Liberation For the 99%
echoes Frazer’s claim that Foucalt’s account of modern power is problematic for
feminists and emphasizes that it reduces human beings to “docile bodies” instead of
agents capable of resisting power. 19
Next, I provide my account of how liberal feminist reforms aimed at
eradicating institutionalized discrimination under the capitalist system are
ineffective because they lack intersectionality both in theory and practice. The only
way for proponents of capitalism to overcome my objection that institutionalized
discrimination is an inherent characteristic of capitalism and cannot be eradicated
from the democratic process is by proving that discrimination occurs incidentally to
capitalism and that there is a way to eradicate it from society without revolution.
Liberal feminist Betty Friedan is a perfect example of how the plight of upper-class
white women is misrepresented as being synonymous with the experiences and
struggles experienced by all women. In The Feminist Mystique , Friedan’s entire
argument revolves around further exploring the role of the nuclear family in
America and its associated “gender norms” by coining the term “feminist mystique , ”
which sees motherhood and childbirth as women’s ultimate achievement in life.
Strangely, Friedan is considered the “matriarch” of second-wave feminism even
though she excluded lesbians, working-class women, and women of color from her
account of the “widespread unhappiness of women in the 1950s and 1960s.” Her
work, The Feminist Mystique, itself reflects these sentiments, and a number of her
post-cursors, such as Stephanie Coontz and bell hooks, accused Friedan of being a
“suffrage - era feminist” who is fighting against an overexaggerated perception of a
“superhero housewife , ” and , ultimately, winds up overlooking the struggles that
African American women, working class women, and lesbians faced by claiming
that in order to remedy the “crisis” of housewives, women simply have to restore
19 Nancy Hartsock, ” Postmodernism and Political Change: Issues for Feminist Theory," Cultural Critique (14): 15 – 33. doi:10.2307/1354291
Volume VI (2023)
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