about the way patriarchy was organized in feudal societies and then about what happened with capitalism. 

So first, in feudal societies, there was the cultural hegemony of patriarchy. For example, religion was patriarchal. God and his son conceived as men. Men officiating as priests, bishops, popes. A bible that tells women to obey their husbands. Accompanying folk viewpoints. The term ‘scold’ was used to stigmatize women that tried to control their husbands’ actions in any way. Someone who talks back and makes decisions. A husband who was not taking control in his marriage might be the object of a demeaning village ritual. Made to ride backwards on a donkey while being insulted by the other villagers. It was expected that men would control their wives with violent beatings. In peasant communities an unequal division of labour — with women doing more hours of work than men. Men were more likely to have positions in employment where they were mobile and moved about the country. When men and women were working together, men would have authority.  

Yet at the same time, in comparison to the Victorian ideals that developed with capitalism, there were surprising expressions of women’s power. For example, if a husband died, the wife could take over the business as the widow. Women had recognized roles that we would now describe as professional — as midwives or herbalists. Even the role of nuns as independent women, to some extent running their own show. With some female religious leaders canonized as saints — for example Saint Teresa of Avila. There was no expectation that women would be uninterested in sex, as developed in Victorian Europe. All these elements of women’s power were built into feudal society.  

If we look at the structure of the economy, the division between men’s work, as part of ‘the economy’ and women’s work as ‘private’ and domestic, did not apply. Most production, including agriculture, was organized by the household with complementary roles for men and women. For example, women making the cheese while the men are ploughing. In the early feudal period few people were connected to the monetary economy through having a job paying money. The feudal ruling class would get a surplus when their peasants supplied a tribute in kind. Like looking after the lord's dog pack. Providing a portion of the crop. Making the lord’s bed. So domestic work and production were being done without a clear economic distinction between the two. 

At the same time, despite this complementarity in the economy, men dominated in families and in the broader political structures. Religion, the feudal political system, the use of armed force. 

The transition to capitalism

So, let’s look now at how this feudal patriarchy came to an end in the transition to capitalist patriarchy. Eli Zaretsky was a New Left author on these topics in the seventies. Followed by the work of dual systems theorists such as Batya Weinbaum and Heidi Hartmann by the end of that decade. Starting with Marx and Weber, Zaretsky points out that capitalism separates paid work outside the home from unpaid domestic work. The capitalist class did this because they wanted control over the paid work. The ownership of the means of production became privatized and the way you would make money out of the means of production was by producing more stuff and marketing and selling it. Making a profit through that and extracting surplus value. To facilitate this, in the first stage of industrialisation, cottage weavers were brought together in big factories. At a time when these weaving machines were hand powered. Later these gathered machines could be powered by steam engines. 

The work that was left over in the home suddenly became separated from ‘production’. In fact, all this domestic work is also productive. But the work that was paid and directly benefited the capitalist owner was the work outside the home, which ended up being called ‘productive’ work, as opposed to unpaid domestic labour. As Weinbaum and Hartmann point out, this change was potentially a challenge to the patriarchal relationships that had been established in the feudal period. In the feudal household the patriarch exercised direct and, on occasion, violent authority over his wife and children. This new context meant that it was perfectly possible for young women, and even children, to slip away from this authority and to live on a wage paid out by a capitalist factory boss. 

As these authors document, in England, the leading industrial country, this option was closed off through several strategic interventions. There was a cross-class alliance of upper-class philanthropists, alarmed at the ‘moral’ effects of factory work, and working-class male unionists, demanding exclusive access to higher paid positions. The factory acts restricted the hours women could work and excluded children from factory work — forcing women to return home to look after them. Along with this, men made demands to define their work as ‘skilled’ and to be paid at a higher rate than women. Together these strategies consolidated the link between women and domesticity, while ensuring that men achieved economic power through market employment. 

In parliament, where the factory acts were enacted, the changes were introduced to ‘protect’ women from the immorality supposedly connected to factory work and mining. For example, drawings of half-naked women towing carts in coal mines created a scandal. Patriarchy masked as chivalry. 

The moral economy of capitalist patriarchy

These changes were also early steps in the developing moral economy of capitalist patriarchy. In that cultural landscape, women take the role of ‘God’s police’ as Ann Summers dubs it. The historian Ruth Bloch talks about the rise of ‘the moral mother’. The role of the moral mother is to institute an early moral discipline. To embody Victorian and puritanical moral ideals in her own conduct and to socialize children in those values. Most fundamentally the work ethic, but this in concert with the allied puritan values — sobriety, punctuality, honesty, respect for property rights, sexual propriety. This moral economy became the justification for the down grading of women’s participation in the labour market. The stay-at-home mother became the acme of feminine virtue. As the working class gained income, working class women in rich countries left the labour market. Women who had to work could be paid a pittance because paid work was never a woman’s true calling. The effect of this myth was to paint the home as a refuge of innocence from the dangerous public world. Implying that adult men had to be tough to survive this realm of nastiness and competition. As Ellen Willis pointed out, the social landscape becomes populated with good cops and bad cops. The good cops are husbands protecting their families from the nasty world out there. The bad cops are violent and dangerous men. 

The ideal of the moral mother started off in the upper class and was gradually implemented lower down the class hierarchy. By the 1920s in the rich countries many ordinary women were staying home, unpaid. At least while the children were young. Government action cemented this ideal. In Australia the Harvester judgement of 1907 established a basic wage for men premised on the idea that their wage would support their family. There were rules to exclude married women from the public service. And so on.

We can see the Red Riding Hood myth as a metaphor for the economic realities of capitalist patriarchy. Ann Cranny Francis unpicks this story in relation to the ‘good cop’ — ‘bad cop’ duality that Willis describes. Red Riding Hood gets into trouble when she strays from the path that her mother has set for her. The Hunter is the good cop. He looks after the grandmother and Red Riding Hood by coming to their rescue. Killing the evil wolf, the bad cop, with his axe. Francis points out that this mythology is a mythology about masculinity in current capitalism. Men's sexuality is conceived as innately dangerous and problematic. It has to be controlled. The good man controls their sexuality and looks after women, protecting them from the evil men out there — who act like wild beasts. 

