Emerging Trends in The Social and Behavioral Sciences

Feminists in Power

Item

Title

Feminists in Power

Author

Orloff, Ann

Schiff, Talia

Research Area

Class, Status and Power

Topic

Gender and Gender Inequality

Abstract

In contrast to the scholarship allied with first and second waves of feminism, feminist analysts today survey a changed landscape of gender across the United States and much of the world: formal exclusions and discrimination are outlawed, gender hierarchies have been undermined, and women are appearing among economic, political, and other elites to an unprecedented degree even as gender inequalities stubbornly persist across multiple arenas. A focal point of debate among analysts of sexuality, political economy, and culture is the meaning and implications of pursuing gender equality in a world that no longer neatly divides into subordinated women and powerful men, and in which the increasing number of women among the socially advantaged problematizes traditional notions of female victimization and male domination. In this essay, we first offer an overview of earlier approaches to gender equality, then turn to critiques of these approaches which insist on the need for a new starting point for considering gender equality and women's emancipation.

Related Essays

The Underrepresentation of Women in Elective Office (Political Science), Sarah F. Anzia

The Sexual Division of Labor (Anthropology), Rebecca Bliege Bird and Brian F. Codding

Stereotype Content (Sociology), Beatrice H. Capestany and Lasana T. Harris

Why So Few Women in Mathematically Intensive Fields? (Psychology), Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams

Gender Segregation in Higher Education (Sociology), Alexandra Hendley and Maria Charles

Gender, Religion, and State in the Middle East (Sociology), Mounira M. Charrad and Amina Zarrugh

Cognitive Processes Involved in Stereotyping (Psychology), Susan T. Fiske and Cydney H. Dupree

Controlling the Influence of Stereotypes on One's Thoughts (Psychology), Patrick S. Forscher and Patricia G. Devine

Changing Family Patterns (Sociology), Kathleen Gerson and Stacy Torres

Divorce (Sociology), Juho H{\addot}rk{\oddot}nen

Grandmothers and the Evolution of Human Sociality (Anthropology), Kristen Hawkes and James Coxworth

Exploring Opportunities in Cultural Diversity (Political Science), David D. Laitin and Sangick Jeon

Women Running for Office (Political Science), Jennifer L. Lawless

Gender Inequality in Educational Attainment (Sociology), Anne McDaniel and Claudia Buchmann

Gender and Women's Influence in Public Settings (Political Science), Tali Mendelberg et al.

Implicit Attitude Measures (Psychology), Gregory Mitchell and Philip E. Tetlock

Cognitive Bias Modification in Mental (Psychology), Meg M. Reuland et al.

Born This Way: Thinking Sociologically about Essentialism (Sociology), Kristen Schilt

Stereotype Threat (Psychology), Toni Schmader and William M. Hall

Gender and the Transition to Adulthood: A Diverse Pathways View (Sociology), Ingrid Schoon

Family Income Composition (Economics), Kristin E. Smith

Gender and Work (Sociology), Christine L. Williams and Megan Tobias Neely

Identifier

etrds0131

extracted text

Feminists in Power
ANN ORLOFF and TALIA SCHIFF1

Abstract
In contrast to the scholarship allied with first and second waves of feminism, feminist analysts today survey a changed landscape of gender across the United States
and much of the world: formal exclusions and discrimination are outlawed, gender hierarchies have been undermined, and women are appearing among economic,
political, and other elites to an unprecedented degree even as gender inequalities
stubbornly persist across multiple arenas. A focal point of debate among analysts
of sexuality, political economy, and culture is the meaning and implications of pursuing gender equality in a world that no longer neatly divides into subordinated
women and powerful men, and in which the increasing number of women among the
socially advantaged problematizes traditional notions of female victimization and
male domination. In this essay, we first offer an overview of earlier approaches to
gender equality, then turn to critiques of these approaches which insist on the need
for a new starting point for considering gender equality and women’s emancipation.

Feminists in the United States and across the world are today presented with
sharply contrasting developments. Formal exclusions of women and gender
discrimination are outlawed, gender hierarchies have been undermined,
and women are appearing among economic, political, and other elites to an
unprecedented degree even as gender inequalities stubbornly persist across
multiple arenas. Yet while the rightness of formal gender equality—that
is, equal treatment under the law—is largely taken for granted, if and how
states or other institutions should press for greater equalization of resources,
rights, and responsibilities is contested. Moreover, some of feminists’
own achievements seem to be simultaneously advancing and legitimizing
neoliberal politics and state projects focused on policing and punishing
that stand in the way of further movement toward gender equality and
that reflect, at least partially, unanticipated cooptation of feminist ideas into
political projects harnessed to the demands of contemporary capitalism and
patriarchal social conservatism.
1. We are equal coauthors; the names are in alphabetical order.
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

1

2

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

This new gendered landscape poses new questions for feminists. The
guarantee of formal gender equalities and the increasing numbers of women
in the advantaged sectors of society, which reflect the partial achievement
of feminist goals, have significant implications for how we think about
core feminist values such as gender equality, women’s emancipation,
and gender justice. What does it mean, for example, to talk about female
victimization—a key trope in the fight against endemic sexual violence or
coercive labor conditions—in a world that no longer neatly divides into
subordinated women and powerful men, and in which there is an increasing
number of women among the socially advantaged, who may nonetheless
face threats to bodily integrity? What are the implications of voicing feminist
values from within the precincts of power? And what should we make of the
fact that the successes of socially conservative and neoliberal intellectual and
political projects has resulted in part from the appropriation and reshaping
of ideas originally forwarded by feminists? In this essay, we contend that
taking into consideration the institutionalization of feminist ideas within
core sites of state power and the cooptation by, and actual alliances of some
feminists with, socially conservative and neoliberal projects2 —is critical for
assessing the opportunities and dangers confronting contemporary feminist
politics.
We first offer an overview of earlier approaches to gender equality, a term
whose meaning is deeply contested. Rather than providing a static definition,
we wish to reflect on the ways in which feminism’s own understandings of,
and approach to, gender equality have significantly changed since the second wave of feminism. We then turn to what we believe to be a new and
evolving debate among analysts of sexuality, political economy, and culture
on the implications of feminism’s new relation to institutions of state power
and law in the United States, especially those that feature increasing reliance
on policing and punishment, and to the neoliberal political projects of capital
and their intellectual advocates. In calling for a new starting point for considering gender equality and women’s emancipation, these critiques shed
light on the implications of pursuing a feminist politics today. We focus on
2. The term “neoliberalism” is invoked often, we think rather too easily, without considering its specific political manifestations. Stephanie Lee Mudge (2008) provides a historically grounded definition of
the term which distinguishes among three modes of neoliberalism: the intellectual, the bureaucratic, and
the political. As an intellectual project, neoliberalism was born within the institutions of welfare capitalism and is characterized by an emphasis on the free market as the source and arbiter of human freedoms
and a disdain for politics, bureaucracies, and the welfare state. In its bureaucratic face, neoliberalism is
expressed by state policy reforms that are guided by the assumption that the state is different from the
market and that encourage competition by rejecting state regulation and management, and desacralizing institutions (such as education and health care) that were previously protected from the forces of
the market. Finally, neoliberalism signifies a market-centric politics guided by the assumption that “one
should unleash market forces whenever possible and that the reach of political decision-making should
be limited.” Neoliberal political forces have sometimes allied with socially conservative, often religiously
inspired, groups, but we maintain that it is important to distinguish between them. See also Hall and
Lamont (2013).

Feminists in Power

3

the United States, where these critiques have been most prominent, but our
suggestions may have wider applicability.

THE OLD GENDER ORDER
Even after the political victories of the first-wave feminist movement in the
early twentieth century—women’s suffrage above all—the gender order of
the mid-twentieth century was characterized by explicitly gendered formal
institutions. Informal institutions, too, reflected and reinforced gender difference and inequality and masculine power. Many organizations advocating
women’s equality—a “second wave” of feminism—emerged in the 1970s in
the United States and across the West to contest these conditions, claiming
that women shared interests in eradicating this state of affairs, despite many
differences among them.
Scholars have examined the variety of feminist responses to this unsatisfactory set of arrangements, proposing typologies based on multiple
dimensions of difference (see, e.g., Echols, 1989). Then, as is the case today,
socialist or labor feminists tended to be most concerned with fundamentally
overhauling the political economy and shifting the gendered division of
labor by encouraging women to work for pay and men to participate in
care and domestic work, as well as by developing public services; radical
feminist approaches involving the law, sexuality, and violence involved
deterring and punishing male perpetrators of violence alongside critiquing
compulsory heterosexuality, the eroticization of violence, and the nuclear
family. Liberal feminists were focused on reforming capitalist and democratic institutions by eliminating discrimination and exclusions, bringing
women into the polity, the labor force, and, ultimately, the very heart of
power. These differences in emphasis remain among current thinkers. What
changed was the commonly held assumption that had tied divergent strands
of feminist thinking together: that all women, regardless of differences in
social location, faced certain kinds of political and social exclusions. Today’s
feminist critics are distinguished from earlier generations by the realization
that feminism is no longer a countercultural minority discourse, as some
feminist ideas have been installed into government and legal institutions,
and an increasing number of women and feminists occupy positions of
formal authority and power. In the following section, we provide an
overview of some of the changes characterizing today’s gendered landscape, the context for contemporary critiques of feminism. We then turn
to these new critiques and to the questions and challenges they pose for
feminists.

4

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

THE NEW GENDER ORDER AND ITS CRITICS
The play of advantage and disadvantage across gender and other forms of
power, difference, and inequality is clearly different from that in the era of
stable gendered hierarchies. Long-standing feminist support for women’s
claims to personhood, and most importantly to the recognition of women as
individual social beings has undoubtedly found some success. While great
strides have been made in eliminating formal discrimination, we are far from
a “50/50” world, whether we look at politics, wages, care work, sexual pleasure, or almost anything else. There are also stark inequalities among women
(and men) by class, race, ethnicity, citizenship status, and household structure in access to good employment and to quality care services.
Since World War II in the global North, manufacturing has declined as
service sector employment has risen, driven importantly by outsourcing
of the work formerly done by housewives to paid service workers, many
of whom migrate to take up this work, and contributing both to women’s
increasing employment levels, and to increasing income inequality.3 The
gendered division of labor of the “male breadwinner family,” with married
women doing full-time care or part-time work plus care, and men providing
most of the income and working full time, has been modified, not ended,
as—on average—women’s time in unpaid caregiving and domestic work
has declined while men’s take-up of care work within and across households
is far less than women’s take-up of paid work.
These “complex inequalities” among women and men have been a significant focus of work on the “intersectional” nature of inequality and power,
by scholars such as Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991), Leslie McCall (2001), and
others (see Cho, Crenshaw, & McCall, 2013 for an overview). According to
these scholars, mainstream feminism is at fault for concentrating on gender
to the exclusion of its co-constitution with other forms of inequality. Pointing to the specificities of contemporary inequalities, in which some women
have achieved economic success by taking advantage of the supply of less
well-paid women service workers (see, e.g., Boris & Parreñas, 2010; Parreñas,
2001; Roberts, 1995), they argue that sexual domination and masculine violence are crossed by class, racial, and educational inequalities. They call on
feminists committed to social justice to engage with the struggles of the most
marginalized people, as a true commitment to social justice would require
feminists to refrain from seeing the world solely in terms of female injury
and male subordination. Rather, feminists must acknowledge that there are
3. Women’s income inequalities have widened over the past few decades (McCall, 2001), and women’s
labor force participation levels vary substantially by education, with highly educated women participating at higher levels than their less-educated counterparts in most Western countries (see, e.g., Evertsson
et al., 2009).

