Review - End of Equality: The Only Way Is Women’s Liberation

Abstract

‘In recent years, at least since the financial crisis of 2008, it has become acceptable to talk, once again, about capitalism, and to use words like class and crisis. A new scepticism towards capitalism and its promises of emancipation and empowerment has arisen in the face of widening inequality and the soaring wealth of the super-rich. Occupy Wall Street encouraged us to think of society as split between the 1% and the 99% and a slew of books and documentaries started to question the logic and efficacy of the free market. Hence, neoliberal capitalism and its policies of free trade, globalisation and austerity began to be put under scrutiny for a wide and bitter audience. Within these debates, one issue that has arisen is that of sexual and gender equality. Whilst advocates of capitalist liberal democracy often paint an optimistic picture of the future in which sexual inequality will be inevitably eroded by the balancing effect of the free market and individual empowerment, this view has recently come under fire from feminists and other activists who point to the stagnation or in some cases reversal of this supposedly inevitable path to equality. Beatrix Campbell’s short manifesto, End of Equality: The Only Way Is Women’s Liberation , is just such an attack and a particularly withering one at that.’