Witches and babies and DEI, oh my!

We shouldn’t have to make a business case for the business of being human

My dear GFPs,

It's March! Or at least it will be by the time this goes out to you. Which means not only is spring right around the corner, or maybe even here already, it’s also FEMINIST CHRISTMAS — which let’s face it, this year feels a little like rearranging deck chairs on the titanic…but let’s not succumb to despair! Instead gorge yourself on the nearly 6000 word essay I seem to have written on witches, babies and DEI…you know you want to.

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But first! A few notices. Alongside a bunch of private lectures I am giving three public lectures this month, to which you are all invited!

The first is in four days (sorry for the late heads-up, but you can watch online if you can’t make it in person!) in Oxford. It’s the Transport Studies’ Unit Annual Lecture and you can get tickets here.

Next up is a week on Monday, the 10th March, and this one is fully online. It’s an event put on by the National Institute for Health and Care research to mark the introduction of their first ever policy on accounting for sex and gender in research! See, it’s not all doom and gloom! You can register for the event here.

And finally, on the 27th March I’ll be speaking at Women in Data’s event at the O2, and you can register for the ballot for tickets here!

Finally, and this is not about an event or international women’s day, or even specifically women, but I do think it’s connected to the conclusion of my essay below (where, spoiler alert, I conclude that the economy should work for humans and not the other way around): the UK government is currently proposing an exception for AI corporations to copyright laws. I wrote a LinkedIn post about why this matters which you can read here, but in short, the government should be creating policy that makes it possible for humans to sustainably create, not for AI corporations to make even greater profits than they already do by legalising the theft of our work. The consultation window has now passed, but you can and definitely still should write to your MP to protest this change (in the comments of my LinkedIn post I share a few resources to help you write it) — especially if your MP happens to be either Feryal Clark who is the Minister for AI and Digital Government or Chris Bryant, the Minister for Creative Industries, Arts and Tourism. Use your voice to protect human creatives; you’ll miss us when we’re gone!

And on that note…

“Never forget that it only takes one political, economic or religious crisis for women’s rights to be put in jeopardy. Those rights are never to be taken for granted; you must remain vigilant throughout your life.”

This quotation has been attributed by The Internet to Simone de Beauvoir, but since I have been unable to find a proper citation (paging Kate Kirkpatrick?!), I’m inclined to consider it apocryphal. Whoever said it, however, the words have been playing on my mind these past months as I have been thinking, for obvious reasons, about backlash. I’ve been thinking about what drives it, what we can do about it. And I’ve been thinking about how bad the one we’re currently living through is going to get.

I’ve also been thinking about a friend of mine. While I was over in the US earlier this month, she told me that her brother had been worrying about his daughters, and what their future looks like. He had, she told me, been trying to comfort himself with the thought that equality has gone too far now for it to be completely rolled back. It is too intertwined with our institutions, with how we live our lives. The arc of the moral universe is long, it may have its pendulum swings like the one we are undoubtedly living through now, but it tends toward justice. Doesn’t it?

Well, I guess it depends on how long your arc is. Maybe on the scale of a gods-eye-view that’s true. But on a plain old human scale, things look more complicated. Things look more like a series of incursions towards justice, followed, sooner or later, by an often brutal repression, and if history teaches us anything it is that no pendulum swing towards justice, no matter how dramatic, is one that cannot be undone.

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And on that upbeat note let’s now rewind a few thousand years all the way to Iron Age Britain. A recent genomic analysis of Iron Age grave-sites has revealed evidence of what researchers call “matrilocality,” that is the practice of men leaving their families of origin when they get married, and instead living with their wives’ family. This practice, the DNA suggests, “was a widespread phenomenon with deep roots on the island.” This approach contrasts with Europe, where the evidence points to the existence of “patrilocality” instead.

Now, the existence of matrilocality does not on its own tell us how women were treated, or what positions they might have held in society, but as the researchers point out, it is “a strong predictor of female social and political empowerment.” Women who stay in their community of origin, are “more likely to inherit, control land, be players in the local economy, and have influence.”

And in any case, the DNA evidence is not our only clue. Beyond the bones themselves, female graves “often contain high-status artefacts, suggesting the social importance of these women.” The researchers believe that together with the DNA evidence, these graves suggest that “wealth was being transferred down the female line." This in turn would predict a greater investment in daughters “as they would probably inherit their mother's status.”