Feminists in Power

5

multiple forms of inequality and domination and that we face widening gaps
between the situations of the advantaged and the disenfranchised.
These premises are indisputable. But they do not address specifically
political questions about feminist projects, in which particular groups make
specific claims, anticipating the agreement of others. In politics, exclusion
is inevitable. The only cure is not a demand that “all”—especially the
most marginalized—be included in every political campaign, but rather
an openness to contestation. This raises a new set of questions regarding
the specific opportunities and risks when feminists are in power. What, for
example, are the implications of the fact that more women are playing on
the field of “men’s politics,” accompanied by claims that women leaders
offer both descriptive and substantive representation for other women? And
what do the complex alliances forming between feminists, state institutions,
and the law imply for traditional understandings of gender equality and
emancipation?
We contend that widening inequalities among women form a critical part
of the backdrop against which a new generation of feminist analysts consider
the implications for feminism of the incorporation of feminists into elite positions of authority in the corporate sector, civil society, and politics, and the
incorporation of feminist ideas into legal, political, and economic discourses.
According to these contemporary analysts—we will call them “the critics
of feminism in power”—feminism’s appropriation by, and complicity with,
socially conservative movements and neoliberal political elites, threaten to
stand in the way of achieving gender equality. This set of critiques is the focus
of the next section.
THE CRITICS OF FEMINISTS IN POWER
Focused on feminists’ increasing access to power and changed relation
to states, a new generation of analysts point to significant shifts within
feminism with respect to political economy and sexuality. In terms of
political economy, feminism has, these critics allege, shifted away from a
redistributive model of justice—a model that was predominant on the left
and center-left since the late nineteenth century, centering on state remedies
for the inequities and oppression generated by capitalism and, in the case
of feminism, “capitalist patriarchy”—to one that emphasizes individual
“choice” and paid employment as the routes toward women’s emancipation.
This shift echoes changes in the political and intellectual landscapes for
“parties of movement” and left-liberal organizations as state-funded and
publicly provided services and benefits, and state regulation of the economy
have given way to market-based remedies for social problems. In the United
States, especially, neoliberal policy prescriptions for the deregulation of

6

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

the economy and the rolling back of programs of social security were
joined to the buildup of the state’s capacities for policing, punishment, and
imprisonment.
Critical works on feminist campaigns against sexual violence have been key
sources of new understandings of the consequences of feminists’ alliances
with power and deployment of the law as the tool to confront and disarm
patriarchal practices. They show how feminists concerned with sexual violence and domination have moved away from critiques of pervasive masculine power toward remedies centered on incarceration and punishment
for gender-based violence, seen primarily as perpetrated by outsiders rather
than intimates, and have started forming alliances with social conservatives
who want to strengthen state punishment of perpetrators. These alliances,
they contend, have problematic and even dangerous implications when carried out from within the precincts of power.
Analysts of feminist antiviolence efforts have pointed to the complex
interrelations between feminism, neoliberalism, and projects that encourage
incarceration, policing, and punishment. Richie (2012) argues that feminist antiviolence activists had a part—unintended—in creating harsher
punishment policies in the United States, in a context in which right-wing
forces had succeeded in disinvesting from poor urban communities and
shredding the safety net while building up the state’s incarcerating and
policing powers. Feminist demands for greater public and legal recognition
of the harm caused by sexual violence served as an inspiration for broader
campaigns for criminalization. This has had damaging effects on the most
vulnerable women, who may face imprisonment themselves or have few
resources when the men in their households are imprisoned, and worked
to enhance the transformation of the United States into a “prison nation.”
Bumiller (2008) notes that these campaigns worked to legitimize an agenda
premised on the notion that the maintenance of the social order depends
on the incarceration and punishment of, “violent perpetrators who preyed
on innocent victims,” and transformed the initial feminist sensibility that
any man can be a rapist into a campaign driven by fear of strangers.
Those strands of feminism which emphasized personal responsibility, the
demonization of the sex-predator, and the valorization of the private family
received precedence over those which did not adapt themselves to the
ascending neoliberal logic.
Feminist antitrafficking campaigns have also fueled neoliberal agendas.
Chapkis (2003) shows how the focus on sex-trafficking legislation, which
assumes a distinction between “innocent victims” and “guilty migrants,”
works to legitimize enhanced border control and antiimmigration policies.
Brennan (2008) and Shih (2013) point to the ways in which the exclusive
focus on sex trafficking over all other forms of exploitive labor legitimizes

Feminists in Power

7

the incarceration of migrants and obscures coercive labor conditions. Rhacel
Parreñas (2001: see also Boris and Parreñas 2010) has argued that feminist
antitrafficking campaigns which seek the abolition of prostitution—thereby
depriving sex workers of their livelihood—hide the fact that the key issue
for sex workers and care workers alike, particularly those without the
legal protections afforded by citizenship, is coerced and unregulated labor
and not “sex slavery.” Here, switching the focus away from regulation of
exploitive labor relations dovetails with neoliberal agendas, which have
been relentlessly antiregulation.
Elizabeth Bernstein (2007, 2010, 2012) focuses on the problematic alliances
formed between neoliberal elites and feminist antitrafficking campaigns.
She argues that the promotion of a neoliberal law and order agenda is
not an unintended consequence of feminist campaigns but rather one that
some feminists deliberately pursued, while some corporate elites have
used antitrafficking campaigns to burnish their brands. Self-interested
and predominantly white middle class feminists situated the family as a
privatized sphere of safety to be protected by the criminal justice system.
Bernstein thus describes the alliance formed between neoliberalism and
feminism as a two-sided relationship rather than a one-sided appropriation;
neoliberalism supported versions of feminism which idealized the private
family, reinforced notions of personal responsibility and condemned public
disorder, just as feminists purposefully joined forces with neoliberal projects
because it served their self-interests.
Analyses of gendered welfare institutions have also contributed to new
understandings of the complex alliances forming between neoliberal political agendas and the interests of women. In the United States, many have
criticized the approach taken by self-described feminists to the consequential
1996 law that “reformed” US social assistance, passed by a Republican-led
Congress and accepted by President Bill Clinton and most Democrats; the
law was considered by many to represent the apogee of neoliberal policy
influence as well as the imposition of a socially conservative and coercive
set of regulations on welfare recipients. Although the law eliminated the
right to social assistance and mandated that welfare recipients, the majority of women in Congress, including feminists and most other progressives
(e.g., the Congressional Black Caucus) went along with the 1996 law (see, e.g.,
Mink, 1998; the essays collected in Mink, 1999). Nor did feminist organizations mount protests of welfare reform. This was partly because it seemed to
be a lost and unpopular cause and partly because rank and file members of
feminist groups such as the National Organization for Women (NOW) supported employment for welfare mothers. This element of the reform made
sense given their commitment to encouraging women’s employment as a
route to gender equality (Orloff, 2006). Mink (1998) indicted “middle-class,

8

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

white” feminists and feminist political leaders for abandoning poor single
mothers, overwhelmingly women of color, in US welfare reform, in favor
of promoting their interests in employment. Others see the problem as the
lack of the public support in the United States (e.g., paid parental leaves,
child care) that have accompanied such mandates in other countries, such as
Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland (e.g., Orloff, 2006; see Leira, 2002;
Lundqvist, 2011 on Nordic developments).
It is not only in the United States that women’s employment has been
encouraged by reforms of welfare states (see, e.g., Esping-Andersen, 1999,
2009; Korpi, 2000; Morgan, 2006; O’Connor, Orloff, & Shaver, 1999). Thus,
even when critical of other aspects of neoliberal-inspired change, many
feminists argued that women’s paid employment—which overlapped with
the “activation agenda” of neoliberal prescription—could be understood as
indicative of progress toward gender equality when it was accompanied by
supportive services. Some analysts, prominently Nancy Fraser (2013) see in
this coincidence the evidence for broader claims that second-wave feminism
implicitly supports some elements of neoliberalism, yet others (e.g., Orloff,
2009) are more dubious that gender-egalitarian forces, and in particular,
their support for women’s employment, have been so completely absorbed
by neoliberalism. Janet Newman (2013) sees alliances between feminism and
neoliberal state projects as two-sided; while feminism has had to adapt to
neoliberalism, neoliberalism has also had to adapt itself to feminist projects,
demanding equality, rights, and welfare benefits.
CONCLUSION: RETHINKING THE MEANINGS
OF A FEMINIST POLITICS
The upshot of these analyses is that some feminists are in power in a world
in which women are no longer only victims, nor are they, formally speaking,
second-class citizens. Implicit to all is a frustration with traditional feminist
understandings of female subordination and male domination and a search
for a new language by which to address persisting gender inequalities at a
time when women are empowered precisely by deploying what might be
thought of as “perverse” or deformed variants of feminism.
While they diverge both in the subject matter of their analysis and in
whether they view feminists’ complicity with neoliberal elites as intended,
these emerging contemporary critiques of feminists in power all seem to
point to the ways in which traditional feminist ideas have been mobilized,
and in turn transformed by state elites, the members of which include
self-identified feminists. For these analysts, the actions of feminists in power
are seen as colluding with a broader neoliberal project of disembedding
capitalism, promoting deregulation, marketization, and employment for all,

Feminists in Power

9

to the exclusion of other changes in social relations that would be needed
for women’s emancipation to become a reality.
Two recent attempts to grapple with the fate of contemporary feminism
as an emancipatory political project are Janet Halley’s Split Decisions (2006)
and Nancy Fraser’s Fortunes of Feminism (2013). Their critique of contemporary feminism—seemingly focused on the United States, but presented as a
general challenge—emerges from a joint premise, shared also by scholars of
intersectionality, that a concentration on injustices to women to the exclusion
of others who suffer social injustice, stands in the way of a true emancipatory
feminist politics. Feminists’ increasing power within state elites and the perverse alliances formed between some feminists and neoliberal elites, make
feminism’s ostensible commitment to all women problematic, they claim.
At the same time, Halley and Fraser diverge in their view of the implications of this state of affairs on a contemporary feminist politics. For Halley,
feminists’ increasing representation among the wielders of power—a phenomenon which she terms governance feminism—leaves us no other option
than to “take a break” from feminism. Tracing the past two decades of theoretical work on sexuality in the United States, she concludes that all feminist
theories, share three core notions: femininity is distinguished from masculinity; femininity is defined by its subordinated relation to masculinity, and
feminism’s goal is to put an end to such subordination. These three core
notions have defined feminism from its inception and have not substantially
changed. What has changed is the standpoint from which they are articulated. While feminist ideas were initially articulated from the standpoint of a
countercultural minority, since the early 1990s there has been an “incremental, but by now quite noticeable installation of feminists and feminist ideas
in actual legal-institutional power” (Halley, 2006, p. 340).
In Halley’s view, feminism’s commitment to women, and to the particularistic vision of justice implied by this commitment, was justified when
feminism spoke from the standpoint of a countercultural minority, but is no
longer when applied by state elites and institutions. First, by continuously
viewing itself as the underdog and women as eternal victims, “governance
feminism” disregards not only the possibility that women are at times instigators of conflict but also occludes the suffering and death of men. Forms
of violence and domination that cannot be translated into male domination
and female victimization thus fall into the background. Second, feminism’s
commitment to female innocence encourages a simplistic rights discourse in
which no showing of a specific harm is needed in order to determine injury
to women. This in turn invites feminists to turn to criminal/social control
visions of law which speak the language of total prohibition.

10

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Thus, in her call to “take a break from feminism,” Halley is not arguing
for a complete abandonment of feminism’s core tenets but rather for repositioning feminism as one political project alongside others. According to
Halley, feminist politics can complement, but not replace, other projects for
racial, economic, and social justice. In her view, only by refusing to view the
world solely through the lens of feminism can we potentially mitigate the
dangerous consequences of pursuing a totalistic feminist agenda from within
positions of power.
Fraser (2013) advances a different approach in The Fortunes of Feminism:
feminists should reinvest in feminist ideology rather than “take a break” from
it. For Fraser, the change within feminism is not a result of feminists’ growing power within state elites but rather a response to changing social and
political circumstances—the demise of communism, the surge of free market
ideology and the rise of identity politics. According to Fraser, in the initial
stages of second-wave feminism, feminists critical of the exclusive framing
of injustice as unfair economic distribution attempted to expand the meaning
of justice to include matters previously considered “private,” such as culture,
sexuality, and housework. As a result, they formulated a critique that integrated three analytically distinct dimensions of gender justice: economic justice, political justice, and cultural justice. These were woven together into one
general critique in the context of state-organized “Keynesian welfare” capitalism, which was simultaneously organized around the needs of households
“headed” by breadwinning men. However, in the changed context of neoliberalism they came to be separated from one another and from the critique of
capitalism that had initially integrated them. The disintegration of feminist
critique allowed for the selective incorporation of feminist ideas, creating a
perverse affinity between neoliberalism and feminism, as when feminists’
support for women’s employment was taken up by US welfare reformers,
but denuded of feminists’ demand for supportive services, or when feminist
critiques of the family wage and traditional masculine authority supplied
neoliberalism a good part of the “romance” that invests flexible capitalism
with a higher meaning and moral point. According to Fraser, it is this perverse affinity which also explains why feminism thrived in the context of
neoliberalism and became a broad based mass social phenomenon.
Halley and Fraser thus provide us with two contrasting approaches for
grappling with the fate of contemporary feminism. Halley argues that feminism has been, and always will be, defined by its commitment to women
and by the particularistic vision of justice this commitment implies. To argue
otherwise is to misunderstand the nature of politics. Thus, rather than (fruitlessly) trying to turn feminism into a universal and all-encompassing emancipatory political project, Halley asks us to acknowledge its limitations and to

Feminists in Power

11

reposition feminism as such. Fraser on the other hand, believes that by reintegrating the dimensions of redistribution, recognition, and representation
that had splintered in the previous era, and by refocusing feminism’s critique
on constraints that arise from market-mediated processes of subordination,
feminism can disrupt the easy passage from feminism to neoliberalism.
What then is the fate of feminism? Is it possible to disrupt the “easy passage from feminism to neoliberalism”? And if not, are we left with the choice
either of “taking a break” from feminism, to which, after all, many of us are
strongly connected, or of surrendering to an inevitable alliance with politically ascendant neoliberal projects and remedies centered on incarceration
and punishment that are inimical to the concerns of most women and repugnant to many of us who would call ourselves feminists?
To answer the question of whether feminists’ increasing exercise of power
entails a perverse alliance with neoliberal elites or rather opens up spaces
for alternative forms of claim making and political alliances is beyond the
scope of this essay, but we would contend that an answer will require empirical analyses of historically and spatially specific contexts in which feminists
have pursued their diverse political projects. Rather, our goal in this initial
overview is to shed light on the fact that any discussion of contemporary
feminist politics must take into consideration two interrelated, yet separate,
developments: first, that the rise of second-wave feminism coincided with
the rise of new forms of politics on the right—both socially conservative and
neoliberal intellectual and political projects have proliferated and enjoyed
political successes. It does seem that part of their successes has resulted from
the appropriation and reshaping of ideas and values originally forwarded
by feminists. And, second, that the installation of feminist ideas within state
elite institutions works to reshape and redefine these (feminist) ideas themselves. An exploration of these coinciding developments and the interrelations between them is critical for a full understanding of the implications of
pursuing an emancipatory feminist politics today.
REFERENCES
Bernstein, E. (2007). Temporarily yours: Intimacy, authenticity, and the commerce of sex.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Bernstein, E. (2010). Militarized humanitarianism meets carceral feminism: The politics of sex, rights, and freedom in contemporary anti-trafficking campaigns. Signs:
Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 36(1), 45–71.
Bernstein, E. (2012). Carceral politics as gender justice? The ‘traffic in women’ and
neoliberal circuits of crime, sex, and rights. Theory and Society, 41(3), 233–259.
Boris, E., & Parreñas, R. S. (2010). Intimate labors: Cultures, technologies, and the politics
of care. Stanford, CA: Stanford Social Sciences.

