Feminism in the United States today is in the midst of dynamic change. The 2016 election spurred the organization of the massive Women’s Marches of the past two years and motivated hundreds of women to run for office (and countless more to volunteer for their campaigns), resulting in 2018 having the highest number of women elected to the U.S. Congress ever. The #metoo movement has generated employee walkouts at Google, led state legislatures to reform sexual harassment procedures, and shaped the recent Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh. “Intersectionality,” “rape culture,” and “toxic masculinity”—terms once rarely used outside of feminist academic circles—are now commonplace in mainstream discourse. And to complicate matters further, a new tweet, executive order, or court decision can suddenly make the events of yesterday seem as if they happened several months ago. This is a challenging political environment in which to write an academic book on contemporary feminism: The languid pace of academic publishing is simply no match for the recent acceleration of political time.
Both of these books show signs of intellectual jet lag, as if they have arrived in a time zone to which they have not yet had the chance to adjust. Catherine Rottenberg’s The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism is the book that feminists would have needed in order to survive Hillary Clinton’s presidency. It began life as a series of timely articles analyzing texts like Anne-Marie Slaughter’s 2012 article in The Atlantic, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” and Sheryl Sandberg’s 2013 Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. On Rottenberg’s reading, Slaughter’s essay inaugurates “a profound if subtle cultural shift” in feminist discourse (p. 23): rather than taking justice, equality, or freedom as the ultimate goal of feminist politics, the essay focuses on women achieving happiness, particularly through a happy work-family balance. (This is, I believe, a reductive reading of Slaughter’s essay; Rottenberg is more charitable in Chapter 5 in her reading of Slaughter’s 2015 book extending the themes of her earlier essay, Unfinished Business: Women, Men, Work, Family.) Happiness—that is, the happiness of individual women who balance career and motherhood simultaneously—supplants the more political goals of earlier feminisms and becomes the apolitical core of what Rottenberg terms neoliberal feminism.
This neoliberal feminism finds its purest expression in two recent popular advice books: Ivanka Trump’s Women Who Work (2017) and Megyn Kelly’s Settle for More (2016), which Rottenberg analyzes in Chapter 5. Both authors urge women to “work hard, choose to improve your life, and maintain a positive attitude” (p. 141). This orientation to work is in part what makes this variant of feminism neoliberal, for Rottenberg. She takes her understanding of neoliberalism primarily from Wendy Brown, who understands it as the colonization of all spheres of life by a market rationality. Sandberg’s injunction to lean in to one’s career is thus a neoliberal incitement to women to think of themselves as human capital, and to make wise investments in their own earning potential. Yet this is a kind of feminism inasmuch as it envisions an ideal of the liberated woman: free to pursue career and motherhood, instead of forced to choose between them. Rottenberg is at her best when she explores the peculiar features of neoliberal feminism in the central chapters of the book, and particularly its contradictory relationship to time: Women are supposed to invest in their future (Chapter 3), while seeking happiness in the present moment (Chapter 4). Both instructions, she notes, lead to the same, unhappy result: Women are directed to focus on their individual lives, which deflects their attention away from organizing politically to address structural injustices.
Carol Gilligan and David Richards’s Darkness Now Visible reveals, however, that the turn from politics to individual lives is not unique to neoliberal feminism; it has its analogue as well in the authors’ turn to psychology as the source of patriarchy. Gilligan and Richards claim that humans all have the capacity for empathy, but patriarchy stunts our psychological development of this capacity. As children learn patriarchal gender roles, they experience trauma: Boys must betray their own feelings to become men; girls must silence their authentic voices to become women (Chapter 2). These gendered traumas in turn produce a patriarchal psychology: Children learn “to split reason (masculine) from emotion (feminine) and to abstract mind and self (masculine) from bodies and relationships (feminine)” (p. 9). While they reference psychological research conducted by Gilligan and others to support these empirical claims, in the book this is presented as if it were the uncontested truth of human psychology. Patriarchy (a term they do not define clearly, and use with no historical or cultural nuance) causes psychological trauma in children, which reproduces patriarchal values at the level of individual psychology. The dark result is that “neither men nor women can resist patriarchy, but rather act out its terms” (p. 64).