The idea that something unholy was going on with the British womenfolk is also backed up by the writings of the Very Shocked Romans, who, upon arrival in Britain were “astonished to find women occupying positions of power”, and, according to presumably a very upset Julius Caesar, even taking “multiple husbands”.

Tbh, the horror is all ours: as Sara Pascoe has sagely noted, no woman has time to take on multiple husbands.

But maybe it’s different in matrilocal societies.

Still, irrespective of their position on polyandry, we do know that women were not entirely shut out of power in Britain.

From Cartimandua’s 30-year reign of the Brigantes, a tribe covering much of northern England, we learn that women could inherit property, divorce and lead armies to great effect. In the east of England, Boudica of the Iceni famously led an uprising that destroyed three Roman towns and challenged the authority of the imperial government. (Nature)

The Roman coverage of the wild Brits has often been dismissed by historians as exoticising nonsense. Over in the patriarchal Roman Empire the concept of women commanding armies and controlling territory was simply inconceivable, so it has been thought that these tall tales about about British warrior queens were simply evidence of a Roman desire to position Brits as the ultimate in backward Barbarians (on reflection, perhaps it wasn’t just the Romans who found the idea of female rulers inconceivable then…). But taken together with the grave and DNA evidence, we have to ask: what if the Romans were telling the truth?

And if they were, another question also arises: what happened to all this female empowerment? How did we get from Iron Age warrior queens to the Victorian Angel in the House?

Well, since I am neither an archaeologist nor an Iron Age historian, I am not qualified to answer that question precisely, but what I can tell you is that this would be far from the only time in history that women have lost what appears to be a position of relative equality with men.

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As I think I’ve mentioned before, I’m currently working on a book about fertility (which, contrary to what is often assumed when you tell people that, does not mean I am writing a book exclusively about infertility, although I am covering that too). Anyway, one of the areas I’m exploring for the book is the current “fertility crisis” and what it means for women and their rights, and a few months ago I was hiking with a brilliant friend of mine and boring her to tears with my thoughts on the topic. I have, however, no regrets because the upshot of boring said friend to tears was that she pointed me towards an absolutely incredible book that she had just read called Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici.

First published in 2004, Caliban and the Witch examines how women lost out during the economic transitions of the 14th to the 18th century. I don’t have space to do justice to the entirety of Federici’s argument here, but for our purposes the angle I’m most interested in is how, in a context of population decline and an accompanying rash of political writing about the economic importance of population growth, this period witnessed not only the emergence of a political and literary climate of intense misogyny, but also the criminalisation and demonisation of any form of birth-control, from contraception to abortion.

Sound at all familiar?

Women in the Middle Ages were not the warrior queens of the Iron Age, but they did have more access to the labour market than most of us might think.

In England, seventy-two out of eighty-five guilds included women among their members. Some guilds, including silk-making, were dominated by them; in others, female employment was as high as that of men. By the 14th century, women were also becoming schoolteachers as well as doctors and surgeons, and were beginning to compete with university-trained men, gaining at times a high reputation.

Federici (2021) p.27

And while we may be used to the standard story about how female midwives came to be pushed out of obstetrics by male doctors, in fact the speciality already included doctors; it’s just that they were female doctors. “After the Caesarian cut was introduced in the 13th century,” writes Federici, “female obstetric[ians] were the only ones who practiced it.”

Meanwhile, women “possessed many means of contraception, mostly consisting of herbs which turned into potions and ‘pessaries’ (suppositories) were used to quicken a woman’s period, provoke an abortion, or create a condition of sterility,” a practice, writes Federici, that the Church still looked on “with a certain indulgence, prompted by the recognition that women may wish to limit their births because of economic reasons.”

This changed, however, as authorities started to be concerned about population decline.

The first shift came in the aftermath of the Black Death that swept across Europe in the mid 14th century, wiping out more than a third of its population. Fewer workers meant more bargaining power for the ones that remained, who demanded better wages and better terms. This included women: “the differential between female and male earnings was drastically reduced in the wake of the Black Death.” The result “for the European proletariat” was, writes Federici, “not only the achievement of a standard of living that remained unparalleled until the 19th century, but the demise of serfdom.”