12

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Brennan, D. (2008). Competing claims of victimhood? Foreign and domestic victims
of trafficking in the United States. Sexuality Research & Social Policy, 5(4), 45–61.
Bumiller, K. (2008). In an abusive state: How neoliberalism appropriated the feminist movement against sexual violence. Durham, England: Duke University Press.
Chapkis, W. (2003). Trafficking, migration, and the law: Protecting innocents, punishing immigrants. Gender & Society, 17(6), 923–937.
Cho, S., Crenshaw, K., & McCall, L. (2013). Toward a field of intersectionality studies:
Theory, applications, and praxis. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society,
38(4), 785–810.
Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and
violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241–1299.
Echols, A. (1989). Daring to be bad: Radical feminism in America, 1967–1975. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Esping-Andersen, G. (1999). Social foundations of postindustrial economies. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Esping-Andersen, G. (2009). The incomplete revolution: Adapting to women’s new
roles. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Evertsson, M., England, P., Mooi-Reci, I., Hermsen, J., de Bruijn, J., & Cotter, D.
(2009). Is gender inequality greater at lower or higher educational levels? Common patterns in the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United States. Social Politics,
16(2), 210–241.
Fraser, N. (2013). Fortunes of feminism: From state-managed capitalism to neoliberal crisis.
London, England: Verso.
Hall, P. A., & Lamont, M. (2013). Social resilience in the neoliberal era. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Halley, J. E. (2006). Split decisions: How and why to take a break from feminism. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Korpi, W. (2000). Faces of inequality: Gender, class, and patterns of inequalities in
different types of welfare states. Social Politics, 7(2), 127–191.
Leira, A. (2002). Working parents and the welfare state: Family change and policy reform in
Scandinavia. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Lundqvist, A. S. (2011). Family policy paradoxes: Gender equality and labour market regulation in Sweden, 1930–2010. Bristol, England: Policy Press.
McCall, L. (2001). Complex inequality: Gender, class, and race in the new economy. New
York, NY: Routledge.
Mink, G. (1998). Welfare’s end. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Mink, G. (Ed.) (1999). Whose welfare? Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Morgan, K. J. (2006). Working mothers and the welfare state: Religion and the politics of
work-family policies in Western Europe and the United States. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.
Mudge, S. L. (2008). What is neo-liberalism? Socio-Economic Review, 6(4), 703–731.
Newman, J. (2013). Spaces of power: Feminism, neoliberalism and gendered labor.
Social Politics, 20(2), 200–221.

Feminists in Power

13

O’Connor, J. S., Orloff, A. S., & Shaver, S. (1999). States, markets, families: Gender, liberalism, and social policy in Australia, Canada, Great Britain, and the United States.
Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Orloff, A. S. (2006). From maternalism to ‘employment for all’: State policies to promote women’s employment across the affluent democracies. In J. Levy (Ed.), The
state after statism: New state activities in the era of globalization and liberalization (pp.
230–268). Cambridge, England: Harvard University Press.
Orloff, A. S. (2009). Should feminists aim for gender symmetry?: Why the
dual-earner/dual-carer model may not be every feminist’s utopia. In J. Gornick
& M. Meyers (Eds.), Gender equality: Transforming family divisions of labor (pp.
129–160). New York, NY: Verso.
Parreñas, R. S. (2001). Servants of globalization: Women, migration and domestic work.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Richie, B. (2012). Arrested justice: Black women, violence, and America’s prison nation.
New York: New York University Press.
Roberts, D. (1995). Race, gender, and the value of mothers’ work. Social Politics, 2(2),
195–207.
Shih, E. (2013). Health and rights at the margins: Human trafficking and HIV/AIDS
amongst Jingpo ethnic communities in Ruili City, China. Anti-Trafficking Review,
(2), 119–136.

ANN SHOLA ORLOFF SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Ann Shola Orloff is Professor of Sociology and Political Science and Board
of Lady Managers of the Colombian Exposition Chair at Northwestern University. She received her BA from Harvard University in 1975, spent several
years as a labor organizer, then went on to receive her PhD from Princeton University in 1985. Orloff’s areas of interest include political sociology,
social policy, gender studies, global, transnational, historical and comparative sociology, and social and feminist theory. Her research focuses on gender,
social policies, and feminist politics. Orloff is the coeditor of Remaking Modernity: Politics, History and Sociology (with Julia Adams and Elisabeth Clemens;
Duke, 2005) and the author of States, Markets, Families: Gender, Liberalism and
Social Policy in Australia, Canada, Great Britain and the United States (with Julia
O’Connor and Sheila Shaver; Cambridge, 1999), in addition to other books
and articles in journals including Sociological Theory, Politics & Gender, Social
Science History, Sociologica, Journal of Policy History, and American Sociological Review. Her work has been translated into Italian, French, Spanish, and
German. She is at work on a manuscript, Toward a Gender-Open Future? Transformations in Gender, Global Capitalism and Systems of Social Provision and Regulation, in which she examines shifts in the gendered character of welfare
and employment policies in the United States, Sweden, and other capitalist
democracies and asks what are the implications for gender equality and for

14

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

feminism. Orloff continues to coedit the journal she helped to found, Social
Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society. She was the President of the Social Science History Association, 2009–2010, and hosted the
annual conference in Chicago in November 2010. From 2002–2010 she was
president of RC 19, the Research Committee on Poverty, Social Welfare, and
Social Policy of the International Sociological Association. Orloff has held visiting positions at the European University Institute (Florence, Italy), Sciences
Po (Paris), the Institute for Future Studies (Stockholm), and the Australian
National University (Canberra). She is be a Visiting Fellow at the Center for
Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford in 2014–2015, was
a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation and has been the recipient of fellowships from the German Marshall Fund, ACLS, and AAUW. At
Northwestern, she has served as Director of Gender Studies and Chair of the
Sociology Department.
TALIA SCHIFF SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Talia Schiff is a JD-PhD candidate at Northwestern University (Department
of Sociology and School of Law). She is a graduate of the Adi Lautman
Interdisciplinary Program for Outstanding Students at Tel Aviv University
from which she received her MA in Sociology in 2009. Schiff’s research
interests include law, political sociology, gender, culture, and historical
and comparative sociology. Her research examines the processes through
which social norms and institutions inform legal categories. Her current
project sets to examine the evolution of legal reliefs from deportation in
U.S. immigration law. More specifically, it explores how a new regime of
asylum policy commenced in the 1980s fueled a significant shift in how
classes of persons eligible for relief came to be defined in U.S. law and
political discourse. Schiff is the author of the paper “Between Minor and
Major Identity: Jaqueline Kahanoff and the ‘Israelization’ of Levantinism,”
which appeared in the journal Theory and Criticism [Hebrew]. Shiff served
as the coeditor of the Annual Journal of the Interdisciplinary Program for
Outstanding Students (2005–2006) and was on the editorial board of the
Northwestern Journal of Law and Social Policy (2013–2014).
RELATED ESSAYS
The Underrepresentation of Women in Elective Office (Political Science),
Sarah F. Anzia
The Sexual Division of Labor (Anthropology), Rebecca Bliege Bird and Brian
F. Codding
Stereotype Content (Sociology), Beatrice H. Capestany and Lasana T. Harris

Feminists in Power

15

Why So Few Women in Mathematically Intensive Fields? (Psychology),
Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams
Gender Segregation in Higher Education (Sociology), Alexandra Hendley
and Maria Charles
Gender, Religion, and State in the Middle East (Sociology), Mounira M.
Charrad and Amina Zarrugh
Cognitive Processes Involved in Stereotyping (Psychology), Susan T. Fiske
and Cydney H. Dupree
Controlling the Influence of Stereotypes on One’s Thoughts (Psychology),
Patrick S. Forscher and Patricia G. Devine
Changing Family Patterns (Sociology), Kathleen Gerson and Stacy Torres
Divorce (Sociology), Juho Härkönen
Grandmothers and the Evolution of Human Sociality (Anthropology), Kristen
Hawkes and James Coxworth
Exploring Opportunities in Cultural Diversity (Political Science), David D.
Laitin and Sangick Jeon
Women Running for Office (Political Science), Jennifer L. Lawless
Gender Inequality in Educational Attainment (Sociology), Anne McDaniel
and Claudia Buchmann
Gender and Women’s Influence in Public Settings (Political Science), Tali
Mendelberg et al.
Implicit Attitude Measures (Psychology), Gregory Mitchell and Philip E.
Tetlock
Cognitive Bias Modification in Mental (Psychology), Meg M. Reuland et al.
Born This Way: Thinking Sociologically about Essentialism (Sociology),
Kristen Schilt
Stereotype Threat (Psychology), Toni Schmader and William M. Hall
Gender and the Transition to Adulthood: A Diverse Pathways View (Sociology), Ingrid Schoon
Family Income Composition (Economics), Kristin E. Smith
Gender and Work (Sociology), Christine L. Williams and Megan Tobias Neely



Feminists in Power
ANN ORLOFF and TALIA SCHIFF1

Abstract
In contrast to the scholarship allied with first and second waves of feminism, feminist analysts today survey a changed landscape of gender across the United States
and much of the world: formal exclusions and discrimination are outlawed, gender hierarchies have been undermined, and women are appearing among economic,
political, and other elites to an unprecedented degree even as gender inequalities
stubbornly persist across multiple arenas. A focal point of debate among analysts
of sexuality, political economy, and culture is the meaning and implications of pursuing gender equality in a world that no longer neatly divides into subordinated
women and powerful men, and in which the increasing number of women among the
socially advantaged problematizes traditional notions of female victimization and
male domination. In this essay, we first offer an overview of earlier approaches to
gender equality, then turn to critiques of these approaches which insist on the need
for a new starting point for considering gender equality and women’s emancipation.