This analysis suggests the myth as a metaphor for the economic structures of capitalist patriarchy. Women are dependent on men economically. In the whole life course, they get only half the income of men of their own class. So, husbands perform the role of the good cop, bringing home the income and protecting their families through that. Meanwhile men in general, men as a political and economic sex-class are the bad cops. Unless you're attached to a husband don't expect any help from us. Society will not come to your assistance. All those men will hang on to their control of income rather than see women get a fair share. There's no way to bring up a child comfortably without the support of a husband. These dynamics still operate, after decades of feminist activism. These structures of income and control over money are part of the furniture of capitalist society. They are rarely seen clearly for what they mean to the gender regime. 

As the terms, ‘good cop’ and ‘bad cop’ suggest, women are also in danger from the men in their families. Men who have the economic power. Ranging from exploitation in the domestic division of labour to much worse. 

Capitalist patriarchy as a circle of causes and effects

We can see this economic structure operating as a circle. Start at any point and go round the circle to get back to where you came from. So, let’s start at women’s low income. The higher income men get through their wages gives them power in the family. They use that power to force a division of labour that advantages them. Their wives do more hours of obligatory work for the couple. Considering both paid work and domestic work. This means that men have free time in their lives to organize politically to maintain patriarchy. This can take the form of men’s leisure pursuits with other men, a site where men collude in consolidating patriarchy. It can take the form of participation in public and political life. From the local football club through to parliament and company management. This political power enables men to maintain their economic domination, their higher incomes relative to women. We are back where we started. For feminists the strategic message of this circle is that intervention to break the circle can be at any point. It makes sense to demand men do more housework, to fund childcare to give women more opportunities, to get women into positions of public power, to start up social groups for women. 

Ch: 15 Women, witches and capitalism in Europe
Terry Leahy 2024

An earlier chapter showed how capitalism and patriarchy intersect to create a particular gender regime. That account focused on the history of this process in the rich world. In this chapter I am going to extend this account by looking firstly at the witch hunts of late feudal and early capitalist Europe. The next chapter will look at the extent to which this history runs in parallel to events taking places in colonized countries of the New World.

Sylvia Federici’s ‘Caliban and the Witch’ is in many ways a comprehensive review of this topic. While I will disagree with some of her interpretation of these events, I have no problems with the descriptive material she sets out. I am identifying her approach as a variety of ‘marxist-feminist’ analysis as it was conceived in the seventies. There are many ways of linking Marxism and feminism and this is only one approach. 

Popular rebellions and heresies

The late middle age in Europe is well known to have been a difficult period. The black death, the huge waves of plague that swept through Europe. Wars, both religious and civil. Like the hundred years war. Federici describes the impact of the ‘commutation’ of tribute in kind into paid taxes and tithes. This took place in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Landlords and the church demanded payment in money. Previously peasants had paid tribute in kind. The poorer peasants with small agricultural plots found it difficult to grow more crops to sell than they needed for their own subsistence. They could not pay the monetary tribute. The enclosure of common land used by peasants had a similar impact in later centuries. Many were forced to give up their peasant plots and look for paid work to live. In the cities, increased monetary exactions had a similar impact.

These various crises drove popular discontent. This discontent was expressed first through peasant rebellions. Very typically, demands to wind back taxes and tributes or to free the peasants directly addressed the economic issues. These rebellions had strong popular support but were often led by merchants, landless knights or excommunicated priests. The rebellions have been called ‘millenarian’ because they envisaged and end to the feudal class system. An egalitarian utopia. In the well-known words of John Ball, an English preacher from the popular uprising of 1381 – ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman’. These uprisings took place in all corners of Europe between 1323 and 1573. To take another example, a book written in the early sixteenth century envisaged a millenarian transformation working through Frederick II. He would arrive on a white horse to rule the whole world. The clergy, including the Pope, would be annihilated. The emperor would also execute money lenders, price fixers and evil lawyers. All wealth would be seized and given to the poor. Private property would be abolished and all things held in common.

In some few cases the rebels achieved some successes in getting their demands met. For example, King Richard gave the serfs their freedom after the 1381 uprising. But in all cases, the rebellions were defeated, the leaders and many of the followers executed. 

Along with these rebellions, heretical sects also took on the establishment. For example, the Cathars, Waldenses, the Poor of Lyon, the Spirituals and Apostolics. Commonly, these heretical sects took over and defended a land base. For example, the Cathar communities of France, the Apostolics in Piedmont. As historians point out, these sects redefined all aspects of daily life. Work, property, reproduction, the position of women. As Federici puts it ‘posing the question of emancipation in truly universal terms’. 

Federici stresses the participation of women in the rebellions and heresies. In the heretical sects, women often had the right to officiate in religious rituals. Men and women might live together communally. There were some women’s communities, such as the Beguines in Germany and Flanders. In the battle for Prague of 1420, the Taborite community fought the establishment. Taborite women dug a long trench, defending it with stones and pitchforks. 

I have no doubt that Federici is right to claim the participation of women in the peasant rebellions and the heresies. In so far as the heresies are concerned, they certainly questioned hierarchy and opened up a pathway for patriarchy to be challenged. I suppose what I doubt is that these feminist moments can be claimed as a narrative of women fighting early capitalism. First, there is every reason for popular movements of this period to be fighting the establishment, the church, the feudal order and nascent capitalism. Both women and men had reasons for discontent. The crisis of social order at the end of feudalism created a space for utopian resistance. Second, reading accounts of the rebellions and the heresies it is very clear that they were led by men and that men were the ones doing most of the fighting. The English rebellion was inspired by the radical sermons of John Ball. It was led by Wat Tyler. Other leaders of the movement were Johan Geoffrey, a bailiff, John Wrawe, a former chaplain and Geoffrey Lister. The Norfolk rebellion 0f 1497 was led by a blacksmith, a lawyer and a baron. The Flemish revolt was led by a man, the pseudo-Baldwin. The leader of the Apostolics of Piedmont was Fra Dolcino, whose partner Margherita was burned by the authorities while he was hacked to death.

The enclosure movement

The history of the enclosure movement is largely sourced from the English example, though similar events were also taking place in Europe. Enclosures began as early as the 12th century, there was a boost in the Tudor period, and they continued through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Landlords took over the common spaces used by peasants to supplement their cropping fields. Where they might graze their pigs or gather acorns and firewood. The fallow fields where they might graze their cattle. These common areas were enclosed by landlords, who took them as private property. In Tudor England, landlords moved away from an agricultural system based on mixed farming and local food provision. They started commercial sheep farming, exporting wool. As the historian William Walzer explains, landlords expelled peasants from their land. Sending them off as wanderers on the streets looking for any available work. A volatile population in the cities.