But not everyone was happy about this, not least employers, as their writings on the matter attest.

‘Servants are now masters and masters are servants,’ complained John Gower in Mirour de l’omme (1378), ‘the peasant pretends to imitate the ways of the freeman, and gives himself the appearance of him in his clothes’

Clearly, more babies, who would eventually become productive workers, were needed to right this untenable situation, and Federici connects this upending of labour relations to the shift this period also saw in the persecution of heretics. Their activities became increasingly associated with “reproductive crimes, especially ‘sodomy,’ infanticide, and abortion,” while “the figure of the heretic increasingly became that of a woman.”

This pattern was repeated following the population crisis which began in the late 16th century, except this time it wasn’t heretics who were being associated with reproductive crimes. It was witches.

During the witch-hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries birth control and non-procreative sex were literally demonised, and this took place in the context not only of population decline, but also a philosophical and political fixation on the connection between a country’s population size and its wealth. At the same time as witches were being hunted down, states also redefined what constituted a reproductive crime, with abortion and contraception now becoming officially criminalised. Meanwhile childbirth, previously almost exclusively the domain of women, now required a surveillance of a male doctor. By the beginning of the 17th century in France and England, writes Federici, “the first male midwives began to appear and, within a century, obstetrics has come almost entirely under state control.”

Alongside this state-sponsored reproductive terrorism came the increasing relegation of women to the home “in a way unknown in previous societies”, alongside the systematic devaluation of their labour. Reproductive work which previously had not been separated out from productive work, all of it being recognised as essential to the maintenance of family life, became officially non-work. Indeed, even when women did engage in market work at home, it was argued by public authorities that this too was not work.

Meanwhile, amid an explosion of anti-women literature (“the insubordination of women and the methods by which they could be ‘tamed’ were among the main themes in the literature and social policy of the ‘transition’”) , European women experienced “a steady erosion” of their rights, from the right to conduct economic activity on their own, to the right to make contracts, to represent themselves in court, to live on their own or with other women, even to appear in public at all. Overall it’s hard to disagree with Federici when she argues that “the main initiative that the state took to restore the desired population ratio was the launching of a true war against women.”

And once the war had been won, the representation of women as child-killing demon-copulators was transmuted into, well, the aforementioned Angel in the House. No longer were we making arguments that dangerously lustful and savage women needed to be tamed and contained; instead women were “depicted as passive, asexual beings, more obedient, more moral than men, capable of exerting a positive moral influence on them.” Their subjugation became naturalised — and we’ve been repeating that line ever since.

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Fast forward to the 21st century and we’re facing another “population crisis.” Political thinkers and governments are all, with increasing desperation, trying to find ways to convince more women to have more babies, concerned that we are not producing the requisite number of replacement workers to drive the economy. So far, very little seems to be working. And, call me a conspiracist, but I can’t help noting that it is in this context that we have seen not only a growth in many countries of increasingly punitive anti-abortion and even anti-contraception rhetoric, but also the emergence of the DEI backlash — which as I noted in my last newsletter is hardly limiting itself to overturning allegedly overzealous hiring and promotion policies, but is also targeting diversity in clinical trials and, most recently, data on PPE for women, just in case anyone was under any illusion that Trump does indeed care about “Defending Women”.

Now, to be very clear, because this is still the internet, I am not in any way comparing the pushback against DEI to the witch-hunts. This is not a direct analogy by any means; cancelling DEI is self-evidently not the same as torturing women and burning them at the stake, and I am not suggesting that this is the first step down a path that leads to the systematic murder of women.

I am also not suggesting that the pushback is entirely, or even predominantly a result of the decline in fertility. There are clearly many factors that are playing into this backlash, not least the dwindling number of secure well-paid jobs for either men or women (although it is worth noting that a decline in job and wage security too seems to have been an important context for the emergence of the witch-hunts).

What I am saying is that it’s worth considering the backlash in the context of how states have responded to other fertility and economic crises through history — and that it’s also incumbent on us to remember that there is precedent for women to not only gain, but comprehensively lose whole swathes of rights (and indeed, that the witch hunts are far from the only example of this; for more modern examples we might look to countries like Afghanistan and Iran — and, when it comes to reproductive rights, the US). What I am saying is that when the economy and fertility rates take a downturn, the playbook has historically not been great for women. I am saying that now is perhaps not the time to be complacent.