Feminists in the United States and across the world are today presented with
sharply contrasting developments. Formal exclusions of women and gender
discrimination are outlawed, gender hierarchies have been undermined,
and women are appearing among economic, political, and other elites to an
unprecedented degree even as gender inequalities stubbornly persist across
multiple arenas. Yet while the rightness of formal gender equality—that
is, equal treatment under the law—is largely taken for granted, if and how
states or other institutions should press for greater equalization of resources,
rights, and responsibilities is contested. Moreover, some of feminists’
own achievements seem to be simultaneously advancing and legitimizing
neoliberal politics and state projects focused on policing and punishing
that stand in the way of further movement toward gender equality and
that reflect, at least partially, unanticipated cooptation of feminist ideas into
political projects harnessed to the demands of contemporary capitalism and
patriarchal social conservatism.
1. We are equal coauthors; the names are in alphabetical order.
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

1

2

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

This new gendered landscape poses new questions for feminists. The
guarantee of formal gender equalities and the increasing numbers of women
in the advantaged sectors of society, which reflect the partial achievement
of feminist goals, have significant implications for how we think about
core feminist values such as gender equality, women’s emancipation,
and gender justice. What does it mean, for example, to talk about female
victimization—a key trope in the fight against endemic sexual violence or
coercive labor conditions—in a world that no longer neatly divides into
subordinated women and powerful men, and in which there is an increasing
number of women among the socially advantaged, who may nonetheless
face threats to bodily integrity? What are the implications of voicing feminist
values from within the precincts of power? And what should we make of the
fact that the successes of socially conservative and neoliberal intellectual and
political projects has resulted in part from the appropriation and reshaping
of ideas originally forwarded by feminists? In this essay, we contend that
taking into consideration the institutionalization of feminist ideas within
core sites of state power and the cooptation by, and actual alliances of some
feminists with, socially conservative and neoliberal projects2 —is critical for
assessing the opportunities and dangers confronting contemporary feminist
politics.
We first offer an overview of earlier approaches to gender equality, a term
whose meaning is deeply contested. Rather than providing a static definition,
we wish to reflect on the ways in which feminism’s own understandings of,
and approach to, gender equality have significantly changed since the second wave of feminism. We then turn to what we believe to be a new and
evolving debate among analysts of sexuality, political economy, and culture
on the implications of feminism’s new relation to institutions of state power
and law in the United States, especially those that feature increasing reliance
on policing and punishment, and to the neoliberal political projects of capital
and their intellectual advocates. In calling for a new starting point for considering gender equality and women’s emancipation, these critiques shed
light on the implications of pursuing a feminist politics today. We focus on
2. The term “neoliberalism” is invoked often, we think rather too easily, without considering its specific political manifestations. Stephanie Lee Mudge (2008) provides a historically grounded definition of
the term which distinguishes among three modes of neoliberalism: the intellectual, the bureaucratic, and
the political. As an intellectual project, neoliberalism was born within the institutions of welfare capitalism and is characterized by an emphasis on the free market as the source and arbiter of human freedoms
and a disdain for politics, bureaucracies, and the welfare state. In its bureaucratic face, neoliberalism is
expressed by state policy reforms that are guided by the assumption that the state is different from the
market and that encourage competition by rejecting state regulation and management, and desacralizing institutions (such as education and health care) that were previously protected from the forces of
the market. Finally, neoliberalism signifies a market-centric politics guided by the assumption that “one
should unleash market forces whenever possible and that the reach of political decision-making should
be limited.” Neoliberal political forces have sometimes allied with socially conservative, often religiously
inspired, groups, but we maintain that it is important to distinguish between them. See also Hall and
Lamont (2013).

Feminists in Power

3

the United States, where these critiques have been most prominent, but our
suggestions may have wider applicability.

THE OLD GENDER ORDER
Even after the political victories of the first-wave feminist movement in the
early twentieth century—women’s suffrage above all—the gender order of
the mid-twentieth century was characterized by explicitly gendered formal
institutions. Informal institutions, too, reflected and reinforced gender difference and inequality and masculine power. Many organizations advocating
women’s equality—a “second wave” of feminism—emerged in the 1970s in
the United States and across the West to contest these conditions, claiming
that women shared interests in eradicating this state of affairs, despite many
differences among them.
Scholars have examined the variety of feminist responses to this unsatisfactory set of arrangements, proposing typologies based on multiple
dimensions of difference (see, e.g., Echols, 1989). Then, as is the case today,
socialist or labor feminists tended to be most concerned with fundamentally
overhauling the political economy and shifting the gendered division of
labor by encouraging women to work for pay and men to participate in
care and domestic work, as well as by developing public services; radical
feminist approaches involving the law, sexuality, and violence involved
deterring and punishing male perpetrators of violence alongside critiquing
compulsory heterosexuality, the eroticization of violence, and the nuclear
family. Liberal feminists were focused on reforming capitalist and democratic institutions by eliminating discrimination and exclusions, bringing
women into the polity, the labor force, and, ultimately, the very heart of
power. These differences in emphasis remain among current thinkers. What
changed was the commonly held assumption that had tied divergent strands
of feminist thinking together: that all women, regardless of differences in
social location, faced certain kinds of political and social exclusions. Today’s
feminist critics are distinguished from earlier generations by the realization
that feminism is no longer a countercultural minority discourse, as some
feminist ideas have been installed into government and legal institutions,
and an increasing number of women and feminists occupy positions of
formal authority and power. In the following section, we provide an
overview of some of the changes characterizing today’s gendered landscape, the context for contemporary critiques of feminism. We then turn
to these new critiques and to the questions and challenges they pose for
feminists.

4

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

THE NEW GENDER ORDER AND ITS CRITICS
The play of advantage and disadvantage across gender and other forms of
power, difference, and inequality is clearly different from that in the era of
stable gendered hierarchies. Long-standing feminist support for women’s
claims to personhood, and most importantly to the recognition of women as
individual social beings has undoubtedly found some success. While great
strides have been made in eliminating formal discrimination, we are far from
a “50/50” world, whether we look at politics, wages, care work, sexual pleasure, or almost anything else. There are also stark inequalities among women
(and men) by class, race, ethnicity, citizenship status, and household structure in access to good employment and to quality care services.
Since World War II in the global North, manufacturing has declined as
service sector employment has risen, driven importantly by outsourcing
of the work formerly done by housewives to paid service workers, many
of whom migrate to take up this work, and contributing both to women’s
increasing employment levels, and to increasing income inequality.3 The
gendered division of labor of the “male breadwinner family,” with married
women doing full-time care or part-time work plus care, and men providing
most of the income and working full time, has been modified, not ended,
as—on average—women’s time in unpaid caregiving and domestic work
has declined while men’s take-up of care work within and across households
is far less than women’s take-up of paid work.
These “complex inequalities” among women and men have been a significant focus of work on the “intersectional” nature of inequality and power,
by scholars such as Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991), Leslie McCall (2001), and
others (see Cho, Crenshaw, & McCall, 2013 for an overview). According to
these scholars, mainstream feminism is at fault for concentrating on gender
to the exclusion of its co-constitution with other forms of inequality. Pointing to the specificities of contemporary inequalities, in which some women
have achieved economic success by taking advantage of the supply of less
well-paid women service workers (see, e.g., Boris & Parreñas, 2010; Parreñas,
2001; Roberts, 1995), they argue that sexual domination and masculine violence are crossed by class, racial, and educational inequalities. They call on
feminists committed to social justice to engage with the struggles of the most
marginalized people, as a true commitment to social justice would require
feminists to refrain from seeing the world solely in terms of female injury
and male subordination. Rather, feminists must acknowledge that there are
3. Women’s income inequalities have widened over the past few decades (McCall, 2001), and women’s
labor force participation levels vary substantially by education, with highly educated women participating at higher levels than their less-educated counterparts in most Western countries (see, e.g., Evertsson
et al., 2009).

Feminists in Power

5

multiple forms of inequality and domination and that we face widening gaps
between the situations of the advantaged and the disenfranchised.
These premises are indisputable. But they do not address specifically
political questions about feminist projects, in which particular groups make
specific claims, anticipating the agreement of others. In politics, exclusion
is inevitable. The only cure is not a demand that “all”—especially the
most marginalized—be included in every political campaign, but rather
an openness to contestation. This raises a new set of questions regarding
the specific opportunities and risks when feminists are in power. What, for
example, are the implications of the fact that more women are playing on
the field of “men’s politics,” accompanied by claims that women leaders
offer both descriptive and substantive representation for other women? And
what do the complex alliances forming between feminists, state institutions,
and the law imply for traditional understandings of gender equality and
emancipation?
We contend that widening inequalities among women form a critical part
of the backdrop against which a new generation of feminist analysts consider
the implications for feminism of the incorporation of feminists into elite positions of authority in the corporate sector, civil society, and politics, and the
incorporation of feminist ideas into legal, political, and economic discourses.
According to these contemporary analysts—we will call them “the critics
of feminism in power”—feminism’s appropriation by, and complicity with,
socially conservative movements and neoliberal political elites, threaten to
stand in the way of achieving gender equality. This set of critiques is the focus
of the next section.
THE CRITICS OF FEMINISTS IN POWER
Focused on feminists’ increasing access to power and changed relation
to states, a new generation of analysts point to significant shifts within
feminism with respect to political economy and sexuality. In terms of
political economy, feminism has, these critics allege, shifted away from a
redistributive model of justice—a model that was predominant on the left
and center-left since the late nineteenth century, centering on state remedies
for the inequities and oppression generated by capitalism and, in the case
of feminism, “capitalist patriarchy”—to one that emphasizes individual
“choice” and paid employment as the routes toward women’s emancipation.
This shift echoes changes in the political and intellectual landscapes for
“parties of movement” and left-liberal organizations as state-funded and
publicly provided services and benefits, and state regulation of the economy
have given way to market-based remedies for social problems. In the United
States, especially, neoliberal policy prescriptions for the deregulation of

6

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

the economy and the rolling back of programs of social security were
joined to the buildup of the state’s capacities for policing, punishment, and
imprisonment.
Critical works on feminist campaigns against sexual violence have been key
sources of new understandings of the consequences of feminists’ alliances
with power and deployment of the law as the tool to confront and disarm
patriarchal practices. They show how feminists concerned with sexual violence and domination have moved away from critiques of pervasive masculine power toward remedies centered on incarceration and punishment
for gender-based violence, seen primarily as perpetrated by outsiders rather
than intimates, and have started forming alliances with social conservatives
who want to strengthen state punishment of perpetrators. These alliances,
they contend, have problematic and even dangerous implications when carried out from within the precincts of power.
Analysts of feminist antiviolence efforts have pointed to the complex
interrelations between feminism, neoliberalism, and projects that encourage
incarceration, policing, and punishment. Richie (2012) argues that feminist antiviolence activists had a part—unintended—in creating harsher
punishment policies in the United States, in a context in which right-wing
forces had succeeded in disinvesting from poor urban communities and
shredding the safety net while building up the state’s incarcerating and
policing powers. Feminist demands for greater public and legal recognition
of the harm caused by sexual violence served as an inspiration for broader
campaigns for criminalization. This has had damaging effects on the most
vulnerable women, who may face imprisonment themselves or have few
resources when the men in their households are imprisoned, and worked
to enhance the transformation of the United States into a “prison nation.”
Bumiller (2008) notes that these campaigns worked to legitimize an agenda
premised on the notion that the maintenance of the social order depends
on the incarceration and punishment of, “violent perpetrators who preyed
on innocent victims,” and transformed the initial feminist sensibility that
any man can be a rapist into a campaign driven by fear of strangers.
Those strands of feminism which emphasized personal responsibility, the
demonization of the sex-predator, and the valorization of the private family
received precedence over those which did not adapt themselves to the
ascending neoliberal logic.
Feminist antitrafficking campaigns have also fueled neoliberal agendas.
Chapkis (2003) shows how the focus on sex-trafficking legislation, which
assumes a distinction between “innocent victims” and “guilty migrants,”
works to legitimize enhanced border control and antiimmigration policies.
Brennan (2008) and Shih (2013) point to the ways in which the exclusive
focus on sex trafficking over all other forms of exploitive labor legitimizes

Feminists in Power

7

the incarceration of migrants and obscures coercive labor conditions. Rhacel
Parreñas (2001: see also Boris and Parreñas 2010) has argued that feminist
antitrafficking campaigns which seek the abolition of prostitution—thereby
depriving sex workers of their livelihood—hide the fact that the key issue
for sex workers and care workers alike, particularly those without the
legal protections afforded by citizenship, is coerced and unregulated labor
and not “sex slavery.” Here, switching the focus away from regulation of
exploitive labor relations dovetails with neoliberal agendas, which have
been relentlessly antiregulation.
Elizabeth Bernstein (2007, 2010, 2012) focuses on the problematic alliances
formed between neoliberal elites and feminist antitrafficking campaigns.
She argues that the promotion of a neoliberal law and order agenda is
not an unintended consequence of feminist campaigns but rather one that
some feminists deliberately pursued, while some corporate elites have
used antitrafficking campaigns to burnish their brands. Self-interested
and predominantly white middle class feminists situated the family as a
privatized sphere of safety to be protected by the criminal justice system.
Bernstein thus describes the alliance formed between neoliberalism and
feminism as a two-sided relationship rather than a one-sided appropriation;
neoliberalism supported versions of feminism which idealized the private
family, reinforced notions of personal responsibility and condemned public
disorder, just as feminists purposefully joined forces with neoliberal projects
because it served their self-interests.
Analyses of gendered welfare institutions have also contributed to new
understandings of the complex alliances forming between neoliberal political agendas and the interests of women. In the United States, many have
criticized the approach taken by self-described feminists to the consequential
1996 law that “reformed” US social assistance, passed by a Republican-led
Congress and accepted by President Bill Clinton and most Democrats; the
law was considered by many to represent the apogee of neoliberal policy
influence as well as the imposition of a socially conservative and coercive
set of regulations on welfare recipients. Although the law eliminated the
right to social assistance and mandated that welfare recipients, the majority of women in Congress, including feminists and most other progressives
(e.g., the Congressional Black Caucus) went along with the 1996 law (see, e.g.,
Mink, 1998; the essays collected in Mink, 1999). Nor did feminist organizations mount protests of welfare reform. This was partly because it seemed to
be a lost and unpopular cause and partly because rank and file members of
feminist groups such as the National Organization for Women (NOW) supported employment for welfare mothers. This element of the reform made
sense given their commitment to encouraging women’s employment as a
route to gender equality (Orloff, 2006). Mink (1998) indicted “middle-class,

