Feminist ideals were resignified to serve neoliberal market individualism

Evidence

Initially, class privilege was not discussed by white women in the women’s movement. They wanted to project an image of themselves as victims and that could not be done by drawing attention to their class. In fact, the contemporary women’s movement was extremely class bound. As a group, white participants did not denounce capitalism. They chose to define liberation using the terms of white capitalist patriarchy, equating liberation with gaining economic status and money power. Like all good capitalists, they proclaimed work as the key to liberation. — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 428 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

As they participated in the women’s movement they found, in their dialogues with white women in women’s groups, in women’s studies classes, at conferences, that their trust was betrayed. They found that white women had appropriated feminism to advance their own cause, i.e., their desire to enter the mainstream of American capitalism. They were told that white women were in the majority and that they had the power to decide which issues would be considered “feminist” issues. — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 442 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim
• XREF: connects to: Some feminists appropriated the movement to serve individual careers rather than collective change — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 551; The women’s movement equated liberation with capitalist economic success — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 428; In consumerist Australia everything including women becomes a commodity (+3 more)

Related

• The women’s movement equated liberation with capitalist economic success (similarity 0.92)
• Some feminists appropriated the movement to serve individual careers rather than collective change (similarity 0.88)
• White women appropriated feminism to gain entry into American capitalism. (similarity 0.86)
• The mainstream women’s movement was deliberately structured around white middle-class interests. (similarity 0.84)
• Capitalist economic change, not feminism, drove women into the workforce (similarity 0.83)
• White feminists appropriated slave suffering to advance their own cause. (similarity 0.83)
• Black women rejected the movement’s execution, not feminism’s ideology. (similarity 0.83)
• Black women needed a separate feminist intellectual tradition (similarity 0.82)
• Women’s liberation depends on liberating all oppressed strata simultaneously (similarity 0.82)
• Feminism never operated as an autonomous movement but as a political instrument (similarity 0.82)
• White feminists appropriated feminism while hooks reclaims it for all people (similarity 0.81)
• Feminist political visions risk destroying the life forms they claim to liberate. (similarity 0.81)
• White men set the terms of women’s liberation and exploit inter-group competition (similarity 0.81)
• A racist and classist feminism merely perpetuates women’s bondage to patriarchy. (similarity 0.81)
• Worker and bourgeois women pursued fundamentally different routes to liberation (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• The women’s movement equated liberation with capitalist economic success #corroborates (0.85) — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 428
• White women appropriated feminism to gain entry into American capitalism. #corroborates (0.80) — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 442
• In consumerist Australia everything including women becomes a commodity #expands (0.55)