Destroying enclosing hedges was the most common form of rural resistance in the period from the 15th to the 17th century. In Norfolk in 1549 a rebellion led by Robert Kett, a farmer and a tanner, involved 16,000 in an armed uprising. As the rebellion was crushed, 3,500 rebels were killed. Federici emphasizes the involvement of women in this rural resistance. During the reign of James 1, ten per cent of these rebellions included women participants. All the participants of some of these protests were women. For example, in 1608 a party of forty women destroyed hedges and fences in Lincolnshire. Federici documents several other cases like that. 

Federici explains this involvement as driven by the particularly severe consequences of enclosure for peasant women. It was more difficult for them to leave their homes looking for work than it was for their husbands. Paid employment for women was between half and a third of the male wage for similar work in this period. Relating this to issues discussed in the previous chapters, the continuation of patriarchy through the transition to a market economy was achieved through a process that ended up with men as the more highly paid wage earners. In turn, as this account suggests, this relates to the disadvantages in power conflicts that reproduction imposes on women. Federici’s analysis of women’s participation makes good sense. However, this is clearly not a resistance to enclosure led by women because of women’s greater disadvantages in a nascent commercial economy. Her own evidence indicates that it was mostly led by men and men were the most likely participants in these acts of resistance. Small farmers whose livelihood was being threatened by enclosure. These men were very likely to end up unemployed and wandering the streets, rather than ensconced in a paying job. 

The witch hunts of Europe

The last of these European episodes was the witch craze. It is very difficult to understand what was going on. The witch burnings were associated with the end of feudal society and the introduction of the capitalist system in Europe and North America. From 1540 to 1750. Up to eighty per cent of the people accused and burned for witchcraft were women. They were often single older women — widows. In terms of likely work roles, they were typically women who were local traditional healers. Herbalists and midwives. They were tried by courts with religious leaders officiating. The aim was to prove the women were witches, communicating with the devil. Between 40,000 and 60,000 people were executed as witches. Of a population of about 70 million. So how can one explain these atrocities? 

Federici’s account of the witch hunts can be summarized as a set of points.

• The new capitalist class engineers the witch trials and benefits from this pogrom. The witch hunts “destroyed a universe of practices, beliefs, and social subjects whose existence was incompatible with capitalist work discipline” (164). 

• The witch trials divide the subordinate classes, pitting men against women. “The witch hunt deepened the divisions between women and men, teaching men to fear the power of women” (165). The effect was to “break class solidarity” (188).

• The witch trials engineer a decline in the status of women compared to feudal society – “the devaluation of women’s social position with the advent of capitalism” (7).

• The ultimate aim of the capitalist class is the domestication of women, keeping them out of the newly defined productive sphere and the incomes connected to wage work.

• The intention is to confine women to the sphere of reproduction. The benefit to the capitalist class is to get reproductive work (childbirth, childcare, housework) work done free of charge. So, the capitalist class depends on this work but does not have to pay for it– a super exploitation of the proletariat. The witch hunts ‘were instrumental to the construction of a new patriarchal order where women’s bodies, their labor, their sexual and reproductive powers were placed under the control of the state and transformed into economic resources’ (169). Old women were likely targets, she argues, because the new organisation of family life ‘gave priority to child-raising at the expense of care previously provided to the elderly’ (199).

• The witch hunt attacks these women because they spearhead a resistance to the new capitalist order – feminists ‘were quick to recognize that hundreds of thousands of women could not have been massacred and subject to the cruellest tortures unless they posed a challenge to the power structure’ (164). 

• It attacks these women because, as midwives and healers, they are an impediment to a boost to population that is much desired by the authorities. There can be no doubt, she says, ‘that the witch-hunt destroyed methods that women had used to control procreation, by indicting them as diabolic devices, and institutionalized the state’s control over the female body, the precondition for its subordination to the reproduction of labor-power’ (183). 

It is these Marxist-feminist aspects of Federici’s account that I want to question. There are other aspects of her account where I am fully in agreement. 

An alternative account

The witch trials were not engineered by the capitalist class. In the period in question (1450 to 1680) the nobility was still in charge. Instead, these trials are organized by middle level clerics with the cooperation of the courts. 

Federici points to aspects of the new capitalist order that are being established at this time and causing stress for the poor. This is undoubtedly one of the factors leading to discontent and the potential for anti-systemic movements. For example, rent instead of tribute service in kind. The enclosure of common fields and the dispossession of the peasants in parts of Europe. There are other stresses. The plagues and famines. Wars, such as the religious wars between Catholics and Protestants.

Following Marvin Harris, it seems most likely that the witchcraft trials were a pre-emptive strike against the potential for millenarian armed uprisings against the church and nobility. This explanation is also an important aspect of Federici’s account. In this period, these millenarian movements affected every part of Europe. Along with unorthodox religious beliefs, they hoped for a new society with equality and the sharing of all goods. In areas where they took control, they killed priests and members of the nobility. As Harris says, the witch hunts were a diversion from this pathway. The authorities were saving the population from witches. The problems people were experiencing in their lives were down to witches, not the nobility or the church. 

The principal result of the witch-hunt system … was that the poor came to believe that they were being victimized by witches and devils instead of princes and popes. Did your roof leak, your cow abort, your oats wither, your wine go sour, your head ache, your baby die? It was a neighbour, the one who broke your fence, owed you money, or wanted your land — a neighbour turned witch. Did the price of bread go up, taxes soar, wages fall, jobs grow scarce? It was the work of witches. Did plague and famine carry off a third of the inhabitants of every village and town? The diabolical, infernal witches were growing bolder all the time. Against people’s phantom enemies, Church and state mounted a bold campaign. The authorities were unstinting in their efforts to ward off this evil, and rich and poor alike could be thankful for the energy and bravery displayed in the battle. (Harris 237)

Trevor-Roper argues a chronology of these trials that fits with this account. The first witch trials occurred in the late sixteenth century in regions where huge millenarian cults had been suppressed – northern Spain, the Alps and the Pyrennees. Later outbreaks fitted with areas that had just been taken over by either protestants or by Catholics. So, England, Scotland and parts of Europe for the first (the late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century) with parts of Germany for the second (the later seventeenth century). In other words, the trials correspond to areas where the newly established authorities were consolidating their control over the rural population. 

