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Why do feminists like witches? Why has witch hunting—meaning, in a figurative sense, attacks on women’s autonomy and freedom—repeated itself over and over again throughout history?

Capitalism needs obedient women, argues Italian feminist Silvia Federici in her seminal book Caliban and the Witch. It needs women who bear children and do as much unpaid labor as possible—work that no one recognizes as work because it does not directly lead to anything that can be sold, yet without it we cannot exist. It is work that women do “out of love”—taking care of the family and the household, raising children.

According to Federici, capitalism, a system that has lasted for several hundred years, could only have come into being because at the dawn of the modern era, in the 15th–17th centuries, there was a series of unprecedented attacks on European and American women. These women were the ones who were leading the uprising against the seizure of communal land, and they were also the ones who were regulating their fertility at a time when the birth rate was falling sharply.

Written by one of the most influential contemporary feminist thinkers, this book pays tribute to witches as women who did not submit, who were poor and rebellious, who no longer bore children, or who helped younger women to have abortions. The witch hunt, in which many of the elites of the time participated, was later swept aside as obscurantism and backwardness to be forgotten. But witches still haunt us today, whether in popular culture or politics. Whenever women achieve greater rights or want control over their own bodies, the cycle of persecution begins again.