Capitalist economic change, not feminism, drove women into the workforce

Evidence

While feminist supporters like to think that feminism has been the motivating force behind changes in woman’s role, in actuality changes in the American capitalist economy have had the greatest impact on the status of women. More women than ever before are in America’s work force not because of feminism but because families can no longer rely on the income of the father. Feminism has been used as a psychological tool to make women think that work they might otherwise see as boring, tedious, and time consuming is liberating. For whether feminism exists or not, women must work. — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 303

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to socialist-feminist and Marxist-feminist debates about capitalism as the primary engine of women’s oppression. — connects to: Black women’s workforce participation did not produce feminist consciousness — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 238; Rising black middle-class incomes fostered women’s pursuit of idealized femininity — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 514; Enslaved women’s unpaid labor did not produce feminist consciousness but resentment at denied womanhood — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 161 (+8 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 303

Related

• Black women’s workforce participation did not produce feminist consciousness (similarity 0.90)
• The women’s movement equated liberation with capitalist economic success (similarity 0.85)
• Rising black middle-class incomes fostered women’s pursuit of idealized femininity (similarity 0.85)
• Slavery forced black women into work independence, not voluntary choice (similarity 0.85)
• Enslaved women’s unpaid labor did not produce feminist consciousness but resentment at denied womanhood (similarity 0.85)
• Major political upheavals, not gradual progress, reshaped women’s condition. (similarity 0.85)
• Pre-revolutionary working-class women had more economic autonomy than bourgeois women. (similarity 0.84)
• Feminist ideals were resignified to serve neoliberal market individualism (similarity 0.83)
• Economic change alone cannot produce the new woman (similarity 0.82)
• Industrialization converted women from producers to consumers and opened teaching to them (similarity 0.82)
• Awareness of sexist discrimination does not equal eliminating sexist oppression (similarity 0.81)
• Black women’s employment is framed as harming black men, unlike white women’s (similarity 0.81)
• White middle-class women are less oppressed than poor or black women (similarity 0.80)
• The mainstream women’s movement was deliberately structured around white middle-class interests. (similarity 0.80)
• Black women have always been free from femininity’s protective constraints. (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Enslaved women’s unpaid labor did not produce feminist consciousness but resentment at denied womanhood #complicates (0.60) — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 161
• Rising black middle-class incomes fostered women’s pursuit of idealized femininity #complicates (0.50) — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 514