The de facto and unconscious aim of the trials was to discipline a recalcitrant population with either millenarian, protestant or catholic attachments. Capitalists as such had little to do with this. It was clerics aided by the civil courts. On the other hand, it can make sense to say that the new capitalist regime, as it gradually became established, benefited from this long period of prior pacification. 

The key tactic of the witch hunts was taken over from methods used to break the millenarian movements. Authorities put pressure on members of local communities to name suspects. These suspects were then tortured to reveal further allies. Breaking up the solidarity of the community. For example, in Aberdeen, Scotland in 1603, ministers of the Presbyterian church were “ordered to ask their parishioners under oath, if they suspected anyone of being a witch. Boxes were placed in the churches to allow the informers to remain anonymous. Then, after a woman had fallen under suspicion, the minister exhorted the faithful from the pulpit to testify against her and forbid anyone to give her help” (Federici 166).

It is mistaken to think that the targeting of women (80 per cent of the accused) was because older women were the spearhead of resistance. As argued in the previous chapter, the great majority of millenarian movements of resistance were led by men. On the other hand, it is true as Federici argues, that these older women were the worst affected by the enclosures, dispossession of peasant holdings and the monetisation of class relationships. These older single women usually made their livings through a combination of a local profession in herbalism, midwifery and a subsistence food provision. They used the commons to source the requirements for their work and their own plots and the commons for subsistence. They could not replicate this economic niche in a situation where they were being deprived of their land and the commons. They could not readily leave this niche and go elsewhere to get a paid job. Families with a male head of household were slightly less damaged by these changes. The husbands and fathers might sell crops to get money, becoming tenant farmers, or get a paid job. To that extent, these women are the people most strongly opposed to the changes that are taking place.

Their resentments were often clear in the testaments indicting witches. The witch stole pears from a neighbour’s trees. Asked to return them, she threw them down in an angry fit. After that, no more pears would grow on that field. Another woman was accused following an incident in which she was refused some cheese. Grace, the one who refused her, became lame. Witches were blamed for every untoward incident. Older widows and village women were targeted because they lacked social support and were easy scapegoats. Coincidentally, these women were also midwives and herbalists. The trials certainly confirmed the domination of men in these professions but that is not what they were primarily about. In an area where witchcraft trials took hold, the first to be accused were older single women. Later there were children of both sexes, some men and even a few middle-class people. Accusations against the nobility were a miniscule minority. Usually, at that point the trials in that area stopped. The spread of witchcraft accusations was guaranteed by the methods used to find witches. The accused were tortured and asked to reveal the names of fellow witches. 

The witches were the people in the village who suddenly find themselves surplus to requirements, without an income and dependent on village support and sympathy. Instead, they get targeted as people who cannot defend themselves. The least powerful people in their communities. Older women, often single. The “witches were usually old women on public assistance or women who survived by going from house to house begging for bits of food or a pot of wine or milk, if they were married their husbands were day laborers but more often, they were widows and lived alone” (170). In a situation where the persecuting clerics were looking for victims and demanding suspects dobbed in by fellow villagers. 

They are consorting with the devil. The disruption that is plaguing us must be their fault. They were accused of having sold body or soul to the devil. By “magical means, murdered scores of children, sucked their blood, made potions with their flesh, caused the death of their neighbour, destroyed cattle and crops, raised storms” (Federici 167).

In so far as these trials and executions were organized by the powerful, they acted as a distraction from the real causes of disruptive upheaval. A grim circus. Not so much a glorious instance of resistance to the new economic order. More an example of the way class society responds to a crisis. 

One aspect of Federici’s account of the witch craze can make some sense. As we have seen, while feudal society was patriarchal, there were arenas of social action in which women had recognized and respected authority. For example, in small business, especially as widows. In medical work as healers, midwives and herbalists. By the seventeenth century these fields of power were gradually being taken over by men, beginning a process of professionalisation. The organisation of the witch trials had the effect of targeting women who exercized these kinds of authority. Clearing the way for a scientific and masculine re-shaping of medicine. Bacon’s endorsement of the witch trials and his parallel between witch hunting and scientific research is a telling pointer to this connection. Federici is not the first feminist historian or sociologist to make this link. ‘Witches, Midwives and Nurses’ was published in 1973 by the Feminist Press and authored by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English. 

The attacks on women represent typical fantasies of patriarchy. The monstrous feminine. Also, that the Devil suborns women to become his helpers. Meaning that the avenging clerics and civil authorities are fighting a powerful male father figure. These fantasies are systematized by persecuting clerics. But they also seem plausible to local men (and women) in the villages. They are confirmed by torture. They make sense in a misogynistic cultural environment where it is not just men who perpetuate these ideas. 

While it is true that the new capitalist role for women removes some of the powers of women in the mediaeval period, feudal Europe was also a patriarchal society. From its very beginnings, capitalism threatens to empower women through a wage independent of family authority.  Men as a sex-class resist this by fighting to create wage differentials. It seems very unlikely that these witch trials initiated a process of domestication and exclusion from wage work. This only happened much later (mostly in the twentieth century) in capitalist industrial societies. Very obviously, most poor women combined work in reproduction (unpaid) with paid work (at lower wages). 

Federici considers the witch craze as driven by the desire of authorities to take control of women’s reproductive power. During the plagues of the Black Death the population of Europe dropped by a third. The consequence was that ordinary paid workers and rural peasants increased their bargaining power. Labour was in short supply. Federici sees this as driving a moral panic about population. Authorities were keen to ensure the quickest possible population growth. A popular panic and changes to the legal system focused on women accused of infanticide. The witch trials targeted women who might aid and abet women in herbal contraception or abortion. Witches were often charged with sacrificing children to the devil. The aim of the witch trials was to break women’s control over reproduction. A control organized through the work of midwives and women herbalists. The aim was to ensure that every birth was attended by male doctors who could ensure that everything was done according to the wishes of the establishment. 

It is possible that clerical authorities backed up civil elites by targeting women who might assist with abortions or contraception. To boost population. But it seems a bit unlikely. The charges of infanticide for ritual purposes are a staple of witchcraft scapegoating — meant to show how unnatural and evil these people are. That old women could not do this unless they were in thrall to the Devil. 

