Q1. Federici points to other interpretations of the witch-hunt as a (1) Church-led extermination of Wiccan tradition and (2) the punishing of women for rising child mortality rates in the 16th and 17th Centuries as inadequate explanations for the timing of the witch-hunts (180-182). However, considering the ‘sexual sadism’ (185) of the torture practices used against the women, can the scale and brutality of the witch-hunts, ‘a misogyny that has no parallel in history’ (185) really be explained entirely in terms of the accumulation of labour-power via the control of women’s “re-productivity”?

Q2.
‘The witch-hunt condemned female sexuality as the source of every evil, but it was also the main vehicle for a broad restructuring of sexual life that, conforming with the new capitalist work-discipline, criminalized any sexual activity that threatened procreation, the transmission of property within the family, or took time and energies away from work’ (194)
Understanding male dictation of female sexuality as crucial to the regulation of female reproduction, what lasting effects can we see of the witch-hunts on today’s post-sexual-revolution understanding of female sexuality?

Q3.
On the one hand, ‘women became the commons’, a ‘natural resource’ (97), that is, women were commodified for the benefit of men who wished to use the female body as reproductive vessels. On the other hand, Federici condemns the perception of the prostitute as being seen as selling herself (197), lamenting a time in the middle ages when prostituted women were considered ‘positive figures who performed a social service for the community’ (my emphasis), that is, a sexual 'service' for men which upholds society.
In what ways does Federici contradict herself here? Perhaps her assumption that women’s bodies must be sexually available for men in order to presumably quench their sexual hunger or else society will fall apart actually mirrors the patriarchal concepts of female sexuality that she consistently criticises?

Q4. In the 16th and 17th Centuries, Federici charts women’s subordination in the sexual division of labour in these ways:
• Reproductive coercion to maintain the workforce. (91) Women become a natural resource for the collective exploitation of men. (97)
• Re-definition of women’s work as ‘non-work’ (92-96 - craftsmen) which enforces marriage as a necessity for survival. (94)
• Legislation criminalising prostituted women. (94)
• Loss of legal power of women. (100)
• Extermination, or the witch-hunts.
• Re-definition of femininity (female gender roles) by the end of the 17th Cent as innate subordination. (103)
• The primitive accumulation of slavery in American colonies. (107-115)
How are similar methods used today to further the exploitation of women’s work?