Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation Autonomedia, 2004
According to Sylvia Federici, the European witch hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, rather than being products of medieval superstition, constituted an effort to impose an emerging capitalist logic on unruly populations. Federici contends, among other things, that women's power had to be destroyed in order for capitalism to develop.