For several decades, she has worked with a variety of international feminist organizations, such asWomen in Nigeria (WIN) and the Latin American-basedNi una menos, to combatgender-based violence.[6] In the 2010s, she organized a project with feminist collectives inSpain to reconstruct the history of women persecuted as witches in early modernEurope, and to raise awareness about what she believes are contemporary witch-hunts still taking place around the world.[7]
In 1972, withMariarosa Dalla Costa andSelma James, Federici co-founded the International Feminist Collective, the organization that launched the campaign forWages for Housework. In 1973, she helped start "Wages for Housework" groups in the U.S. In 1975, she published the pamphletWages Against Housework, the document most associated with the Wages for Housework movement.[13]
In 1995, during the campaign to free African-American journalistMumia Abu-Jamal fromdeath row, Federici helped launch the Anti-Death Penalty Project (ADPP) within the Radical Philosophy Association. Along with ADPP co-leadersGeorge Caffentzis and Everet Green, Federici encouraged the global academic community to agitate against thedeath penalty.[16]
Federici's best-known book,Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (2004), expands on the work ofLeopoldina Fortunati to investigate the reasons for thewitch hunts that occurred in theearly modern period,[21][22][23][24] but Federici puts greater emphasis on afeminist interpretation. In the book, she argues against the traditional understanding ofKarl Marx's concept ofprimitive accumulation, which is viewed as a necessary precursor forcapitalism. Instead, she posits that primitive accumulation is a fundamental characteristic of capitalism itself—that the economic system, in order to perpetuate itself, requires a constant infusion of expropriated capital. She connects this expropriation to women's unpaid labour, via reproduction and otherwise, which she frames as a historical precondition to the rise of a capitalist economy predicated upon wage labor. Related to this, she outlines the historical struggles forthe commons and forcommunalism.[25] Instead of seeing capitalism as a liberatory defeat offeudalism, Federici interprets the ascent of capitalism as a reactionary move to subvert the rising tide of communalism and to retain the basic social contract.
She situates the institutionalization ofrape andprostitution—as well as theheretic andwitch-hunt trials, burnings and torture—at the center of a systematic suppression of women and appropriation of their labor. This is tied into colonial expropriation and provides a framework for understanding the work of theInternational Monetary Fund,World Bank, and other proxy institutions as engaging in a renewed cycle of primitive accumulation, by which everything held in common—from water, to seeds, to our genetic code—becomes privatized in what amounts to a new round ofenclosures.[26]
Often described as a counterpoint toMarx's account of "primitive accumulation",Caliban reconstructs the history ofcapitalism, highlighting the continuity between the capitalist subjugation of women, thetransatlantic slave trade, and thecolonization of the Americas. The book has been described as "a retelling of the birth of capitalism that places women at the center of the story".[27]
Il Grande Calibano: Storia del corpo sociale ribelle nella prima fase del capitale (in Italian). Milan: Franco Angeli. 1984.OCLC20376620. Co-written withLeopoldina Fortunati.
"Il Femminismo e il Movimento contro la guerra USA".DeriveApprodi (in Italian). No. 24. 2004.
(1995) (ed.)Enduring Western Civilization: The Construction of the Concept of Western Civilization and Its "Others". Westport, Connecticut, and London: Praeger.
(2000) (ed.)A Thousand Flowers: Structural Adjustment and the Struggle for Education in Africa. Africa World Press. Co-edited with George Caffentzis and Ousseina Alidou.
(2000) (ed.)African Visions: Literary Images, Political Change, and Social Struggle in Contemporary Africa. Westport, Connecticut, and London: Praeger. Co-edited with Joseph McLaren and Cheryl Mwaria.
(2021) (ed.)Feminicide and Global Accumulation: Frontline Struggles to Resist the Violence of Patriarchy and Capitalism. Brooklyn, New York: Common Notions. Co-edited with Susana Draper and Liz Mason-Deese.
^Federici, Silvia; Markham-Cantor, Alice (1 May 2023)."How Social Turmoil Has Increased Witch Hunts throughout History".Scientific American.Every year more than 1,000 people around the world, including men and children, are tortured, expelled from their homes or killed after being charged with witchcraft—using magic, usually to cause harm. Far from declining with modernization, as some 20th-century scholars predicted, witch hunts are holding steady in some places and may be happening more often in others.
^Federici, Silvia (2021).Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Penguin Modern Classics. London: Penguin Book. p. x.ISBN978-0-241-53253-9.
^DuRand, Cliff."About RPA". Radical Philosophy Association. Retrieved31 July 2025. This web page includes "A RPA History" link to aWord document with details about the Anti-Death Penalty Project and Federici's involvement with it.
^Barbagallo, Camille; Beuret, Nicholas; Harvie, David, eds. (2019).Commoning with George Caffentzis and Silvia Federici. Pluto Press. pp. 152, 275.ISBN978-0745339412.
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