8

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

white” feminists and feminist political leaders for abandoning poor single
mothers, overwhelmingly women of color, in US welfare reform, in favor
of promoting their interests in employment. Others see the problem as the
lack of the public support in the United States (e.g., paid parental leaves,
child care) that have accompanied such mandates in other countries, such as
Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland (e.g., Orloff, 2006; see Leira, 2002;
Lundqvist, 2011 on Nordic developments).
It is not only in the United States that women’s employment has been
encouraged by reforms of welfare states (see, e.g., Esping-Andersen, 1999,
2009; Korpi, 2000; Morgan, 2006; O’Connor, Orloff, & Shaver, 1999). Thus,
even when critical of other aspects of neoliberal-inspired change, many
feminists argued that women’s paid employment—which overlapped with
the “activation agenda” of neoliberal prescription—could be understood as
indicative of progress toward gender equality when it was accompanied by
supportive services. Some analysts, prominently Nancy Fraser (2013) see in
this coincidence the evidence for broader claims that second-wave feminism
implicitly supports some elements of neoliberalism, yet others (e.g., Orloff,
2009) are more dubious that gender-egalitarian forces, and in particular,
their support for women’s employment, have been so completely absorbed
by neoliberalism. Janet Newman (2013) sees alliances between feminism and
neoliberal state projects as two-sided; while feminism has had to adapt to
neoliberalism, neoliberalism has also had to adapt itself to feminist projects,
demanding equality, rights, and welfare benefits.
CONCLUSION: RETHINKING THE MEANINGS
OF A FEMINIST POLITICS
The upshot of these analyses is that some feminists are in power in a world
in which women are no longer only victims, nor are they, formally speaking,
second-class citizens. Implicit to all is a frustration with traditional feminist
understandings of female subordination and male domination and a search
for a new language by which to address persisting gender inequalities at a
time when women are empowered precisely by deploying what might be
thought of as “perverse” or deformed variants of feminism.
While they diverge both in the subject matter of their analysis and in
whether they view feminists’ complicity with neoliberal elites as intended,
these emerging contemporary critiques of feminists in power all seem to
point to the ways in which traditional feminist ideas have been mobilized,
and in turn transformed by state elites, the members of which include
self-identified feminists. For these analysts, the actions of feminists in power
are seen as colluding with a broader neoliberal project of disembedding
capitalism, promoting deregulation, marketization, and employment for all,

Feminists in Power

9

to the exclusion of other changes in social relations that would be needed
for women’s emancipation to become a reality.
Two recent attempts to grapple with the fate of contemporary feminism
as an emancipatory political project are Janet Halley’s Split Decisions (2006)
and Nancy Fraser’s Fortunes of Feminism (2013). Their critique of contemporary feminism—seemingly focused on the United States, but presented as a
general challenge—emerges from a joint premise, shared also by scholars of
intersectionality, that a concentration on injustices to women to the exclusion
of others who suffer social injustice, stands in the way of a true emancipatory
feminist politics. Feminists’ increasing power within state elites and the perverse alliances formed between some feminists and neoliberal elites, make
feminism’s ostensible commitment to all women problematic, they claim.
At the same time, Halley and Fraser diverge in their view of the implications of this state of affairs on a contemporary feminist politics. For Halley,
feminists’ increasing representation among the wielders of power—a phenomenon which she terms governance feminism—leaves us no other option
than to “take a break” from feminism. Tracing the past two decades of theoretical work on sexuality in the United States, she concludes that all feminist
theories, share three core notions: femininity is distinguished from masculinity; femininity is defined by its subordinated relation to masculinity, and
feminism’s goal is to put an end to such subordination. These three core
notions have defined feminism from its inception and have not substantially
changed. What has changed is the standpoint from which they are articulated. While feminist ideas were initially articulated from the standpoint of a
countercultural minority, since the early 1990s there has been an “incremental, but by now quite noticeable installation of feminists and feminist ideas
in actual legal-institutional power” (Halley, 2006, p. 340).
In Halley’s view, feminism’s commitment to women, and to the particularistic vision of justice implied by this commitment, was justified when
feminism spoke from the standpoint of a countercultural minority, but is no
longer when applied by state elites and institutions. First, by continuously
viewing itself as the underdog and women as eternal victims, “governance
feminism” disregards not only the possibility that women are at times instigators of conflict but also occludes the suffering and death of men. Forms
of violence and domination that cannot be translated into male domination
and female victimization thus fall into the background. Second, feminism’s
commitment to female innocence encourages a simplistic rights discourse in
which no showing of a specific harm is needed in order to determine injury
to women. This in turn invites feminists to turn to criminal/social control
visions of law which speak the language of total prohibition.

10

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Thus, in her call to “take a break from feminism,” Halley is not arguing
for a complete abandonment of feminism’s core tenets but rather for repositioning feminism as one political project alongside others. According to
Halley, feminist politics can complement, but not replace, other projects for
racial, economic, and social justice. In her view, only by refusing to view the
world solely through the lens of feminism can we potentially mitigate the
dangerous consequences of pursuing a totalistic feminist agenda from within
positions of power.
Fraser (2013) advances a different approach in The Fortunes of Feminism:
feminists should reinvest in feminist ideology rather than “take a break” from
it. For Fraser, the change within feminism is not a result of feminists’ growing power within state elites but rather a response to changing social and
political circumstances—the demise of communism, the surge of free market
ideology and the rise of identity politics. According to Fraser, in the initial
stages of second-wave feminism, feminists critical of the exclusive framing
of injustice as unfair economic distribution attempted to expand the meaning
of justice to include matters previously considered “private,” such as culture,
sexuality, and housework. As a result, they formulated a critique that integrated three analytically distinct dimensions of gender justice: economic justice, political justice, and cultural justice. These were woven together into one
general critique in the context of state-organized “Keynesian welfare” capitalism, which was simultaneously organized around the needs of households
“headed” by breadwinning men. However, in the changed context of neoliberalism they came to be separated from one another and from the critique of
capitalism that had initially integrated them. The disintegration of feminist
critique allowed for the selective incorporation of feminist ideas, creating a
perverse affinity between neoliberalism and feminism, as when feminists’
support for women’s employment was taken up by US welfare reformers,
but denuded of feminists’ demand for supportive services, or when feminist
critiques of the family wage and traditional masculine authority supplied
neoliberalism a good part of the “romance” that invests flexible capitalism
with a higher meaning and moral point. According to Fraser, it is this perverse affinity which also explains why feminism thrived in the context of
neoliberalism and became a broad based mass social phenomenon.
Halley and Fraser thus provide us with two contrasting approaches for
grappling with the fate of contemporary feminism. Halley argues that feminism has been, and always will be, defined by its commitment to women
and by the particularistic vision of justice this commitment implies. To argue
otherwise is to misunderstand the nature of politics. Thus, rather than (fruitlessly) trying to turn feminism into a universal and all-encompassing emancipatory political project, Halley asks us to acknowledge its limitations and to

Feminists in Power

11

reposition feminism as such. Fraser on the other hand, believes that by reintegrating the dimensions of redistribution, recognition, and representation
that had splintered in the previous era, and by refocusing feminism’s critique
on constraints that arise from market-mediated processes of subordination,
feminism can disrupt the easy passage from feminism to neoliberalism.
What then is the fate of feminism? Is it possible to disrupt the “easy passage from feminism to neoliberalism”? And if not, are we left with the choice
either of “taking a break” from feminism, to which, after all, many of us are
strongly connected, or of surrendering to an inevitable alliance with politically ascendant neoliberal projects and remedies centered on incarceration
and punishment that are inimical to the concerns of most women and repugnant to many of us who would call ourselves feminists?
To answer the question of whether feminists’ increasing exercise of power
entails a perverse alliance with neoliberal elites or rather opens up spaces
for alternative forms of claim making and political alliances is beyond the
scope of this essay, but we would contend that an answer will require empirical analyses of historically and spatially specific contexts in which feminists
have pursued their diverse political projects. Rather, our goal in this initial
overview is to shed light on the fact that any discussion of contemporary
feminist politics must take into consideration two interrelated, yet separate,
developments: first, that the rise of second-wave feminism coincided with
the rise of new forms of politics on the right—both socially conservative and
neoliberal intellectual and political projects have proliferated and enjoyed
political successes. It does seem that part of their successes has resulted from
the appropriation and reshaping of ideas and values originally forwarded
by feminists. And, second, that the installation of feminist ideas within state
elite institutions works to reshape and redefine these (feminist) ideas themselves. An exploration of these coinciding developments and the interrelations between them is critical for a full understanding of the implications of
pursuing an emancipatory feminist politics today.
REFERENCES
Bernstein, E. (2007). Temporarily yours: Intimacy, authenticity, and the commerce of sex.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Bernstein, E. (2010). Militarized humanitarianism meets carceral feminism: The politics of sex, rights, and freedom in contemporary anti-trafficking campaigns. Signs:
Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 36(1), 45–71.
Bernstein, E. (2012). Carceral politics as gender justice? The ‘traffic in women’ and
neoliberal circuits of crime, sex, and rights. Theory and Society, 41(3), 233–259.
Boris, E., & Parreñas, R. S. (2010). Intimate labors: Cultures, technologies, and the politics
of care. Stanford, CA: Stanford Social Sciences.

12

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Brennan, D. (2008). Competing claims of victimhood? Foreign and domestic victims
of trafficking in the United States. Sexuality Research & Social Policy, 5(4), 45–61.
Bumiller, K. (2008). In an abusive state: How neoliberalism appropriated the feminist movement against sexual violence. Durham, England: Duke University Press.
Chapkis, W. (2003). Trafficking, migration, and the law: Protecting innocents, punishing immigrants. Gender & Society, 17(6), 923–937.
Cho, S., Crenshaw, K., & McCall, L. (2013). Toward a field of intersectionality studies:
Theory, applications, and praxis. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society,
38(4), 785–810.
Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and
violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241–1299.
Echols, A. (1989). Daring to be bad: Radical feminism in America, 1967–1975. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Esping-Andersen, G. (1999). Social foundations of postindustrial economies. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Esping-Andersen, G. (2009). The incomplete revolution: Adapting to women’s new
roles. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Evertsson, M., England, P., Mooi-Reci, I., Hermsen, J., de Bruijn, J., & Cotter, D.
(2009). Is gender inequality greater at lower or higher educational levels? Common patterns in the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United States. Social Politics,
16(2), 210–241.
Fraser, N. (2013). Fortunes of feminism: From state-managed capitalism to neoliberal crisis.
London, England: Verso.
Hall, P. A., & Lamont, M. (2013). Social resilience in the neoliberal era. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Halley, J. E. (2006). Split decisions: How and why to take a break from feminism. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Korpi, W. (2000). Faces of inequality: Gender, class, and patterns of inequalities in
different types of welfare states. Social Politics, 7(2), 127–191.
Leira, A. (2002). Working parents and the welfare state: Family change and policy reform in
Scandinavia. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Lundqvist, A. S. (2011). Family policy paradoxes: Gender equality and labour market regulation in Sweden, 1930–2010. Bristol, England: Policy Press.
McCall, L. (2001). Complex inequality: Gender, class, and race in the new economy. New
York, NY: Routledge.
Mink, G. (1998). Welfare’s end. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Mink, G. (Ed.) (1999). Whose welfare? Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Morgan, K. J. (2006). Working mothers and the welfare state: Religion and the politics of
work-family policies in Western Europe and the United States. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.
Mudge, S. L. (2008). What is neo-liberalism? Socio-Economic Review, 6(4), 703–731.
Newman, J. (2013). Spaces of power: Feminism, neoliberalism and gendered labor.
Social Politics, 20(2), 200–221.

Feminists in Power

13

O’Connor, J. S., Orloff, A. S., & Shaver, S. (1999). States, markets, families: Gender, liberalism, and social policy in Australia, Canada, Great Britain, and the United States.
Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Orloff, A. S. (2006). From maternalism to ‘employment for all’: State policies to promote women’s employment across the affluent democracies. In J. Levy (Ed.), The
state after statism: New state activities in the era of globalization and liberalization (pp.
230–268). Cambridge, England: Harvard University Press.
Orloff, A. S. (2009). Should feminists aim for gender symmetry?: Why the
dual-earner/dual-carer model may not be every feminist’s utopia. In J. Gornick
& M. Meyers (Eds.), Gender equality: Transforming family divisions of labor (pp.
129–160). New York, NY: Verso.
Parreñas, R. S. (2001). Servants of globalization: Women, migration and domestic work.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Richie, B. (2012). Arrested justice: Black women, violence, and America’s prison nation.
New York: New York University Press.
Roberts, D. (1995). Race, gender, and the value of mothers’ work. Social Politics, 2(2),
195–207.
Shih, E. (2013). Health and rights at the margins: Human trafficking and HIV/AIDS
amongst Jingpo ethnic communities in Ruili City, China. Anti-Trafficking Review,
(2), 119–136.

