Wellness obsession arose from failed radical politics, not feminist backlash

Evidence

In Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer, Barbara Ehrenreich, who died in September 2022, tracked the ways that the quest for health and wellness became obsessive pursuits in the Reagan and Thatcher era and has only grown in influence since. She argued that this turn was a reaction not to feminism’s successes, but rather to the failures of revolutionary movements, when the high hopes of the 1960s and ’70s slammed into the brick wall of ’80s neoliberalism. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 574

Categorization

• XREF: Contrasts sharply with Wolf’s Beauty Myth thesis (patriarchy’s tax on feminism) which Klein frames in the preceding paragraph — a genuine scholarly disagreement worth tracking.
• DEFINE: Establishes a causal origin story for wellness culture that Klein will build her diagonalism argument on.