Nancy Fraser on Feminism and Capitalism - and her Critics' Telling Response

Legendary disenchanted feminist scholar Nancy Fraser of New School University in Manhattan has a book in the stores and has puffed it with a couple of articles claiming that feminism has become the "handmaiden of capitalism". Here's one in The Guardian

Feminism and Neoliberalism

And an interview in the New York Times

Leaning-in

Fraser claims "My feminism emerged from the New Left and is still colored by the thought of that time. For me, feminism is not simply a matter of getting a smattering of individual women into positions of power and privilege within existing social hierarchies. It is rather about overcoming those hierarchies. This requires challenging the structural sources of gender domination in capitalist society — above all, the institutionalized separation of two supposedly distinct kinds of activity: on the one hand, so-called “productive” labor, historically associated with men and remunerated by wages; on the other hand, “caring” activities, often historically unpaid and still performed mainly by women. In my view, this gendered, hierarchical division between “production” and “reproduction” is a defining structure of capitalist society and a deep source of the gender asymmetries hard-wired in it. There can be no “emancipation of women” so long as this structure remains intact..... the mainstream feminism of our time has adopted an approach that cannot achieve justice even for women, let alone for anyone else. The trouble is, this feminism is focused on encouraging educated middle-class women to “lean in” and “crack the glass ceiling” – in other words, to climb the corporate ladder. By definition, then, its beneficiaries can only be women of the professional-managerial class. And absent structural changes in capitalist society, those women can only benefit by leaning on others — by offloading their own care work and housework onto low-waged, precarious workers, typically racialized and/or immigrant women. So this is not, and cannot be, a feminism for all women!"

But London-based Brenna Bhandar and Denise Ferreira da Silva counter that Fraser "reveals the innate and repetitive myopia of White feminism to take account, to converse and think along with Black and Third World Feminists." They find it "tiring when White feminists speak of second-​wave feminism as if it were the only “feminism” and use the pronoun “we” when lamenting the failures of their struggles" and complain that "the persistent claim to universalism, which is the core of this White feminism, renders the experiences, thoughts and work of Black and Third World feminists invisible, over and over again."

White Feminist Fatigue