Conclusions

My analysis of these events fits with a Foucauldian perspective on history. We can see the apparatus of the witch hunts being first assembled to deal with heretical movements in Spain, the Alps and the Pyrenees. The authorities use torture to get members of the dangerous group to indict each other, breaking solidarity. This tactic works and gets replicated. It is then generalized and inflicted on new targets. The terror breaks up the potential for more revolutionary millenarian attacks on class power. 

The problem that I see in Federici’s account is that it starts at the end of this process and works back. The end is a subdued population, a gender regime suitable to capitalism, an acceptance of work discipline, the end of peasant control of land within a feudal accommodation, the domination of wage labour as the main form of exploitation. All this is in the future — 1750 to 1910. Federici treats the witch hunts as a capitalist conspiracy to bring about this ultimate outcome. But as a Foucauldian approach suggests, the players at the time have none of this in their heads as they develop strategies that make sense at the time. A largely aristocratic class structure, millenarian resistance to the church and nobility. A strategy that works to contain this resistance. A strategy discovered and replicated rather than planned to achieve a later set of end points. 

Looking at this as an example of an intersection between patriarchy and class power we may say this. The witch hunts are a strategy of class power under threat. They target women as scapegoats because they are already a group with less social power. An easy target. They are also the victims because the developing new economy puts them at a particular disadvantage compared to men of their own class. Rather than making war on the whole of the peasant underclass, as also happened at this time, the powers that be made an example of particular members of the subordinate class to terrify the whole class. To an extent we could see this as ‘dividing the proletariat’ by gender to rule them. But it depended on the willingness of the peasant community, as a whole, to treat these older single women as expendable. An existing patriarchal dispensation managed to create a more general effect. The problem with Marxist feminism is that it treats men of the subordinate classes as forever the innocents. It never looks at the investments which men of all classes have in patriarchy. I find it a worry that ultra leftists who would never go near a Trotskyist democratic socialist party so readily become enthusiasts for this kind of account. 

Ch: 16 Women’s resistance to capitalist colonialism 
Terry Leahy 2024

In the previous chapter I looked at Sylvia Federici’s account of the witchcraft hunts of Europe. Federici sees these phenomena of early capitalism in Europe as essentially similar to the processes of colonialism in the Global South. Likewise, the targeting of women’s traditional power in pre-capitalist economies and their resistance to capitalist inroads. In the context of early capitalist Europe and the later Global South, Federici finds a common thread. Capitalism is an attack on women’s power in pre-capitalist societies. Women’s resistance makes them a target of nascent capitalism in both contexts. ‘The counterparts of the typical European witch, then, were … the colonized native Americans and the enslaved Africans’ (Federici, 197).

Federici looks at this issue in relation to early colonial attacks on Indigenous resistance in the Americas. In particular, the Spanish and Portuguese inroads into Latin and South America. ‘The charge of devil worshipping was carried by missionaries and conquistadors to the “New World” as a tool for the subjugation of local populations’ (163). An initial period saw the colonial authorities attempting to force the natives to become Christians. When this failed, the Spanish colonial powers treated the local people as in league with the devil and applied the technologies of the witch hunts to this resistance. Local people were encouraged to name witches in their midst. These devil worshippers were duly executed at the stake or killed by hanging. As she points out, it was difficult to convince local people to treat their traditional religions as devil worship and difficult to break up the solidarity of Indigenous communities through these strategies. On the other hand, the terror inspired by these tactics certainly helped to break local resistance to colonialism. 

My own sense of the narratives she describes is that anti-colonial resistance was not, in most cases, a gendered response but was coming from both men and women — reacting to the sufferings imposed by the colonial regime. Forced labour in the mines, usually ending in death, was a typical imposition. My main objection to this analogy is Federici’s claim that as in Europe, witchcraft accusations were aimed at women for the most part. Corresponding to a gendered resistance to capitalist colonialism in the New World — as in the Old World. For example, she argues that in the Yucatan and Peru, women were most likely to be charged with witchcraft because they were the ‘staunchest defenders of their community’ (Federici 197). I do not find this backed by the detail of her accounts. One example mentions trials of 75 Indian heretics between 1536 and 1543. These ‘heretics’ were ‘mainly drawn from the political and religious leaders of central Mexican communities’ (Federici 197). In other words, they were mainly men. Other cases fit with Federici’s interpretation. In 1660 in Huarochiri, 32 were convicted in an inquisition against idolatry — 28 were women. According to Federici, this was because women were most strongly defending the old ways. It may have been because the inquisitors expected witches to be women. Or, as in Europe, because they were more likely to be named by anonymous informants as the least powerful members of their communities. 

The following accounts consider these issues in relation to other parts of the colonized world and to similar arguments in relation to gendered resistance. 

The Chipko struggle

An earlier version of Federici’s argument is the ecofeminist classic by Vandana Shiva ‘Staying Alive’. I will look at her analysis of the Chipko struggle in India. The word ‘chipko’ refers to one of the central tactics of this movement to save Indigenous forests. Protesters go to the forest and hug the trees, defying those who have come to cut them down. The popular strength of the Chipko struggle comes from the local peasant women of the north of India. The movement began in the early 1970’s, though similar struggles go back hundreds of years. Beginning in Uttarakhand, in the Himalayan North of India, the Chipko movement spread throughout the country. 

The background to the Chipko struggle is the removal of forests from the control of peasant communities and the privatization or state control of these resources, with consequent environmental problems. Traditionally, the peasants of India used their forests for medicinal herbs and wild food, for tree fodder and grazing and for gathering wood for fuel. The supply of water and the stability of the water supply was also dependent on the forest cover. When the British colonized India they declared by a stroke of the pen that all communally owned forests were now under the ownership of the state. Gradually, they took these forests out of the hands of subsistence peasants and redeveloped them as part of a timber industry. During British rule, the main use of the timber was to supply the British military and industrial machine. Trees in the Himalayas were primarily cut to make railway sleepers. A similar policy has been continued by postcolonial governments, who have concentrated on the commercial uses of the forests. Often, timber has been cut only to be exported to wealthy countries. Forests have also been cleared to use the land for cash crop farming. The cutting of forests in mountainous areas has caused soil erosion and mudslides, flooding, and the drying up of ground water supplies. Recently, state policy has favoured the replacement of indigenous forest diversity with eucalypt plantations, suitable for the timber industry. This eucalypt monoculture kills local understory species with a leaf fall containing eucalypt terpenes – oils that are toxic to local vegetation. Each of these developments has harmed the peasant communities which have relied on forests for some part of their subsistence.