ANN SHOLA ORLOFF SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Ann Shola Orloff is Professor of Sociology and Political Science and Board
of Lady Managers of the Colombian Exposition Chair at Northwestern University. She received her BA from Harvard University in 1975, spent several
years as a labor organizer, then went on to receive her PhD from Princeton University in 1985. Orloff’s areas of interest include political sociology,
social policy, gender studies, global, transnational, historical and comparative sociology, and social and feminist theory. Her research focuses on gender,
social policies, and feminist politics. Orloff is the coeditor of Remaking Modernity: Politics, History and Sociology (with Julia Adams and Elisabeth Clemens;
Duke, 2005) and the author of States, Markets, Families: Gender, Liberalism and
Social Policy in Australia, Canada, Great Britain and the United States (with Julia
O’Connor and Sheila Shaver; Cambridge, 1999), in addition to other books
and articles in journals including Sociological Theory, Politics & Gender, Social
Science History, Sociologica, Journal of Policy History, and American Sociological Review. Her work has been translated into Italian, French, Spanish, and
German. She is at work on a manuscript, Toward a Gender-Open Future? Transformations in Gender, Global Capitalism and Systems of Social Provision and Regulation, in which she examines shifts in the gendered character of welfare
and employment policies in the United States, Sweden, and other capitalist
democracies and asks what are the implications for gender equality and for

14

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

feminism. Orloff continues to coedit the journal she helped to found, Social
Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society. She was the President of the Social Science History Association, 2009–2010, and hosted the
annual conference in Chicago in November 2010. From 2002–2010 she was
president of RC 19, the Research Committee on Poverty, Social Welfare, and
Social Policy of the International Sociological Association. Orloff has held visiting positions at the European University Institute (Florence, Italy), Sciences
Po (Paris), the Institute for Future Studies (Stockholm), and the Australian
National University (Canberra). She is be a Visiting Fellow at the Center for
Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford in 2014–2015, was
a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation and has been the recipient of fellowships from the German Marshall Fund, ACLS, and AAUW. At
Northwestern, she has served as Director of Gender Studies and Chair of the
Sociology Department.
TALIA SCHIFF SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Talia Schiff is a JD-PhD candidate at Northwestern University (Department
of Sociology and School of Law). She is a graduate of the Adi Lautman
Interdisciplinary Program for Outstanding Students at Tel Aviv University
from which she received her MA in Sociology in 2009. Schiff’s research
interests include law, political sociology, gender, culture, and historical
and comparative sociology. Her research examines the processes through
which social norms and institutions inform legal categories. Her current
project sets to examine the evolution of legal reliefs from deportation in
U.S. immigration law. More specifically, it explores how a new regime of
asylum policy commenced in the 1980s fueled a significant shift in how
classes of persons eligible for relief came to be defined in U.S. law and
political discourse. Schiff is the author of the paper “Between Minor and
Major Identity: Jaqueline Kahanoff and the ‘Israelization’ of Levantinism,”
which appeared in the journal Theory and Criticism [Hebrew]. Shiff served
as the coeditor of the Annual Journal of the Interdisciplinary Program for
Outstanding Students (2005–2006) and was on the editorial board of the
Northwestern Journal of Law and Social Policy (2013–2014).
RELATED ESSAYS
The Underrepresentation of Women in Elective Office (Political Science),
Sarah F. Anzia
The Sexual Division of Labor (Anthropology), Rebecca Bliege Bird and Brian
F. Codding
Stereotype Content (Sociology), Beatrice H. Capestany and Lasana T. Harris

Feminists in Power

15

Why So Few Women in Mathematically Intensive Fields? (Psychology),
Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams
Gender Segregation in Higher Education (Sociology), Alexandra Hendley
and Maria Charles
Gender, Religion, and State in the Middle East (Sociology), Mounira M.
Charrad and Amina Zarrugh
Cognitive Processes Involved in Stereotyping (Psychology), Susan T. Fiske
and Cydney H. Dupree
Controlling the Influence of Stereotypes on One’s Thoughts (Psychology),
Patrick S. Forscher and Patricia G. Devine
Changing Family Patterns (Sociology), Kathleen Gerson and Stacy Torres
Divorce (Sociology), Juho Härkönen
Grandmothers and the Evolution of Human Sociality (Anthropology), Kristen
Hawkes and James Coxworth
Exploring Opportunities in Cultural Diversity (Political Science), David D.
Laitin and Sangick Jeon
Women Running for Office (Political Science), Jennifer L. Lawless
Gender Inequality in Educational Attainment (Sociology), Anne McDaniel
and Claudia Buchmann
Gender and Women’s Influence in Public Settings (Political Science), Tali
Mendelberg et al.
Implicit Attitude Measures (Psychology), Gregory Mitchell and Philip E.
Tetlock
Cognitive Bias Modification in Mental (Psychology), Meg M. Reuland et al.
Born This Way: Thinking Sociologically about Essentialism (Sociology),
Kristen Schilt
Stereotype Threat (Psychology), Toni Schmader and William M. Hall
Gender and the Transition to Adulthood: A Diverse Pathways View (Sociology), Ingrid Schoon
Family Income Composition (Economics), Kristin E. Smith
Gender and Work (Sociology), Christine L. Williams and Megan Tobias Neely


Feminists in Power
ANN ORLOFF and TALIA SCHIFF1

Abstract
In contrast to the scholarship allied with first and second waves of feminism, feminist analysts today survey a changed landscape of gender across the United States
and much of the world: formal exclusions and discrimination are outlawed, gender hierarchies have been undermined, and women are appearing among economic,
political, and other elites to an unprecedented degree even as gender inequalities
stubbornly persist across multiple arenas. A focal point of debate among analysts
of sexuality, political economy, and culture is the meaning and implications of pursuing gender equality in a world that no longer neatly divides into subordinated
women and powerful men, and in which the increasing number of women among the
socially advantaged problematizes traditional notions of female victimization and
male domination. In this essay, we first offer an overview of earlier approaches to
gender equality, then turn to critiques of these approaches which insist on the need
for a new starting point for considering gender equality and women’s emancipation.

Feminists in the United States and across the world are today presented with
sharply contrasting developments. Formal exclusions of women and gender
discrimination are outlawed, gender hierarchies have been undermined,
and women are appearing among economic, political, and other elites to an
unprecedented degree even as gender inequalities stubbornly persist across
multiple arenas. Yet while the rightness of formal gender equality—that
is, equal treatment under the law—is largely taken for granted, if and how
states or other institutions should press for greater equalization of resources,
rights, and responsibilities is contested. Moreover, some of feminists’
own achievements seem to be simultaneously advancing and legitimizing
neoliberal politics and state projects focused on policing and punishing
that stand in the way of further movement toward gender equality and
that reflect, at least partially, unanticipated cooptation of feminist ideas into
political projects harnessed to the demands of contemporary capitalism and
patriarchal social conservatism.
1. We are equal coauthors; the names are in alphabetical order.
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

1

2

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

This new gendered landscape poses new questions for feminists. The
guarantee of formal gender equalities and the increasing numbers of women
in the advantaged sectors of society, which reflect the partial achievement
of feminist goals, have significant implications for how we think about
core feminist values such as gender equality, women’s emancipation,
and gender justice. What does it mean, for example, to talk about female
victimization—a key trope in the fight against endemic sexual violence or
coercive labor conditions—in a world that no longer neatly divides into
subordinated women and powerful men, and in which there is an increasing
number of women among the socially advantaged, who may nonetheless
face threats to bodily integrity? What are the implications of voicing feminist
values from within the precincts of power? And what should we make of the
fact that the successes of socially conservative and neoliberal intellectual and
political projects has resulted in part from the appropriation and reshaping
of ideas originally forwarded by feminists? In this essay, we contend that
taking into consideration the institutionalization of feminist ideas within
core sites of state power and the cooptation by, and actual alliances of some
feminists with, socially conservative and neoliberal projects2 —is critical for
assessing the opportunities and dangers confronting contemporary feminist
politics.
We first offer an overview of earlier approaches to gender equality, a term
whose meaning is deeply contested. Rather than providing a static definition,
we wish to reflect on the ways in which feminism’s own understandings of,
and approach to, gender equality have significantly changed since the second wave of feminism. We then turn to what we believe to be a new and
evolving debate among analysts of sexuality, political economy, and culture
on the implications of feminism’s new relation to institutions of state power
and law in the United States, especially those that feature increasing reliance
on policing and punishment, and to the neoliberal political projects of capital
and their intellectual advocates. In calling for a new starting point for considering gender equality and women’s emancipation, these critiques shed
light on the implications of pursuing a feminist politics today. We focus on
2. The term “neoliberalism” is invoked often, we think rather too easily, without considering its specific political manifestations. Stephanie Lee Mudge (2008) provides a historically grounded definition of
the term which distinguishes among three modes of neoliberalism: the intellectual, the bureaucratic, and
the political. As an intellectual project, neoliberalism was born within the institutions of welfare capitalism and is characterized by an emphasis on the free market as the source and arbiter of human freedoms
and a disdain for politics, bureaucracies, and the welfare state. In its bureaucratic face, neoliberalism is
expressed by state policy reforms that are guided by the assumption that the state is different from the
market and that encourage competition by rejecting state regulation and management, and desacralizing institutions (such as education and health care) that were previously protected from the forces of
the market. Finally, neoliberalism signifies a market-centric politics guided by the assumption that “one
should unleash market forces whenever possible and that the reach of political decision-making should
be limited.” Neoliberal political forces have sometimes allied with socially conservative, often religiously
inspired, groups, but we maintain that it is important to distinguish between them. See also Hall and
Lamont (2013).

Feminists in Power

3

the United States, where these critiques have been most prominent, but our
suggestions may have wider applicability.

THE OLD GENDER ORDER
Even after the political victories of the first-wave feminist movement in the
early twentieth century—women’s suffrage above all—the gender order of
the mid-twentieth century was characterized by explicitly gendered formal
institutions. Informal institutions, too, reflected and reinforced gender difference and inequality and masculine power. Many organizations advocating
women’s equality—a “second wave” of feminism—emerged in the 1970s in
the United States and across the West to contest these conditions, claiming
that women shared interests in eradicating this state of affairs, despite many
differences among them.
Scholars have examined the variety of feminist responses to this unsatisfactory set of arrangements, proposing typologies based on multiple
dimensions of difference (see, e.g., Echols, 1989). Then, as is the case today,
socialist or labor feminists tended to be most concerned with fundamentally
overhauling the political economy and shifting the gendered division of
labor by encouraging women to work for pay and men to participate in
care and domestic work, as well as by developing public services; radical
feminist approaches involving the law, sexuality, and violence involved
deterring and punishing male perpetrators of violence alongside critiquing
compulsory heterosexuality, the eroticization of violence, and the nuclear
family. Liberal feminists were focused on reforming capitalist and democratic institutions by eliminating discrimination and exclusions, bringing
women into the polity, the labor force, and, ultimately, the very heart of
power. These differences in emphasis remain among current thinkers. What
changed was the commonly held assumption that had tied divergent strands
of feminist thinking together: that all women, regardless of differences in
social location, faced certain kinds of political and social exclusions. Today’s
feminist critics are distinguished from earlier generations by the realization
that feminism is no longer a countercultural minority discourse, as some
feminist ideas have been installed into government and legal institutions,
and an increasing number of women and feminists occupy positions of
formal authority and power. In the following section, we provide an
overview of some of the changes characterizing today’s gendered landscape, the context for contemporary critiques of feminism. We then turn
to these new critiques and to the questions and challenges they pose for
feminists.

4

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

THE NEW GENDER ORDER AND ITS CRITICS
The play of advantage and disadvantage across gender and other forms of
power, difference, and inequality is clearly different from that in the era of
stable gendered hierarchies. Long-standing feminist support for women’s
claims to personhood, and most importantly to the recognition of women as
individual social beings has undoubtedly found some success. While great
strides have been made in eliminating formal discrimination, we are far from
a “50/50” world, whether we look at politics, wages, care work, sexual pleasure, or almost anything else. There are also stark inequalities among women
(and men) by class, race, ethnicity, citizenship status, and household structure in access to good employment and to quality care services.
Since World War II in the global North, manufacturing has declined as
service sector employment has risen, driven importantly by outsourcing
of the work formerly done by housewives to paid service workers, many
of whom migrate to take up this work, and contributing both to women’s
increasing employment levels, and to increasing income inequality.3 The
gendered division of labor of the “male breadwinner family,” with married
women doing full-time care or part-time work plus care, and men providing
most of the income and working full time, has been modified, not ended,
as—on average—women’s time in unpaid caregiving and domestic work
has declined while men’s take-up of care work within and across households
is far less than women’s take-up of paid work.
These “complex inequalities” among women and men have been a significant focus of work on the “intersectional” nature of inequality and power,
by scholars such as Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991), Leslie McCall (2001), and
others (see Cho, Crenshaw, & McCall, 2013 for an overview). According to
these scholars, mainstream feminism is at fault for concentrating on gender
to the exclusion of its co-constitution with other forms of inequality. Pointing to the specificities of contemporary inequalities, in which some women
have achieved economic success by taking advantage of the supply of less
well-paid women service workers (see, e.g., Boris & Parreñas, 2010; Parreñas,
2001; Roberts, 1995), they argue that sexual domination and masculine violence are crossed by class, racial, and educational inequalities. They call on
feminists committed to social justice to engage with the struggles of the most
marginalized people, as a true commitment to social justice would require
feminists to refrain from seeing the world solely in terms of female injury
and male subordination. Rather, feminists must acknowledge that there are
3. Women’s income inequalities have widened over the past few decades (McCall, 2001), and women’s
labor force participation levels vary substantially by education, with highly educated women participating at higher levels than their less-educated counterparts in most Western countries (see, e.g., Evertsson
et al., 2009).