In a society such as ours, where reproductive work has been so thoroughly devalued (and no, all the rhetoric about “the most important job in the world” does not blind women to the fact that our society actually does not think it’s an important job at all as evidenced by the severe economic and social consequences of becoming a mother) it’s little wonder that women are, given the choice, increasingly opting out altogether. And let’s face it: if the growing range of economic incentives (admittedly, ones that do little beyond tinker around the edges of the motherhood penalty) are not convincing women to pump out babies for the economy, what lever, beyond removing that choice, and forcing us out of the workplace and into the birthing pool, remains?

Well, and this may shock you, I believe there is in fact another way — but it would require us to tell a whole new story about the workplace, the economy, and our place within them.

In Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist (another brilliant book, a collection of essays that I recommend you all read), the author Paul Kingsnorth critiques the modern environmentalist movement which has, he writes, been essentially tamed by business interests. Instead of making arguments about the intrinsic value of the environment, the greens have instead made their case in economic terms.

At the most extreme end of this tendency are what Kingsnorth calls the “Neo-environmentalists, who “tend to exhibit an excitable enthusiasm for markets.”

They like to put a price on things like trees, lakes, mist, crocodiles, rainforests and watersheds, all of which can deliver 'ecosystem services', which can be bought and sold, measured and totted up. Tied in with this is an almost religious attitude to the scientific method. Everything that matters can be measured by science and priced by markets, and any claims without numbers attached can be easily dismissed. This is presented as 'pragmatism' but is actually something rather different: an attempt to exclude from the green debate any interventions based on morality, emotion, intuition, spiritual connection or simple human feeling.

Kingsnorth, (2017) pp.133-4

This is, to a certain extent, all understandable. “The success that economics has had in monetising the things that science can explain,” notes Kingsnorth, “has convinced many that everything of significance can be monetised.” As a result, many environmentalists “have persuaded themselves that, in order to be taken seriously by those with the power to save or destroy, they must speak this language too.”

And, he acknowledges, the approach has “yielded many clear dividends.” Green concerns have been heard in the corridors of power. They’re an established presence in both corporate and political life. But it has been, says Kingsnorth, “a Faustian bargain. Argue that a forest should be protected because of its economic value as a 'carbon sink', and you have nothing to say when gold or oil of much greater value are discovered beneath it.” Ultimately, Kingsnorth writes, speaking “the language of the dominant culture […] that measures everything it sees and demands a return, is not a clever trick but a clever trap.” And in this culture we have “lost sight of any values beyond the quantifiable.”

I read this book a few years ago, during the height of the pandemic in fact, and I remember being struck by how much of Kingsnorth’s arguments also applied to modern feminism. Because we too have fallen into the trap of making the economic case for equality. Give women equal access to the jobs market — for the economy. Close the gender health gap — for the economy. Reduce the burden of women’s unpaid care work — for the economy. Combat domestic violence — for the economy.

And yes, I do include myself in this critique, and just as with environmentalists I understand exactly how we got here: making the moral case for equality is easily dismissed as pie-in-the-sky idealism, or even classic female irrationality. In this way our arguments for equality could themselves be held as evidence of why we don’t deserve said equality. We aren’t hard-headed enough, we don’t understand cold economic realities, we can’t be taken seriously. But start explaining how much money they were leaving on the table by discriminating against us and suddenly we get a seat at the table.

On the other hand, and to rephrase Kingsnorth, argue that women’s workplace rights should be protected because diversity drives profits and you have nothing to say when they decide that what really drives profits is forcing your womb into the service of creating more workers for free.

Just as with environmental concerns it’s hard, to again rephrase Kingsnorth, to “open a newspaper now or visit a corporate website or listen to a politician or read the label on a packet of biscuits without being bombarded with propaganda about the importance of ‘saving the planet’ [diversity equity and inclusion].” But as he says about the corporate sustainability jargon, “there is a terrible hollowness to it all; a sense that society is going through the motions without understanding why.”

