caliban and the witch is really interesting but there are also a lot of historical inaccuracies and parts that are purposefully misleading. I'm a history major and this is one of the texts that we discussed in class, so I'll list some of the issues below:
She claims that the hatred of prostitutes is new and didn't exist in the middle ages, which is entirely false.
When talking about numbers, she says that some feminists say that 9 million women were killed but she'll use the conservative number 100,000, but the 9 million number has no basis in fact so bringing it up is just meant to change the reader's baseline for believably. Within actual scholarship, 100,000 is the high end of the estimate, and it includes all the men killed, so the actual number of women murdered is believed to be significantly lower. This is important because her whole claim is based on scale.
(The holocaust comparison above isn't unique: Federici used the 9 million to incorrectly equate the number of women killed to the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust)
Because the witch trials occurred over 250 years, the actual number of deaths was around 200-400 a year. This is still obviously horrible, but German peasant revolts at the time had 100,000 deaths in just 3 years, so it's important not to place too much importance on the witch trials.
She says that there tended to be an economic motivation in the accusation and that the pattern held everywhere except Germany, but didn't mention that half of the cases occurred in Germany, so it's as important as everywhere else combined.
This isn't to say don't read it, but be careful when citing or believing her arguments.
annaxmalina
2087
izzy806
