You should perhaps read Silvia Federici, on women becoming witches, in Caliban and the witch. Women, bodies and primitive accumulation, to shed some light on the spectacle we are currently witnessing in the media, in the public square, in our parliaments around “gender theory”. The ancient panic surrounding so-called witches, persecuted in the name of social therapy, considered sick, agents of contamination, comes back like an echo, while hunters were seen as healthy.
Hundreds of thousands of women were tortured and murdered during a hunting expedition that lasted two centuries. This is proof, as Silvia Federici indicates, that they represented a threat to the order being established. Marxist readings ignore the role of women in the rise of capitalism coupled with colonization, slavery and the extermination of indigenous nations in the territories of the “new world”. Yet as the years went by, laws and orders were drawn up that dictated what a witch was, how to denounce those who were, and how to put them to death.
Silvia Federici shows how men of power and religious men in Europe during the 16th centurye and XVIIe centuries, created from scratch an epidemic of witchcraft. We forget that among the first documents distributed, after the invention of printing, were posters concerning trials for witchcraft and descriptions of the actions of which the accused were accused. It was the jurists, magistrates and demonologists who did the bulk of the work. At the end of the 16th centurye century, the machine was well oiled. Everyone agreed, lawyers, judges, statesmen, scientists, philosophers: witches, that is to say women, had to be controlled, and to do this, they had to be persecuted.
It was the actions of women that had to be eliminated, in general, and not a particular crime. Everything they were, everything they did that threatened the new social order that was being built and at the head of which men stood. The accusations were both sufficiently vague and sufficiently monstrous to target an innumerable number of arbitrary elements, while ensuring that they had the terrorized population on their side.
The creation of this feminine threat — witches — served to widen the gap between men and women so that men feared women and did everything in their power to dominate them and deprive them of knowledge, beliefs, practices they carried. Witches were peasant women, they were poor, often elderly, widowed or single. Their accusers, moreover, were wealthy members of society — often their employers or landlords.
As the terror and the hunt grew, denunciations found their way into the mouths of neighbors, family members, girls denouncing their mothers, and friends their friends. Against the guilds organized by women, against their frequentation of taverns, against their sharing of the common, pyres are erected. “We must instill terror in some,” declared the jurist Jean Bodin, one of the instigators of the witch hunt, “by punishing many.”
Get back on the right path
The following were accused of witchcraft: midwives, women who controlled their fertility or refused motherhood, those who begged or stole crumbs to survive, as well as those said to be frivolous, prostitutes, guilty of adultery, or who had a life sexual activity outside of marriage. In short, all women were guilty, they all had to be put back on the straight and narrow. The witch hunt also served this purpose: to establish conjugality, domesticity, to impose the heterosexual couple with children, what we today call the “nuclear family” as the basis of society.
Finally, we must not forget that the witch was also the one who replied, who argued, who swore and who did not cry when she was tortured.
The killings were public. Stripped and shaved, because the devil hides in the hair, victims of sexual abuse (raped, long needles pricked all over the surface of the body, including inside the vagina, in order to find an insensitive point), quartered , their limbs torn off, held seated on iron chairs under which a fire was lit, their bones crushed… They were put to death in front of the community, including in front of their children, in particular their daughters who, sometimes, had their heads whipped. eyes fixed on their burning mothers.
It happens at the same time: the witch hunt and the invention of the modern woman dependent on bourgeois ideals. Punish adultery, prostitution, childbearing outside of marriage, infanticide, and also: demonize friendships between women which endanger heterosexual marriage. It is at this moment that the word gossip changes meaning. God (God) and sibb (parent), which meant godmother, and also midwife, birthing companion, and more broadly friend, came to borrow the meaning we know today.
In French, the word “gossip” undergoes a similar evolution. From a close friend, the gossip has become a woman who spreads words with malicious intent. Join together like this gossip and gossip, moving from a neutral term denoting the connection between women and their conversations to a negative term that devalues and demonizes women’s speech. This word that circulates between them while they collaborate, cooperate to give birth, sew, make beer, cook…
While the word “gossip” is gradually denigrated, poverty is feminized and male domination is established. Thus, at the end of the 16th centurye century, to punish a disobedient woman, a shrew bridle or gossip bridle : a sort of muzzle made of leather and metal, the bit of which is inserted into the woman’s mouth as one would a horse, and which, because it is often covered with spikes, tears the tongue if she tries to speak.
Rumors: remarks circulated on the sly and which are likely to harm the person who is the subject, when this is not the explicitly pursued objective. As Silvia Federici points out, it is women who “gossip”. In the Western collective imagination, it is they who, because they have time to waste, talk without saying anything important and poison social life.
Misogyny and defense of sexism
Elsewhere, they are seen as transmitting history and traditions, ancestral knowledge related to health, an understanding of human psychology and relationships. Denunciation movements, collective speaking out in the public space, groupings, the creation of single-sex spaces, the publication of collectives… So many contemporary manifestations of a desire to take back, on our own account and in its sense positive, this much-maligned gossip. Because, as Silvia Federici writes, we know that we know.
Yes, we know that behind the current war on trans people and “gender theory” lies misogyny and the defense of sexism on which our systems are based.
We know that behind the rise to the front of parents, politicians and columnists saying they want to protect children against the contamination of gender identities that escape the binary lies the defense of male domination.
Prohibit women from assuming male rights. Forbid men from diminishing themselves by attributing femininity to themselves. So that everyone is in their place, that is to say: that men are above, women below, and oppression dependent on incontestable biological marks. Prohibit a domestic model other than heterosexual and strictly marital. Prohibit the emperor from being exposed and the arbitrariness of our social organization from being revealed.
So that segregation continues to operate silently, we replace the witch hunt with the trans hunt. The parallel is glaring: the witch hunt continues. This time, the people we want to burn at the stake by putting their lives in danger, those we throw into the maw of violence, those who spread rumors about instead of listening to the experts in the matter, those who are gagged when we should be listening to them, those who are accused of crimes when they are the victims… This time, these people, they are non-binary, they are trans, they are queer, they are feminists.