I was reminded of Kingsnorth’s book this month when I belated cracked open my proof copy of Cordelia Fine’s excellent and incredibly timely new book Patriarchy Inc, which has since December been balefully staring me down from my tottering TBR pile (please! no more books! Unless it’s Chimamanda’s latest for which I am SO excited or unless Donna Tartt decides to finally give us book number four WHERE IS IT, DONNA??). Fans of Fine’s meticulous takedowns of the shoddy science and lazy assumptions that characterise so much evolutionary psychology will find much to enjoy in this book (I certainly did), but that’s not what I want to talk about here. What I want to talk about is Fine’s critique of “business case DEI” which she condemns as a “major obstacle to dismantling patriarchy.”

Similarly to Kingsnorth, Fine decries the collapsing of the original goals of feminism (equality between the sexes) down to a business case argument. Which, when you think about it, is pretty demeaning isn’t it? I don’t deserve equality on the basis of my humanity, only in so far as that equality can drive more profits — for someone else.

Just like it did for the environmentalists, this approach has paid some dividends, if by dividends you mean that politicians and corporations are now well-versed in explaining why diversity is good for business. The trouble is, says Fine, those dividends have not included the creation of “workplaces that offer genuine gender equality for women (or men), because that was never the goal.” [my emphasis]

Echoing Kingsnorth’s injunction about the “terrible hollowness” of so much corporate green-speak, Fine writes that she wants to her book to serve:

as an intervention to prevent the important concept of gender equality from becoming what the nineteenth-century political philosopher John Stuart Mill called 'dead dogma'. By this, he meant a doctrine for which ‘Instead of a vivid conception and a living belief, there remain only a few phrases retained by rote; or, if any part, the shell and husk only of the meaning is retained, the finer essence being lost.’

Fine (2025), p.11

Indeed, this hollowness, this ongoing transformation of the concept of equality into a “dead dogma” can perhaps go some way to explaining why companies invested so much in efforts like “unconscious bias training” which had in the first instance never been shown to work and have now been shown if anything to be counter-productive. It can perhaps also explain quite how easily and quickly so many corporations simply rolled over when Trump came knocking. Because the aim was never equality, when the profit incentive changed, so did the policy.

Fine gives the example of a “prestigious global consulting firm” who commissioned “three workplace gender inequality experts” to help them with their “woman problem,” the problem being that women weren’t advancing in their careers at the same rate as men, due to problems with balancing work and family. That was the story anyway.

But the experts found something different. They found a workplace where both men and women complained about balancing work and home, with “two thirds of the firm's associates who were fathers comment[ing] that they were experiencing work-family conflict.” They found a workplace where, contrary to the narrative from the firm’s leaders, the male turnover rate was virtually the same as the supposedly significantly higher female turnover rate. They also found a workplace where both men and women were suffering as a result of “the firm’s practices of overselling and overdelivery.”

Associates complained about account managers piling on work that added little real value - like presentations with hundreds of slides - and that came at a steep price for associates' family life and health. […] Although many associates had the same complaint, with everyone else overworking to over-deliver, each of them had to do the same just to keep up.

Fine (2025) p.87

Men coped by overworking (or leaving) — burning out you might say. Women coped by taking up “work-family accommodations” that were supposed to help them successfully combine work and family life but which in reality were severely stigmatised and served to derail rather than save women’s careers.

The gender inequality experts took their insights to the leadership team, along with recommendations that “might not only alleviate the so-called woman problem, but could reduce employee burnout and turnover across the board, while minimizing low-value work and reducing the risks of failure to deliver on projects.”

The consultancy firm did not, however, want to hear it. They preferred their insoluble “woman problem” narrative. And they preferred to hang on to their “ideal worker norm,” which says that the best worker is the one who dedicates himself to his job above all else and is willing and able to work extreme long hours. And yes the ideal worker is a default male, because it is usually men who have the time to be this ideal worker — the mythical “unencumbered worker” I wrote about in Invisible Women.

Now, we could argue all day and all night about how effective the “ideal worker” might actually be, how many mistakes they might make, how much busy-work versus productive work they are actually doing, how little business benefit they might in fact bring to a company, but that would be to fall into the trap Kingsnorth and Fine identify of allowing our demands for justice to be co-opted into bolstering a narrative that is fundamentally not interested in our humanity except in so far as that humanity can be exploited for profit.

