Feminist Nancy Fraser: Feminism Furthered Female Exploitation -- [Updated] Factory Women Paid $1/Hour to Make $70 Feminist T-Shirts

Liberated!

Liberated II, by Making $70 "What A Feminist Looks Like" T-Shirts for $1 per hour

Here and here, Professor Nancy Fraser -- a leading uncrypto-Marxist feminist theoretician of the New School in N.Y. -- argues that contemporary radical feminists have been dupes for the anti-national, anti-family economies that have emerged with globalization and the rise of multinational corporations. 

According to Fraser, feminism did the work of justifying the destruction of the family order in the name of liberation of women, but it was really serving the agenda of power-hungry states and business interests. This is why the purportedly patriarchal legislators, courts and businesses "fell" so easily to the supposedly downtrodden feminist masses; pushing women into the workforce served the interests of government and business. Shockingly, feminists didn't win the day because of a massive moral conversion of evil patriarchs nor did the feminists' protests force these change. 

The feminist revolution imposed on Western societies, celebrated by the media and academy, simply served the interests of the powerful. Feminists thought that their rebellion against God's order would provide them with freedom, instead, according to Fraser, feminism provided "the justification for new forms of inequality and exploitation" of women, men and children. Rebelling against the familial bounds set by God, they succeeded only in setting the chains of the modern world more tightly around everyone's necks.

According to Fraser, feminists successfully attacked:

 the ideal of a male breadwinner-female homemaker family [but] Feminist criticism of that ideal now serves to legitimate [a] form of capitalism [that] relies heavily on women's waged labour, especially low-waged work in service and manufacturing, performed not only by young single women but also by married women and women with children; not by only racialised [sic] women, but by women of virtually all nationalities and ethnicities. As women have poured into labour markets around the globe, state-organised capitalism's ideal of the family wage is being replaced by the newer, more modern norm – apparently sanctioned by feminism – of the two-earner family. Never mind that the reality that underlies the new ideal is depressed wage levels, decreased job security, declining living standards, a steep rise in the number of hours worked for wages per household, exacerbation of the double shift – now often a triple or quadruple shift – and a rise in poverty, increasingly concentrated in female-headed households. Neoliberalism turns a sow's ear into a silk purse by elaborating a narrative of female empowerment. Invoking the feminist critique of the family wage to justify exploitation, it harnesses the dream of women's emancipation to the engine of capital accumulation.

In other words, feminists didn't win a fight for liberation. They became useful idiots -- to borrow from Fraser's Marxist jargon -- in the modern state's battle to destroy the solidarity of the family and to convert every member as soon as possible into a member of the atomized, lumpenproletariat workforce. Feminism is a covering ideology used by the economic and political elites to gain what they wanted, a larger workforce and a less cohesive civil society. With their false claim that the family was oppressive and that freedom meant becoming a wage drudge in the contemporary economic labor machine, feminists have not liberated women but have destroyed the central seminal institution of solidarity in all human societies. Alongside other radical egalitarians like the communists, the radical feminists desire to destroy God-ordered social hierarchies did not bring liberation but oppression. Fraser does not even mention the millions of babies killed to accomplish feminist "liberation" in the abortion mills of the world because she cares more about economic inequalities than dead babies and the violation of women's bodies inherent in abortion.

Like all revolutionaries in the face of their failures, Fraser's response is not to repent. She thinks that even more radical social changes are required. The failure of the revolution proves only that a greater and more egalitarian feminist revolution is required.

[Update] Nice story here on the utter hypocrisy of posing feminist radicals who destroy traditional familial communities and replace them with sweat-shop wage laborers.