Feminists in Power

5

multiple forms of inequality and domination and that we face widening gaps
between the situations of the advantaged and the disenfranchised.
These premises are indisputable. But they do not address specifically
political questions about feminist projects, in which particular groups make
specific claims, anticipating the agreement of others. In politics, exclusion
is inevitable. The only cure is not a demand that “all”—especially the
most marginalized—be included in every political campaign, but rather
an openness to contestation. This raises a new set of questions regarding
the specific opportunities and risks when feminists are in power. What, for
example, are the implications of the fact that more women are playing on
the field of “men’s politics,” accompanied by claims that women leaders
offer both descriptive and substantive representation for other women? And
what do the complex alliances forming between feminists, state institutions,
and the law imply for traditional understandings of gender equality and
emancipation?
We contend that widening inequalities among women form a critical part
of the backdrop against which a new generation of feminist analysts consider
the implications for feminism of the incorporation of feminists into elite positions of authority in the corporate sector, civil society, and politics, and the
incorporation of feminist ideas into legal, political, and economic discourses.
According to these contemporary analysts—we will call them “the critics
of feminism in power”—feminism’s appropriation by, and complicity with,
socially conservative movements and neoliberal political elites, threaten to
stand in the way of achieving gender equality. This set of critiques is the focus
of the next section.
THE CRITICS OF FEMINISTS IN POWER
Focused on feminists’ increasing access to power and changed relation
to states, a new generation of analysts point to significant shifts within
feminism with respect to political economy and sexuality. In terms of
political economy, feminism has, these critics allege, shifted away from a
redistributive model of justice—a model that was predominant on the left
and center-left since the late nineteenth century, centering on state remedies
for the inequities and oppression generated by capitalism and, in the case
of feminism, “capitalist patriarchy”—to one that emphasizes individual
“choice” and paid employment as the routes toward women’s emancipation.
This shift echoes changes in the political and intellectual landscapes for
“parties of movement” and left-liberal organizations as state-funded and
publicly provided services and benefits, and state regulation of the economy
have given way to market-based remedies for social problems. In the United
States, especially, neoliberal policy prescriptions for the deregulation of

6

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

the economy and the rolling back of programs of social security were
joined to the buildup of the state’s capacities for policing, punishment, and
imprisonment.
Critical works on feminist campaigns against sexual violence have been key
sources of new understandings of the consequences of feminists’ alliances
with power and deployment of the law as the tool to confront and disarm
patriarchal practices. They show how feminists concerned with sexual violence and domination have moved away from critiques of pervasive masculine power toward remedies centered on incarceration and punishment
for gender-based violence, seen primarily as perpetrated by outsiders rather
than intimates, and have started forming alliances with social conservatives
who want to strengthen state punishment of perpetrators. These alliances,
they contend, have problematic and even dangerous implications when carried out from within the precincts of power.
Analysts of feminist antiviolence efforts have pointed to the complex
interrelations between feminism, neoliberalism, and projects that encourage
incarceration, policing, and punishment. Richie (2012) argues that feminist antiviolence activists had a part—unintended—in creating harsher
punishment policies in the United States, in a context in which right-wing
forces had succeeded in disinvesting from poor urban communities and
shredding the safety net while building up the state’s incarcerating and
policing powers. Feminist demands for greater public and legal recognition
of the harm caused by sexual violence served as an inspiration for broader
campaigns for criminalization. This has had damaging effects on the most
vulnerable women, who may face imprisonment themselves or have few
resources when the men in their households are imprisoned, and worked
to enhance the transformation of the United States into a “prison nation.”
Bumiller (2008) notes that these campaigns worked to legitimize an agenda
premised on the notion that the maintenance of the social order depends
on the incarceration and punishment of, “violent perpetrators who preyed
on innocent victims,” and transformed the initial feminist sensibility that
any man can be a rapist into a campaign driven by fear of strangers.
Those strands of feminism which emphasized personal responsibility, the
demonization of the sex-predator, and the valorization of the private family
received precedence over those which did not adapt themselves to the
ascending neoliberal logic.
Feminist antitrafficking campaigns have also fueled neoliberal agendas.
Chapkis (2003) shows how the focus on sex-trafficking legislation, which
assumes a distinction between “innocent victims” and “guilty migrants,”
works to legitimize enhanced border control and antiimmigration policies.
Brennan (2008) and Shih (2013) point to the ways in which the exclusive
focus on sex trafficking over all other forms of exploitive labor legitimizes

Feminists in Power

7

the incarceration of migrants and obscures coercive labor conditions. Rhacel
Parreñas (2001: see also Boris and Parreñas 2010) has argued that feminist
antitrafficking campaigns which seek the abolition of prostitution—thereby
depriving sex workers of their livelihood—hide the fact that the key issue
for sex workers and care workers alike, particularly those without the
legal protections afforded by citizenship, is coerced and unregulated labor
and not “sex slavery.” Here, switching the focus away from regulation of
exploitive labor relations dovetails with neoliberal agendas, which have
been relentlessly antiregulation.
Elizabeth Bernstein (2007, 2010, 2012) focuses on the problematic alliances
formed between neoliberal elites and feminist antitrafficking campaigns.
She argues that the promotion of a neoliberal law and order agenda is
not an unintended consequence of feminist campaigns but rather one that
some feminists deliberately pursued, while some corporate elites have
used antitrafficking campaigns to burnish their brands. Self-interested
and predominantly white middle class feminists situated the family as a
privatized sphere of safety to be protected by the criminal justice system.
Bernstein thus describes the alliance formed between neoliberalism and
feminism as a two-sided relationship rather than a one-sided appropriation;
neoliberalism supported versions of feminism which idealized the private
family, reinforced notions of personal responsibility and condemned public
disorder, just as feminists purposefully joined forces with neoliberal projects
because it served their self-interests.
Analyses of gendered welfare institutions have also contributed to new
understandings of the complex alliances forming between neoliberal political agendas and the interests of women. In the United States, many have
criticized the approach taken by self-described feminists to the consequential
1996 law that “reformed” US social assistance, passed by a Republican-led
Congress and accepted by President Bill Clinton and most Democrats; the
law was considered by many to represent the apogee of neoliberal policy
influence as well as the imposition of a socially conservative and coercive
set of regulations on welfare recipients. Although the law eliminated the
right to social assistance and mandated that welfare recipients, the majority of women in Congress, including feminists and most other progressives
(e.g., the Congressional Black Caucus) went along with the 1996 law (see, e.g.,
Mink, 1998; the essays collected in Mink, 1999). Nor did feminist organizations mount protests of welfare reform. This was partly because it seemed to
be a lost and unpopular cause and partly because rank and file members of
feminist groups such as the National Organization for Women (NOW) supported employment for welfare mothers. This element of the reform made
sense given their commitment to encouraging women’s employment as a
route to gender equality (Orloff, 2006). Mink (1998) indicted “middle-class,

8

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

white” feminists and feminist political leaders for abandoning poor single
mothers, overwhelmingly women of color, in US welfare reform, in favor
of promoting their interests in employment. Others see the problem as the
lack of the public support in the United States (e.g., paid parental leaves,
child care) that have accompanied such mandates in other countries, such as
Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland (e.g., Orloff, 2006; see Leira, 2002;
Lundqvist, 2011 on Nordic developments).
It is not only in the United States that women’s employment has been
encouraged by reforms of welfare states (see, e.g., Esping-Andersen, 1999,
2009; Korpi, 2000; Morgan, 2006; O’Connor, Orloff, & Shaver, 1999). Thus,
even when critical of other aspects of neoliberal-inspired change, many
feminists argued that women’s paid employment—which overlapped with
the “activation agenda” of neoliberal prescription—could be understood as
indicative of progress toward gender equality when it was accompanied by
supportive services. Some analysts, prominently Nancy Fraser (2013) see in
this coincidence the evidence for broader claims that second-wave feminism
implicitly supports some elements of neoliberalism, yet others (e.g., Orloff,
2009) are more dubious that gender-egalitarian forces, and in particular,
their support for women’s employment, have been so completely absorbed
by neoliberalism. Janet Newman (2013) sees alliances between feminism and
neoliberal state projects as two-sided; while feminism has had to adapt to
neoliberalism, neoliberalism has also had to adapt itself to feminist projects,
demanding equality, rights, and welfare benefits.
CONCLUSION: RETHINKING THE MEANINGS
OF A FEMINIST POLITICS
The upshot of these analyses is that some feminists are in power in a world
in which women are no longer only victims, nor are they, formally speaking,
second-class citizens. Implicit to all is a frustration with traditional feminist
understandings of female subordination and male domination and a search
for a new language by which to address persisting gender inequalities at a
time when women are empowered precisely by deploying what might be
thought of as “perverse” or deformed variants of feminism.
While they diverge both in the subject matter of their analysis and in
whether they view feminists’ complicity with neoliberal elites as intended,
these emerging contemporary critiques of feminists in power all seem to
point to the ways in which traditional feminist ideas have been mobilized,
and in turn transformed by state elites, the members of which include
self-identified feminists. For these analysts, the actions of feminists in power
are seen as colluding with a broader neoliberal project of disembedding
capitalism, promoting deregulation, marketization, and employment for all,

Feminists in Power

9

to the exclusion of other changes in social relations that would be needed
for women’s emancipation to become a reality.
Two recent attempts to grapple with the fate of contemporary feminism
as an emancipatory political project are Janet Halley’s Split Decisions (2006)
and Nancy Fraser’s Fortunes of Feminism (2013). Their critique of contemporary feminism—seemingly focused on the United States, but presented as a
general challenge—emerges from a joint premise, shared also by scholars of
intersectionality, that a concentration on injustices to women to the exclusion
of others who suffer social injustice, stands in the way of a true emancipatory
feminist politics. Feminists’ increasing power within state elites and the perverse alliances formed between some feminists and neoliberal elites, make
feminism’s ostensible commitment to all women problematic, they claim.
At the same time, Halley and Fraser diverge in their view of the implications of this state of affairs on a contemporary feminist politics. For Halley,
feminists’ increasing representation among the wielders of power—a phenomenon which she terms governance feminism—leaves us no other option
than to “take a break” from feminism. Tracing the past two decades of theoretical work on sexuality in the United States, she concludes that all feminist
theories, share three core notions: femininity is distinguished from masculinity; femininity is defined by its subordinated relation to masculinity, and
feminism’s goal is to put an end to such subordination. These three core
notions have defined feminism from its inception and have not substantially
changed. What has changed is the standpoint from which they are articulated. While feminist ideas were initially articulated from the standpoint of a
countercultural minority, since the early 1990s there has been an “incremental, but by now quite noticeable installation of feminists and feminist ideas
in actual legal-institutional power” (Halley, 2006, p. 340).
In Halley’s view, feminism’s commitment to women, and to the particularistic vision of justice implied by this commitment, was justified when
feminism spoke from the standpoint of a countercultural minority, but is no
longer when applied by state elites and institutions. First, by continuously
viewing itself as the underdog and women as eternal victims, “governance
feminism” disregards not only the possibility that women are at times instigators of conflict but also occludes the suffering and death of men. Forms
of violence and domination that cannot be translated into male domination
and female victimization thus fall into the background. Second, feminism’s
commitment to female innocence encourages a simplistic rights discourse in
which no showing of a specific harm is needed in order to determine injury
to women. This in turn invites feminists to turn to criminal/social control
visions of law which speak the language of total prohibition.