Similarly, and this one is quite galling to me, you can argue until the cows come home (indeed, I have) that the economic contribution of women’s reproductive work is substantial, and that the formal economy not only depends on it, but that the formal economy would do even better if it valued and compensated it properly — hell, it might even convince a few more women to push out some of those babies everyone is so keen on us having. But let’s face it, it’s a tough sell to convince someone to pay for something they’ve been getting for free for centuries, no matter how unfair that might be — because remember it’s not fairness that matters, it’s zeros on the balance sheet.

Although it is worth noting that given the current set-up actually is economically illogical we should perhaps consider that it was never entirely about the economy, stupid anyway. As the philosopher Janet Radcliffe Richards noted on the subject of economically illogical discriminatory workplace practices in her classic book The Sceptical Feminist:

What, for instance, must be happening if an employer passes over a competent woman in favour of a less competent man? It means that the job will be less well done, and therefore (to put it schematically) that he will be losing money by appointing the man. Why should he do that? He is actually willing to pay for something or other, and it is hard to see what it could possibly be other than the simple cause of male supremacy.

Radcliffe Richards (1980), p.83

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It’s easy to forget that the way we live and work now is a choice, based on a particular ideology. It is not an immutable law of nature, and nor have we always done things this way. As Fine points out in her book,

It’s often forgotten that industrialization wrought huge changes in men's lives, as they moved out of household economies, away from their families and into manufacturing and services in the market sphere. In fact, this shift has been described as 'just as revolutionary as the more recent changes for women'.

Fine (2025), p.72

Notwithstanding the more recent emergence of what Fine calls the “hypermasculine norm of relentless work hours” embodied by the Silicon Valley bros (most notably Elon Musk), while men may be more likely to be able to fit into the fit into today’s “ideal worker” mould, most men — and you may want to sit down for this — don’t actually like this norm any more than women do.

Fine presents plenty of evidence, should it be needed, that men also wish they could spend more time with their families and less time at work, because whatever Musk and his cronies may want us to believe, men are not profit-maximising automatons any more than women are. Indeed, there is plenty of evidence from research papers in a range of countries that, and I can’t believe I’m even having to make this argument, that men are happier when they get to spend time outside of work, with their families, yes but actually also just engaged in household tasks.

The advent of the “fourth industrial revolution” brings with it the potential for shifts in the way we live and work that are just as dramatic as those wrought by industrialisation, and it’s easy to imagine the dark side of these changes. Growing isolation and social breakdown as we increasingly retreat away from each other and into our screens where our algorithmic overlords continue to get fat off the proceeds of feeding us the very worst of who we are. Growing inequality as yet more of the world’s riches flow to the top 0.1% instead of trickling down to the rest of us as promised. Growing unemployment as human workers are increasingly replaced by AI — after all, what’s the business case for using humans if an AI will do?

To return briefly to the UK government consultation on AI and copyright, what’s the economic case for protecting creatives from being swallowed up by the tech industry? You might protest that you don’t want to watch, read or listen to AI-driven films, books or music, no matter how impossible it becomes to tell them apart from those that came from a human mind. You might insist that there is something intangible about the fact that a human created this that you value outside of any economic argument. But in a world in which the only arguments that matter are business case arguments, will you be able to make yourself heard?

So, what if we do things differently this time? What if we use the growth of AI and digitalisation to instead help to reverse some of the changes of industrialisation, to reverse the strict separation of the “household” from the “market”? What if we use it to enable us (by, say, enabling hybrid and flexible working and automating low-value time-costly busywork) to reunite productive and reproductive work to the benefit of us all? Even better, why don’t we create a system that privileges humans in all our messy and un-economically viable humanity?

Such a system would not only recognise that humans need feeding, clothing, educating, socialising, caring and resting, but that humans deserve such things whether or not providing them produces a profit. Such a system would recognise that reproductive work, whatever its contribution to the economy, is valuable to humans. And that that should be enough.

As an added bonus for all the pro-natalists out there, in such a system we wouldn’t be making a business case for babies, not only because the case is so self-evidently inhuman, but because it simply wouldn’t be necessary. The evidence is very clear on this: most people are not having the number of children they want. They are having the number of children they feel able to bring into a world that has privileged The Economy™ over the business of being human. They are having the number of children that is compatible with an ideology that tells us that only market-work has any real value.

