[1] As part of the radical autonomist feminist Marxist tradition,[2] the book offers a critical alternative to Marx's theory of primitive accumulation.

[1] Federici argues that the witch hunts served to restructure family relations and the role of women in order to satisfy society's needs during the rise of capitalism.

[3] In the book's introduction, Federici states that "there has been the desire to rethink the development of capitalism from a feminist viewpoint, while at the same time, avoiding the limits of a "women's history" separated from that of the male part of the working class.

Federici notes that the persecution of witches originated as a preoccupation of the upper classes—and the information that intellectuals, clergy, and magistrates created was disseminated to the common people by the pamphlets they published, the art they commissioned, and the laws and religious canon they wrote.

[8] Federici states that "If we consider the historical context in which the witch hunt occurred, the gender and class of the accused, and the effects of persection", then the inevitable conclusion is that it was an attack (premeditated or not) on "women's resistance to the spread of capitalist relations and the power that women had gained by virtue of their sexuality, their control over reproduction, and their ability to heal" [9] The witches persecuted were typically poor women older than 40, often beggars; in Ireland and the Scottish Western Highlands, where collective land-tenure and kinship ties provided a social safety net unknown to laborers on enclosed lands, there is no record of witch-hunts.