Empowerment as Surrender: How Women Lost the Struggle for Emancipation as They Won Equality and Inclusion

This analysis addresses the way second-wave feminism, through its incontestable achievements in terms of both political mobilization and intellectual critique, failed to address the larger structural sources of the injustice the movement fought, thereby falling short of the lasting emancipation it aspired to achieve. This is a story of “failure by success.” I also chart a path for recasting the feminist agenda from the point of view of a broader critique of contemporary capitalism, in which instances of gender injustice are symptomatic of broader forms of domination to which men and women are equally subjected.