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Feminism intercepted
How the Bourgeoisie Seized Women’s Struggle
LAURA CESARETTI

Excerpts:

"Liberal feminism belongs to the particular and individualistic kind of society in which we are living nowadays, the sort of vision pushed in the mid-twentieth century by the likes of Ayn Rand, who considered being selfish and self-reliant a rock that cannot be broken, all couched within a philosophical system of rational self-interest which she called Objectivism. Rand’s theories were themselves a product of the US post-Second World War economic boom. Documentary filmmaker Yasha Levine of the Nefarious Russians describes this ethos as a psyop fostered by Americans through films, books, and art. Consequentially, Rand’s notions of rational self-interest had a boom in the Reagan and Thatcher years and have expanded across American culture to include its “colonies” of which Italy is just one of many.

Media propaganda rejected full-time motherhood just as it labelled breastfeeding as a sign of backwardness and pushed women to work. Consumerism of any kind has become the symbol of breaking from a past of poverty and advancing towards a modern future of ostensible liberation. The idea of humans as individuals, not communities, began to surface, along with the idea of self-realisation and the right to pursue personal freedom ahead of anything else. It is there that liberal feminism rose, becoming mainstream amid America’s suburban culture and ultimately reaching Italy shortly there after.

Rather than a struggle against the oppression of patriarchy, feminism focused on the isolation of the modern nuclear family, which American feminist Betty Friedan famously defined as a “comfortable concentration camp” that oppressed women. Coincidentally, such feminist musings emanated mainly from the new bourgeoisie. What was unbearable, then, was not the overwhelming amount of housework and childcare; instead, it was the boredom and loneliness that occurred in women’s spare time, which they learnt to cure with alcohol, sexual adventures, or an obsessive interest in their children.

From this milieu comes the idea that women’s empowerment means entering the business world exactly like men. These feminists believed that entering the masculine world of competitive achievement would cure the “problem that has no name,” intercepting the struggle of working-class women together with those who come from a different cultural environment or those who struggle with racial violence. While Western feminists argue about the right to be or not to be a mother, the global women’s health movement emerging in Latin America, Africa and Asia, has pointed out that due to centuries of slavery and colonialism, for non-white women, reproductive injustice has also involved the forced denial of motherhood. Under slavery, black women were forced to nurse the children of white mothers instead of their own for instance.

At the time, there were only a few critical voices, such as that of Pier Paolo Pasolini who warned that the quest for emancipation is leading Italians from a nuclear family to a family of consumers. From the moment women rightfully progress toward emancipation, the whole society regresses because it is consumeristic society that takes up her educational role. Pasolini, like Rafanelli, addresses the bourgeoisie as the class that shapes modern society. As holders of power, the elite class has no interest in educating a child; instead, their aim has only been to educate the children in societal adaptions where children are future labourers and consumers. In this way, liberation and emancipation are concepts that depend entirely upon the transformation of the individual to consumer, with the imperative that the individual must maintain and reinforce the status quo.