This account of psychological trauma is the authors’ response to their shock at Donald Trump’s election. How was it possible that a blatantly misogynist politician could be elected? Because unless we treat our childhood trauma, we are all primed for patriarchy, which somehow means that we are primed to “become captive to the voice of false authority” (p. 9). Yet, they complain, while many commentators are willing to talk about “totalitarianism and fascism,” “we are struck by the reluctance to talk about gender” (p. 15). The authors claim, that is, that during the 2016 campaign and since Trump’s election, there has been no significant discussion of “Trump’s worldview”: that “gender is the lens through which everything is perceived” (p. 115). Given the breadth of smart, feminist analysis throughout 2016 and since about Trump’s rhetoric, misogyny, and machismo, this is a rather astounding claim (see Jill Filipovic’s frequent columns in the New York Times; Margot Talbot’s “2016’s Manifest Misogyny,” in the October 24, 2016, issue of the New Yorker; and Emily Crockett’s “Why Misogyny Won,” from November 15, 2016, in Vox for examples of mainstream gendered analysis).
I take this to be a reflection of how deeply disoriented Gilligan and Richards feel in the Trump era. The book gives the impression that they are having trouble letting go of the feminist future they had thought was inevitable: For example, they repeatedly invoke a fantastic, idealized Barack Obama, lauding his feminist “manhood not bound by the gender binary and hierarchy” (p. 115) and his marriage to “Michelle, a strong and outspoken and truly liberated woman” (p. 122).
The book performs Gilligan and Richards’s profound sense of disorientation: It moves quickly from readings of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Virginia Woolf to discussions of antiwar protests in the 1960s and student projects from their cotaught New York University Law School seminar in 2016. The narrative thread connecting the disparate chapters is that patriarchy traumatizes us, and that the only way to counter this is with feminism (which here means something like reworking gender roles as the Obamas are supposed to have done). This is all very interesting, yet readers drawn by the book’s subtitle to look for an account of current feminist resistance or a blueprint for future resistance will be disappointed. Darkness Now Visible aims more to diagnose the pathology of patriarchal thinking than to offer a solution to it.
Rottenberg also seems disoriented by Trump. She asserts throughout her book that neoliberal feminism is “on the rise” (p. 83), but her main evidence to support this is that Megyn Kelly’s and Ivanka Trump’s books have sold well. It is hard to reconcile the resurgence of mass feminist mobilization in the United States (in the streets, at the polls, online) with the idea that a neoliberal feminism that occludes structural injustice, focuses women on their individual careers and happiness, and deflects attention from politics is in the ascendancy right now. Rottenberg attempts to get around this in her conclusion by suggesting that the upsurge in feminist political activism and the rise of neoliberal feminism are concurrent, but separate, trends (pp. 171–74). Yet that seems to sidestep the problem too easily. How is it possible that the white, elite women who were interpellated by Sheryl Sandberg’s injunction to “lean in” to their careers are now the affluent, college-educated white women whose votes and organizing flipped more than 30 House districts in the recent midterm elections? If neoliberal feminism primed women to focus on their own individual happiness, how is it that a viral hashtag (#metoo) could make visible the structural sexual abuse of women in the workplace? Where Gilligan and Richards are perhaps a bit too preoccupied with asking themselves how they missed the political shift in 2016, Rottenberg is surprisingly uncurious about her own blind spots. Instead, she seems to stubbornly insist that not that much has changed, really: Neoliberal feminism continues to rise.
Had The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism appeared in early 2016, it would have seemed timely (as Rottenberg’s earlier articles were); but in late 2018, it seems instead to have missed its mark. Ivanka Trump’s individualized, apolitical feminism is far from the most important concern that feminists do—or should—have today; rather, it should be her father’s white nationalism and authoritarianism (and here, Gilligan and Richards are closer to diagnosing the primary political problem). We should be concerned about having a president with little respect for checks and balances, for an independent media, and for the rights and liberties of women and minorities. Trump’s rhetoric and policies have politicized many women and many feminists who perhaps thought that they did not need to fight any longer, or who were perhaps under the spell of a Sandbergian neoliberal feminism. They are leaning in—to politics and collective action. Perhaps, like Gilligan and Richards, they needed the traumatic shock of a President Trump to wake them from their complacency.