A good example of the way Shiva describes the Chipko movement is her account of the struggle at the village of Reni in the Alakananda valley. In 1970, there was a major flood and landslide. Local women blamed it on the felling of trees in the catchment area. In 1973, a woman saw some men coming with axes to begin more tree felling. She and her companions surrounded the timber contractors, saying:

This forest is our mother. When there is a crisis of food, we come here to collect grass and dry fruits to feed our children. We dig out herbs and collect mushrooms from this forest. You cannot touch these trees.

A group of local women organized vigilance parties to prevent the trees being cut and got the government to agree to a ten-year ban on logging. Shiva’s account emphasizes the key role of local women in this protest.

Shiva sees the Chipko movement as an inspiration for ecofeminism world-wide. Tribal women can show the way through their traditional spiritual connection to a feminized nature and through their intimate understanding of harmonious and sustainable interaction with the natural world:

… they have the holistic and ecological knowledge of what the production and protection of life is about. 

According to Shiva, the actions taken by British and Indian governments are based on a masculinized scientific view of forests. Working from the analysis given by Merchant, she sees the scientific perception of forests as a ‘reduction’ of the complexity of the forest to a number of simple ‘uses.’ A source of timber and profit. This ignores the forest as a complex of interacting biological parts. Socially, it reduces the forest to the needs of a colonial or postcolonial government for timber or cash. The complexity of pre-existing uses is ignored. As one part of a sustainable agriculture. The forests as sources for a great variety of products used for everyday subsistence. The importance of the forests for management of the water catchment. 

Shiva presents the movement as defending the feminine aspects of the world, as conceived by local religious belief. Forests in India have been worshipped as the Goddess of the Forest, Aranyani. The forest as a symbol of the earth’s fertility is also worshipped as the Earth Mother, as Vana Durga, or as the Tree Goddess. In folk and tribal cultures, trees are also worshipped as Vana Devatas or forest deities. A more overarching identification of women and nature sees nature as the feminine ‘prakriti’, which combines with the masculine principle ‘purusha’ to create the world. The energy of prakriti is named as 
‘Shakti’. These beliefs provide a living context for the actions of women (and men) within the Chipko movement. A good example is the statement of Itwari Devi, a village elder:
Shakti (strength) comes to us from these forests and grasslands; we watch them grow, year in and year out through their internal shakti, and we derive our strength from it. We watch our streams renew themselves and we drink their clear and sparkling water – that gives us shakti. We drink fresh milk, we eat ghee, we eat food from our own fields – all this gives us not just nutrition for the body, but a moral strength, that we are our own masters, we control and produce our own wealth. That is why ‘primitive’ and ‘backward’ women who do not buy their needs from the market but produce them themselves are leading Chipko. Our power is nature’s power, our shakti comes from prakriti. 
As a social movement the Chipko struggle combines the activist energies of two socially different groups. One is a middle class, Gandhian movement of social change. Organisers from this milieu have seeded the Chipko struggles, coordinating information and strategies. Some of these activists were women from the global North who had gone to work in India with the peasants. The second part of the Chipko movement is much larger numerically — it is the peasants who are defending their forests.

Shiva argues that in both these wings of the movement, women dominate. Looking at the Gandhian activists, she traces the movement back to earlier initiatives by Mira Behn, an English woman. Mira Behn was one of Gandhi’s closest followers who moved to the Himalayas in the 1940s. Originally, she worked on cattle as central to sustainable agriculture and initiated a centre in the foothills. She moved to create an ashram further into the Himalayas after floods convinced her that the problem of deforestation was of major importance. Shiva also writes about Sarala Behn, who started an ashram for hill women and influenced another key female activist, Bimla Behn who spent eight years with Sarala. Shiva’s perspective is that the key male activists in the movement were actually inspired and led by these women. Sunderlal Bahuguna, who is widely acknowledged as a key figure in other accounts, married Bimla Behn, who demanded that he leave the Congress Party and settle in a hill village to initiate local action. Shiva also points out that Sunderlal had worked with Mira Behn. She argues that other key male activists, such as Chandi Prasad Bhatt, were drawn in by Bahuguna to support a movement ‘generated by women’s power’.

Some of the women Gandhian activists that Shiva mentions were from Europe. Mira Behn was the daughter of a British naval officer, and her name was originally Madeleine Slade. Sarala Behn, who continued her work in the next generation is also mentioned by Shiva as a key figure. She was also of British origin, her original name being Catherine Hillman. From the constructionist perspective, these origins are worth noting. If ecofeminism is socially constructed, its origins in India are both European and Indian.

Shiva’s second reason for identifying the movement with women, is her understanding of the basis of peasant support for the movement. As Shiva sees it, to begin with, peasant people of both sexes were opponents of deforestation and private and state ownership of the forests. Women wanted to save their forests, and the men wanted to prevent outside contractors from making all the profits from timber. Later, as contractors began to work with local men, there was often a split between the women, who used the forest for subsistence, and their husbands, who could make money by cutting timber as local contractors. In 1977, these divisions came to a head when the forests at Adwani were auctioned. Large groups of women from fifteen villages came to guard the forests and eventually repelled both the contractors and the police, who had come to support the timber cutters. These actions were led by Bachni Devi who was the wife of the local village headman, who was himself a contractor. Shiva sees this incident as revealing a split in the movement. The struggle became one in which women fought to maintain the power which was based in their traditional role as agriculturalists and users of forests subsistence. Men were undermining this power through their engagement in a new cash economy of timber production. 

In turn Shiva relates this gender division to two other factors. One is the preference of western patriarchy to appoint men as ‘providers’ for their families’ subsistence through wage labour. Shiva sees the global extension of western patriarchy being expressed in this Indian situation, as it has been in other countries in the developing world. As other authors have pointed out, a common development of Uttarakhand society during the postcolonial period was the migration of men to the plains, leaving the women in charge of subsistence agriculture in the villages. A second factor is the traditional division of labour within Indian peasant agriculture. Shiva shows that women actually did considerably more agricultural work than their husbands in traditional peasant and tribal economies in India. When the cash economy came along, it could not provide sufficient income to service the needs of the whole family. So, women continued on with their traditional subsistence agriculture, while men were increasingly involved in the cash economy. Women believed that the best survival strategy was not to rely on cash income but to maintain traditional subsistence agriculture. According to Shiva, they ended up by fighting their husbands whose actions were undermining that production strategy. Ethically, the women supported their struggle by invoking the central spiritual importance of the forest ecosystem.

