Introduction Chapter 1: Feminism

Chapter 2: Consumerism
2.1Marketization of Present-Day Feminism.
In this section, the relationship between mainstream feminism and globalization will be discussed. Mainstream feminism seems to aid neoliberalism more than it helps to address present-day issues concerning women’s equality in contemporary patriarchal society around the globe. Feminism is now mobilized as a means to serve the economy, enabled by the junction between feminism and neoliberalism, of which the self-help industry is the most evident example of products and services that target women.
At the present moment, however, mainstream feminism is used to exploit women, rather than enforce their position in society. The focus on personal growth and the individual are perilous because it negates a responsibility toward society, and shifts this focus to the individual. As Kelly, Burton and Regan explain, “[t]he problem which had no name in the 1950s, and which in the 1970s was clearly named as one of men’s power and men’s behavior, has, by a complicated alchemy, been transformed into women’s unwillingness to use their own power, and their need to increase their self-esteem” (80).³ Somehow, what began as a problem created by men, turned into women’s lack of self-esteem. As Gloria Steinem puts it, the problem was tranformed from “the personal is political” to “the political is personal” (17). Consequently, if you are not able to become a self-governing individual, this could be seen as a failure to fulfil one’s duty, as required by the social system. “The individual change promoted by commercialized feminism is not only for the purpose of creating personal satisfaction but also is intended to create citizens who will regulate and govern themselves” (Goodkind 400). This, on a larger scale, benefits the social system more than it does the individual, as it focuses more on what the individual can do for the social system, instead of focusing on what the social system can do for the individual. In this way, the individual is held accountable for what happens on a larger scale. By turning the personal into the political, “what is packaged for women to use to make themselves happier and more confident will also shape them into the kind of citizens needed for the successful functioning of the neoliberal state” (Goodkind 400). If we become self-governing individuals, we also become self-governing citizens. Goodkind goes on to provide us with more evidence of neoliberalism’s impact on feminism, namely, “an increasing divergence between academic and popular feminism”, and, “within popular versions of feminism, a shift in the location of the problem to be addressed from outside the self (e.g. patriarchal society) to within the self (e.g. low self-esteem)” (401). This perpetuates the problematics surrounding women’s positions in society, because it denies the existence of a societal problem, keeping women marginalized, and making them believe that they are responsible for their own marginalization.
2.2Self-Help Books as a Billion Dollar Industry.
Self-help books have targeted female readers for the past few decades, and managed to maintain “the privileged position in addressing ‘women’s issues’ in the textual marketplace, offering ‘solutions’ to women’s problems that often borrow from the discourse of feminism even as they work against feminism’s fundamental tenets” (Schrager 177). It is contradictive for a text to offer certain methods to achieve agency and autonomy, if those very terms mean that you have the freedom to act out your own, personal desires. Autonomy can never be reached if it is offered to you by another person, because there are still power relations at play when you need a dominant industry, such as the self-help industry, to allow you to act a certain way. Complete autonomy can only be reached if we no longer have self-help literature, or any other type of authority that tells women how they should behave, develop, and even become autonomous. The contradistinction that exists within the post-feminist voice of Gilbert, perfectly illustrates how being told to become independent is far from the same as the realization that, as an individual, you already are independent. One of the other issues is that it connects spiritualism to consumerism, which causes a lot of women to be dually marginalized, due to their finances not allowing them to be able to follow Gilbert’s example. In this way, spiritualism comes with a price tag, and if you cannot afford it, you cannot truly find yourself. As Gilbert herself puts it: “I have been driven to find inner peace with methods that might seem a bit drastic for the general populace . . . I don’t know if I have much of a choice, though” (163). She goes on to explain that if you really want change, drastic methods are required.