10

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Thus, in her call to “take a break from feminism,” Halley is not arguing
for a complete abandonment of feminism’s core tenets but rather for repositioning feminism as one political project alongside others. According to
Halley, feminist politics can complement, but not replace, other projects for
racial, economic, and social justice. In her view, only by refusing to view the
world solely through the lens of feminism can we potentially mitigate the
dangerous consequences of pursuing a totalistic feminist agenda from within
positions of power.
Fraser (2013) advances a different approach in The Fortunes of Feminism:
feminists should reinvest in feminist ideology rather than “take a break” from
it. For Fraser, the change within feminism is not a result of feminists’ growing power within state elites but rather a response to changing social and
political circumstances—the demise of communism, the surge of free market
ideology and the rise of identity politics. According to Fraser, in the initial
stages of second-wave feminism, feminists critical of the exclusive framing
of injustice as unfair economic distribution attempted to expand the meaning
of justice to include matters previously considered “private,” such as culture,
sexuality, and housework. As a result, they formulated a critique that integrated three analytically distinct dimensions of gender justice: economic justice, political justice, and cultural justice. These were woven together into one
general critique in the context of state-organized “Keynesian welfare” capitalism, which was simultaneously organized around the needs of households
“headed” by breadwinning men. However, in the changed context of neoliberalism they came to be separated from one another and from the critique of
capitalism that had initially integrated them. The disintegration of feminist
critique allowed for the selective incorporation of feminist ideas, creating a
perverse affinity between neoliberalism and feminism, as when feminists’
support for women’s employment was taken up by US welfare reformers,
but denuded of feminists’ demand for supportive services, or when feminist
critiques of the family wage and traditional masculine authority supplied
neoliberalism a good part of the “romance” that invests flexible capitalism
with a higher meaning and moral point. According to Fraser, it is this perverse affinity which also explains why feminism thrived in the context of
neoliberalism and became a broad based mass social phenomenon.
Halley and Fraser thus provide us with two contrasting approaches for
grappling with the fate of contemporary feminism. Halley argues that feminism has been, and always will be, defined by its commitment to women
and by the particularistic vision of justice this commitment implies. To argue
otherwise is to misunderstand the nature of politics. Thus, rather than (fruitlessly) trying to turn feminism into a universal and all-encompassing emancipatory political project, Halley asks us to acknowledge its limitations and to

Feminists in Power

11

reposition feminism as such. Fraser on the other hand, believes that by reintegrating the dimensions of redistribution, recognition, and representation
that had splintered in the previous era, and by refocusing feminism’s critique
on constraints that arise from market-mediated processes of subordination,
feminism can disrupt the easy passage from feminism to neoliberalism.
What then is the fate of feminism? Is it possible to disrupt the “easy passage from feminism to neoliberalism”? And if not, are we left with the choice
either of “taking a break” from feminism, to which, after all, many of us are
strongly connected, or of surrendering to an inevitable alliance with politically ascendant neoliberal projects and remedies centered on incarceration
and punishment that are inimical to the concerns of most women and repugnant to many of us who would call ourselves feminists?
To answer the question of whether feminists’ increasing exercise of power
entails a perverse alliance with neoliberal elites or rather opens up spaces
for alternative forms of claim making and political alliances is beyond the
scope of this essay, but we would contend that an answer will require empirical analyses of historically and spatially specific contexts in which feminists
have pursued their diverse political projects. Rather, our goal in this initial
overview is to shed light on the fact that any discussion of contemporary
feminist politics must take into consideration two interrelated, yet separate,
developments: first, that the rise of second-wave feminism coincided with
the rise of new forms of politics on the right—both socially conservative and
neoliberal intellectual and political projects have proliferated and enjoyed
political successes. It does seem that part of their successes has resulted from
the appropriation and reshaping of ideas and values originally forwarded
by feminists. And, second, that the installation of feminist ideas within state
elite institutions works to reshape and redefine these (feminist) ideas themselves. An exploration of these coinciding developments and the interrelations between them is critical for a full understanding of the implications of
pursuing an emancipatory feminist politics today.
REFERENCES
Bernstein, E. (2007). Temporarily yours: Intimacy, authenticity, and the commerce of sex.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Bernstein, E. (2010). Militarized humanitarianism meets carceral feminism: The politics of sex, rights, and freedom in contemporary anti-trafficking campaigns. Signs:
Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 36(1), 45–71.
Bernstein, E. (2012). Carceral politics as gender justice? The ‘traffic in women’ and
neoliberal circuits of crime, sex, and rights. Theory and Society, 41(3), 233–259.
Boris, E., & Parreñas, R. S. (2010). Intimate labors: Cultures, technologies, and the politics
of care. Stanford, CA: Stanford Social Sciences.

12

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Brennan, D. (2008). Competing claims of victimhood? Foreign and domestic victims
of trafficking in the United States. Sexuality Research & Social Policy, 5(4), 45–61.
Bumiller, K. (2008). In an abusive state: How neoliberalism appropriated the feminist movement against sexual violence. Durham, England: Duke University Press.
Chapkis, W. (2003). Trafficking, migration, and the law: Protecting innocents, punishing immigrants. Gender & Society, 17(6), 923–937.
Cho, S., Crenshaw, K., & McCall, L. (2013). Toward a field of intersectionality studies:
Theory, applications, and praxis. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society,
38(4), 785–810.
Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and
violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241–1299.
Echols, A. (1989). Daring to be bad: Radical feminism in America, 1967–1975. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Esping-Andersen, G. (1999). Social foundations of postindustrial economies. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Esping-Andersen, G. (2009). The incomplete revolution: Adapting to women’s new
roles. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Evertsson, M., England, P., Mooi-Reci, I., Hermsen, J., de Bruijn, J., & Cotter, D.
(2009). Is gender inequality greater at lower or higher educational levels? Common patterns in the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United States. Social Politics,
16(2), 210–241.
Fraser, N. (2013). Fortunes of feminism: From state-managed capitalism to neoliberal crisis.
London, England: Verso.
Hall, P. A., & Lamont, M. (2013). Social resilience in the neoliberal era. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Halley, J. E. (2006). Split decisions: How and why to take a break from feminism. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Korpi, W. (2000). Faces of inequality: Gender, class, and patterns of inequalities in
different types of welfare states. Social Politics, 7(2), 127–191.
Leira, A. (2002). Working parents and the welfare state: Family change and policy reform in
Scandinavia. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Lundqvist, A. S. (2011). Family policy paradoxes: Gender equality and labour market regulation in Sweden, 1930–2010. Bristol, England: Policy Press.
McCall, L. (2001). Complex inequality: Gender, class, and race in the new economy. New
York, NY: Routledge.
Mink, G. (1998). Welfare’s end. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Mink, G. (Ed.) (1999). Whose welfare? Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Morgan, K. J. (2006). Working mothers and the welfare state: Religion and the politics of
work-family policies in Western Europe and the United States. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.
Mudge, S. L. (2008). What is neo-liberalism? Socio-Economic Review, 6(4), 703–731.
Newman, J. (2013). Spaces of power: Feminism, neoliberalism and gendered labor.
Social Politics, 20(2), 200–221.

Feminists in Power

13

O’Connor, J. S., Orloff, A. S., & Shaver, S. (1999). States, markets, families: Gender, liberalism, and social policy in Australia, Canada, Great Britain, and the United States.
Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Orloff, A. S. (2006). From maternalism to ‘employment for all’: State policies to promote women’s employment across the affluent democracies. In J. Levy (Ed.), The
state after statism: New state activities in the era of globalization and liberalization (pp.
230–268). Cambridge, England: Harvard University Press.
Orloff, A. S. (2009). Should feminists aim for gender symmetry?: Why the
dual-earner/dual-carer model may not be every feminist’s utopia. In J. Gornick
& M. Meyers (Eds.), Gender equality: Transforming family divisions of labor (pp.
129–160). New York, NY: Verso.
Parreñas, R. S. (2001). Servants of globalization: Women, migration and domestic work.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Richie, B. (2012). Arrested justice: Black women, violence, and America’s prison nation.
New York: New York University Press.
Roberts, D. (1995). Race, gender, and the value of mothers’ work. Social Politics, 2(2),
195–207.
Shih, E. (2013). Health and rights at the margins: Human trafficking and HIV/AIDS
amongst Jingpo ethnic communities in Ruili City, China. Anti-Trafficking Review,
(2), 119–136.

ANN SHOLA ORLOFF SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Ann Shola Orloff is Professor of Sociology and Political Science and Board
of Lady Managers of the Colombian Exposition Chair at Northwestern University. She received her BA from Harvard University in 1975, spent several
years as a labor organizer, then went on to receive her PhD from Princeton University in 1985. Orloff’s areas of interest include political sociology,
social policy, gender studies, global, transnational, historical and comparative sociology, and social and feminist theory. Her research focuses on gender,
social policies, and feminist politics. Orloff is the coeditor of Remaking Modernity: Politics, History and Sociology (with Julia Adams and Elisabeth Clemens;
Duke, 2005) and the author of States, Markets, Families: Gender, Liberalism and
Social Policy in Australia, Canada, Great Britain and the United States (with Julia
O’Connor and Sheila Shaver; Cambridge, 1999), in addition to other books
and articles in journals including Sociological Theory, Politics & Gender, Social
Science History, Sociologica, Journal of Policy History, and American Sociological Review. Her work has been translated into Italian, French, Spanish, and
German. She is at work on a manuscript, Toward a Gender-Open Future? Transformations in Gender, Global Capitalism and Systems of Social Provision and Regulation, in which she examines shifts in the gendered character of welfare
and employment policies in the United States, Sweden, and other capitalist
democracies and asks what are the implications for gender equality and for

14

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

feminism. Orloff continues to coedit the journal she helped to found, Social
Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society. She was the President of the Social Science History Association, 2009–2010, and hosted the
annual conference in Chicago in November 2010. From 2002–2010 she was
president of RC 19, the Research Committee on Poverty, Social Welfare, and
Social Policy of the International Sociological Association. Orloff has held visiting positions at the European University Institute (Florence, Italy), Sciences
Po (Paris), the Institute for Future Studies (Stockholm), and the Australian
National University (Canberra). She is be a Visiting Fellow at the Center for
Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford in 2014–2015, was
a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation and has been the recipient of fellowships from the German Marshall Fund, ACLS, and AAUW. At
Northwestern, she has served as Director of Gender Studies and Chair of the
Sociology Department.
TALIA SCHIFF SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Talia Schiff is a JD-PhD candidate at Northwestern University (Department
of Sociology and School of Law). She is a graduate of the Adi Lautman
Interdisciplinary Program for Outstanding Students at Tel Aviv University
from which she received her MA in Sociology in 2009. Schiff’s research
interests include law, political sociology, gender, culture, and historical
and comparative sociology. Her research examines the processes through
which social norms and institutions inform legal categories. Her current
project sets to examine the evolution of legal reliefs from deportation in
U.S. immigration law. More specifically, it explores how a new regime of
asylum policy commenced in the 1980s fueled a significant shift in how
classes of persons eligible for relief came to be defined in U.S. law and
political discourse. Schiff is the author of the paper “Between Minor and
Major Identity: Jaqueline Kahanoff and the ‘Israelization’ of Levantinism,”
which appeared in the journal Theory and Criticism [Hebrew]. Shiff served
as the coeditor of the Annual Journal of the Interdisciplinary Program for
Outstanding Students (2005–2006) and was on the editorial board of the
Northwestern Journal of Law and Social Policy (2013–2014).
RELATED ESSAYS
The Underrepresentation of Women in Elective Office (Political Science),
Sarah F. Anzia
The Sexual Division of Labor (Anthropology), Rebecca Bliege Bird and Brian
F. Codding
Stereotype Content (Sociology), Beatrice H. Capestany and Lasana T. Harris

Feminists in Power

15

Why So Few Women in Mathematically Intensive Fields? (Psychology),
Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams
Gender Segregation in Higher Education (Sociology), Alexandra Hendley
and Maria Charles
Gender, Religion, and State in the Middle East (Sociology), Mounira M.
Charrad and Amina Zarrugh
Cognitive Processes Involved in Stereotyping (Psychology), Susan T. Fiske
and Cydney H. Dupree
Controlling the Influence of Stereotypes on One’s Thoughts (Psychology),
Patrick S. Forscher and Patricia G. Devine
Changing Family Patterns (Sociology), Kathleen Gerson and Stacy Torres
Divorce (Sociology), Juho Härkönen
Grandmothers and the Evolution of Human Sociality (Anthropology), Kristen
Hawkes and James Coxworth
Exploring Opportunities in Cultural Diversity (Political Science), David D.
Laitin and Sangick Jeon
Women Running for Office (Political Science), Jennifer L. Lawless
Gender Inequality in Educational Attainment (Sociology), Anne McDaniel
and Claudia Buchmann
Gender and Women’s Influence in Public Settings (Political Science), Tali
Mendelberg et al.
Implicit Attitude Measures (Psychology), Gregory Mitchell and Philip E.
Tetlock
Cognitive Bias Modification in Mental (Psychology), Meg M. Reuland et al.
Born This Way: Thinking Sociologically about Essentialism (Sociology),
Kristen Schilt
Stereotype Threat (Psychology), Toni Schmader and William M. Hall
Gender and the Transition to Adulthood: A Diverse Pathways View (Sociology), Ingrid Schoon
Family Income Composition (Economics), Kristin E. Smith
Gender and Work (Sociology), Christine L. Williams and Megan Tobias Neely



Media

Feminists in Power