Other accounts of the Chipko struggle have a slightly different account of these gender issues. Other accounts focus on the Gandhian movement as a key factor and nominate as key activists the male leaders of this movement. For example, Guha specifies two central wings of the movement as the one inspired and led by Sunderlal Bahuguna and the one inspired and led by Chandi Prasad Bhatt. It was usually these figures who negotiated with government leaders and finalized settlements that protected forests – after prolonged local action had forced the government’s hand. For example, in 1980 it was Bahuguna who negotiated with the Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, to gain a ban on logging above 1000 meters and a fifteen-year ban on commercial logging (Lane 1993). It was Bhatt who first suggested the tactic of hugging the trees. He was responsible, as well, for organising the local village cooperatives which have been consistent opponents of commercial exploitation of the forests by the state and large companies.

An account of the Reni action that is based in Bhatt’s own narrative, gives him and his activists a much more prominent role than that suggested by Shiva’s account. In 1973, Bhatt and his activists began to gather support in the villages against the government plans to auction 2,500 trees in the Reni Forest. He reminded the villagers of the dangers of floods caused by deforestation and two colleagues remained to spread his message. Chandi Prasad then went to Dehra Dunn to appeal to the forestry department and contractors to abandon their plans to auction the trees. Failing in this, he warned them of the local resistance. The government decided to subvert this anticipated resistance by offering to pay the men of the Reni village compensation for land the government had claimed fourteen years before. Payment was to be presented some distance from the village. The contractors arrived at the village after the men had left. A little girl spotted the contractors, and Gaura Devi organised the women of the village to confront them. The contractors withdrew from the forest. When the men returned, they learned about the women’s surprise victory. Rallies were held and a constant watch organised. Finally, Chandi Prasad was invited to the state capital to meet with the minister. After a two-year delay, the committee that had been set up recommended that there be no logging and the government put a ten-year ban on logging. This account differs from Shiva’s in a few ways. It stresses the key organising role of Bhatt and his group of activists and emphasizes their important role in negotiating with the government. It suggests that the men of Reni were also strongly opposed to the logging but were tricked into being absent when the contractors arrived — leaving the women to carry out a resistance which was supported by the men.

Despite this, other accounts do give support to two central ideas of Shiva’s. It has been women peasants who have been the strongest local supporters of the Chipko actions. Even Guha, who is sceptical about the feminist analysis of Chipko, admits that women were more consistent participants in peasant resistance than men, and traces it to women’s roles in traditional agricultural production. As well, there seems no doubt that there were a number of incidents in which men and women were opposed over these issues and women resisted deforestation against the wishes of the men. Shiva mentions the incident at Adwari described above. An example mentioned by Bina Agarwal is an attempt to establish a potato-seed farm by cutting down an oak forest in Dongri Paintoli village. The men supported the idea because it would bring in a money income; but the women opposed it because it would mean longer treks for fuel and fodder. Lane mentions another event in Vadiargh in 1979, where men were bought off with bribes and the women from Kemar, one hundred kilometers away, came and camped to stop the logging. Both Agarwal and Lane see these clashes as symptomatic of a situation in which women had most to lose through commercialization of the forests. 

Looking at the Chipko struggle, we can consider how it might be viewed as ecofeminism. Shiva identifies the ‘reductionism’ of the scientific view as masculinist and patriarchal. This reductionism fits with the social construction of masculinity. It is a use of science to legitimate actions which disregard the variety of purposes relevant to the forest ecosystem. As science it only notices those purposes most dear to the hearts of powerful men in government and industry – timber for the British Empire, or export income for the postcolonial Indian government. So, it fits the analysis of patriarchal masculinity as distancing and competitive. This ‘reductionist’ science is based on an emotional distancing from the purposes of the many plants and animals that make the forest their home. It does not take them into account when it evaluates the forests purely as a timber producing resource. It distances itself, as well, from the purposes of other sections of the human community. It promotes a policy which causes both flooding and drought. It distances itself from the multiple uses of the forests made by tribal and peasant agriculture. It ignores women’s traditional uses of the forests. In all this, it is a science which fits with a socially constructed masculinity. 

Looking at the peasants involved in the struggle, a gendered analysis of capitalism fits well. Within western patriarchy, since the capitalist period, men’s power has been based in their control of the cash economy – paid work and capital ownership. As western patriarchy and capitalism came to India, they brought this social construction of gender with them. It seemed only natural in this cultural context to appoint local men as employees within the cash economy and to confer power on them through this appointment. Since the cash economy excluded women, it was only to be expected that women would attempt to retain power through their connection to the traditional subsistence economy. This is one factor that was relevant to the support that peasant women gave to the Chipko struggle. The other factor, as noted above, is that traditional agriculture gave women a very close connection to the forests, because of the way their agricultural role tied them to activities such as the gathering of fuel and fodder.

Another struggle with different gender implications

In other instances, a set of similar local struggles do not fall into these gendered patterns. The particularities of global capitalist production also produce contexts in which men become the leading figures in grassroots resistance to ecological destruction. So in Brazil, Chico Mendes organised the resistance of a union of male rubber tappers to deforestation. This deforestation was being brought about by an alliance between the Brazilian government and beef barons, who wanted to clear the rainforests to provide grazing land. The rubber tappers’ movement against deforestation was supported by male dominated environmentalist organisations in the wealthy countries. Environmentalists from the international urban middle class also helped to create alliances between the rubber tappers and the Indigenous people of the Amazon. The indigenous people were also threatened by deforestation. 

In many ways the rubber tappers struggle in the Amazon is parallel to the Chipko movement. In both cases, a group of local people who have made a traditional economic use of the forest are resisting forest clearing. In both cases, the clearing of the forests is inspired by an alliance between a central government and business interests. In one case, the vagaries of capitalism pit local women against the deforesters; in another case the vagaries of capitalism pit local men against the deforesters.