We shouldn’t be in position where we’re making an economic argument for more babies. Whether or not one exists, we shouldn’t have to make a business case for our humanity. It should be a basic non-negotiable. Call me a naive idealist all you like, but I’m with Fine on this: “the economy exists for us, for our well-being, not the other way around.” So maybe we should start acting like it?

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One more thing. Whenever I give a talk, about the data gap, about inequality, about women’s rights, inevitably someone asks the question: what can men do? I would hope the preceding paragraphs not only give something of an idea, but also make the case that this isn’t simply about helping women, it’s about centering humans in our economic worldview.

But in a world where women’s rights are not simply stagnating, but in too many countries actually regressing, there is something else that men can do. If our governments really and truly do come for our freedoms, if they continue to roll back our reproductive rights and move on to our economic, legal and human rights, you can stand up with us, you can speak up for us, and you can refuse to be complicit. You can refuse to listen to the propaganda that whispers that we are your enemy and instead remember that we are your sisters, we are your daughters, we are your lovers, we are your mothers, we are your friends.

In Caliban and the Witch, Federici describes the “intense process of social degradation” that preceded and accompanied the witch-hunts. “From the pulpit or the written page, humanists, Protestant reformers, counter-reformation Catholics, all cooperated in the vilification of women, constantly and obsessively,” she writes.

Just as today, by repressing women, the ruling classes more effectively repressed the entire proletariat. They instigated men who had been expropriated, pauperized, and criminalized to blame their personal misfortunes on the castrating witch, and to view the power that women had won against the authorities as a power women would use against them.

Federici (2021), p.208

It is hard not to see parallels in the rhetoric of certain politicians and thinkers today, who consistently blame men’s declining social and economic power on feminism as opposed to an economic ideology that isn’t working for anyone other than the super-rich.

Back in the 16th century, this policy of divide and rule worked. Male workers turned against the women in their trades, mounting a series of often intensely misogynistic campaigns to exclude women from their workplaces. “Women tried to resist this onslaught, but - faced with the intimidating tactics male workers used against them – failed.”

Indeed, there is evidence that the wave of misogyny that by the late 15th century was mounting in the European cities – reflected in the male obsession with the ‘battle for the breeches’ and with the character of the disobedient wife, pictured in the popular literature in the act of beating her husband or riding on his back – emanated also from this (self-defeating) attempt to drive women from the workplace and from the market.

Federici (2021) p.108

Little surprise, says Federici, that by the time the situation had deteriorated to the point of women being murdered by the state, there is scant evidence of men intervening on their behalf. Although some individual sons, husbands, and fathers did attempt to save their female relatives from being burned alive, there is no record of any other male organisations opposing the persecution.

We know, instead, that some men made a business of denouncing women, appointing themselves as ‘witch finders,’ travelling from village to village threatening to expose women unless they paid up. Other men took advantage of the climate of suspicion surrounding women to free themselves from unwanted wives and lovers, or to blunt the revenge of women they had raped or seduced.”

Federici (2021) p.208

There is, however, one group of men who did things differently. Federici tells the story of a group of Basque fishermen who were away at sea “engaged in annual cod season” while “French Inquisitor Pierre Lancre was conducting mass trials that led to the burning of perhaps as many as six hundred women.” But when men of one of the largest fleets “heard rumors of their wives, mothers, and daughters [being] stripped, stabbed, and many already executed, the 1609 cod campaign was ended two months early. The fishermen returned, clubs in hands, and liberated a convoy of witches being taken to the burning place.”

“This one popular resistance,” says Federici, “was all it took to stop the trials.”

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If after all that you are hungry for MORE feminist analysis about combining productive and reproductive work, and additionally you like your feminist analysis with a side order of dogs — and who doesn’t — may I submit for your consideration: NIGHTBITCH, which I just watched and thoroughly enjoyed (the fact that it was less horror-y than I imagined was a bonus for me, but YMMV — hyperlinking that for my mum 🥰). Ignore the low rotten tomatoes score, those reviews were clearly written by cats.

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Poppy pic of the week

Because I think we could all do with one of those, couldn’t we? So here she is sniffing around in the mugs that were made in her honour by a very lovely friend of ours 🥰 — she (the friend I mean, not Poppy) has a substack which you can check out here

That’s it! Until next time, my dear GFPs….xoxoxo