Capitalist patriarchy comes to the Global South

As capitalist imperial power comes out of Europe, colonizing the rest of the world, it is facing up to very different patriarchal gender regimes. The early response of colonial governments is to enslave or kill off the local population without regard to gender. Beyond this, capitalism begins to institute a regime of paid labour, not unlike the regime of the home countries. What they are most likely to do in this process is to attract the most powerful gender in the local population by offering them paid work. Access to the monetary economy. In mining, landed estates or manufacturing. Doing this, they are making assumptions about money and gender that are already entrenched in the rich countries. Treating men as breadwinners. On the other hand, to maintain the colonial advantage of super exploitation they are not actually paying these men a living wage. They are assuming that women will supplement the family’s cash income by engaging in at least some subsistence production. Tying women to their villages and further closing off their options to move to urban cash employment. 

As Federici mentions, this new patriarchal development is not just a cultural phenomenon of capitalist patriarchy coming out of Europe. It is also enabled by women’s role in reproduction. It is harder for women to achieve the mobility necessary to chase new opportunities in paid employment opened up by capitalism in the Global South. As in Europe a traditional patriarchal gender order is maintained by a set of events that also advantages men relative to women in the subordinate classes. 

So, what are the political implications? Women must defend community resources against new capitalist incursions. To maintain the subsistence production necessary to keep the family going. While the men are elsewhere, employed or looking for a paid job. This is why the example of the Chipko struggle is, as Shiva argues, something of a model for the politics of gender and capital in the Global South. This is not because women are innately closer to nature. It is because the colonial imperialist regime puts women in this position — defending community subsistence resources against yet new incursions of capitalist appropriation.

Another example is the struggle against commercial fishing trawlers that has taken place on the Indian coast. While men are getting jobs in commercial fishing, women are losing access to a cheap protein resource for their households — from artisanal local fishing. At the same time, this is by no means a universal phenomenon. In low paid industrial jobs in much of the Global South, women are preferred as workers. Those left behind in the villages struggle to get by without their support for local food provision. 

The Southern African example

I want to finish this account by making a few comments coming out of research in Southern and Eastern Africa. In the countries colonized by the British, a typical pattern was for less agriculturally productive regions to be set aside as ‘native reserves’. The idea was that women would stay on the native reserves conducting household food provision for their families. Meanwhile men of working age would go into urban areas to get jobs in the towns. Or get jobs on agricultural estates owned by white people to do paid work. Or get jobs in mining. This arrangement was enforced through laws restricting the movement of rural people. Families were not permitted to migrate to the cities. Only those with paid employment, the men, would get temporary permits. The remittances brought home by men were intended to provide necessary purchased inputs for the household economy.

Employed men would bring some money back to the village for the household economy. A common pattern was for men to attempt to maintain control over these resources by buying cattle. The cattle would be grazed on the common grazing land owned by the village and minded by apprentice young relatives acting as herders. It was a convention that men would gain prestige by accumulating more cattle and they were reluctant to sell them. In effect, they retained a retirement stake for when they left work. Cattle could be sold in a family emergency, an illness or expensive ceremony. While in many ways the patriarchy of the village was not compromised by this arrangement, women as heads of households exercized authority while husbands were absent. 

To what extent has the conflict between capitalist encroachment and the defence of the commons informed this situation? To begin with, the original appropriation of the best land by white farmers is still a large part of the economic structure of these countries. This land has been lost to capitalist agriculture. The effect has been dependence on paid work and the commercial economy. Despite this, the community ownership of the native reserves has been a remarkably resilient feature of these economies. The independence struggles of the previous century have made it difficult to wind this community ownership back. Despite constant advice from economic experts to do this. A traditional chief may make arbitrary seizures of community land, trying to sell the land and make money. With local families defending their de facto ownership. Resistance to these developments has been intense from both men and women in rural families. There is a constant danger of sabotage and armed resistance if arbitrary seizures are too extreme. Land immediately adjacent to the residential village is most at risk while plots further out are safe. 

In terms of gender, men’s ownership of livestock is a key aspect of gendered inequality. It also creates problems for the subsistence economy. The fact that half of the village land is used as a common grazing resource prevents this land being used to deal with food security issues. An example of men’s power in the villages and its impact on the very livelihoods of their families. Up to half of the children under five are stunted from malnutrition. Partly due to inadequate nutrition and partly due to gastric infections coming out of poor sewerage provision. As well, the push from governments, most NGOs and many local men is to use this local community land for cash crops of one kind or another. Imagining that this will solve food problems as people use their income to buy food. These projects rarely work and very often reflect the demands of men for employment. In other words, there is no outside support to improve the productivity of the agriculture that could in fact feed people. 

There is a variability between men’s participation in agriculture for household food provision. In South Africa it is rare to see rural men tilling the fields and growing crops. If they are unemployed, they are hanging out in the village hoping for work or going elsewhere to find it. However, in Zimbabwe after the cash economy collapsed, many rural men returned to their villages and participated in feeding their families through their work on the land. There are a few projects for rural food security in Africa that concentrate on subsistence household food security. At least as an aspect of a more commercial strategy. For example, tree crops for sale and for household food, with a side project for growing vegetables for household consumption. Projects like this are most likely to be taken up by women. They see it as their responsibility to feed the family. In addition, men who are locally known as ‘strong Christians’ are more likely to join such projects. They see ‘providing for their family’ as something that can be achieved through household agriculture and not just from paid employment outside the village. They have a strong work ethic and reject alcohol consumption. The downside of this pattern is that men who have strong social connections with each other in the village — through drinking together and through traditional religious ceremonies — are hard to recruit to household food provision. To strategies of subsistence agriculture that may actually work for food security. 

Conclusions

Taken as a whole, these examples suggest the complexity of the interaction of patriarchy and the commercial economy in the Global South. While there is some benefit in a broad brushstrokes’ narrative of how this all works, the detail is important. I think it is much easier to get at this if we do not assume that capitalism entails a particular type of patriarchy. We should not assume that capitalist patriarchy is an unchangeable package, the same across the heresies, the witch craze, the enclosure movement and the patchwork of struggles in the Global South more recently. Or even that capitalism itself, as a social imaginary and economic structure, implies patriarchy. Let us look at how this is playing out case by case. I mean for me, there is one sense in which patriarchy and capitalism are inevitably linked and this is not the one we hear about most. Patriarchy is an essential prop for capitalism because it creates some of the psychological foundations required for any class society. The expectation of hierarchy arising out of the patriarchal family. The competitive masculinity that turns boys to men in the patriarchal household. Like the radical feminists of the seventies, I am more inclined to see capitalism coming out of patriarchy than the other way around.