Fortunes of Feminism by Nancy Fraser Page A

defend a non-identitarian version of the latter. Part III contemplates prospects for a revival of feminist radicalism in a time of neoliberal crisis. Advocating a “post-Westphalian” turn, the essays comprising this section situate struggles for women’s emancipation in relation to two other sets of social forces: those bent on extending the sway of markets, on the one hand, and those seeking to “defend society” from them, on the other. Diagnosing a “dangerous liaison” between feminism and marketization, these essays urge feminists to break that unholy alliance and forge a principled new one, between “emancipation” and “social protection.”
    In general, then, the concerns shaping the volume’s organization are both systematic and historical. A record of one theorist’s ongoing efforts to track the movement’s trajectory, the book assesses feminism’s current prospects and future possibilities. Let me elaborate.
    When second-wave feminism first erupted on the world stage, the advanced capitalist states of Western Europe and North America were still enjoying the unprecedented wave of prosperity that followed World War II. Utilizing new tools of Keynesian economic steering, they had apparently learned to counteract business downturns and to guide national economic development so as to secure near full employment for men. Incorporating once unruly labor movements, the advanced capitalist countries had built more or less extensive welfare states and institutionalized national cross-class solidarity. To be sure, this historic class compromise rested on a series of gender and racial-ethnic exclusions, not to mention external neocolonial exploitation. But those potential fault lines tended to remain latent in a social-democratic imaginary that foregrounded class redistribution. The result was a prosperous North Atlantic belt of mass-consumption societies, which had apparently tamed social conflict.
    In the 1960s, however, the relative calm of this “Golden Age of capitalism” was suddenly shattered. 1 In an extraordinary international explosion, radical youth took to the streets—at first to oppose the Vietnam War and racial segregation in the US. Soon they began to question core features of capitalist modernity that social democracy had heretofore naturalized: materialism, consumerism, and “the achievement ethic”; bureaucracy, corporate culture, and “social control”; sexual repression, sexism, and heteronormativity. Breaking through the normalized political routines of the previous era, new social actors formed new social movements, with second-wave feminism among the most visionary.
    Along with their comrades in other movements, the feminists of this era recast the radical imaginary. Transgressing a political culture that had privileged actors who cast themselves as nationally bounded and politically tamed classes, they challenged the gender exclusions of social democracy. Problematizing welfare paternalism and the bourgeois family, they exposed the deep androcentrism of capitalist society. Politicizing “the personal,” they expanded the boundaries of contestation beyond socioeconomic distribution—to include housework, sexuality, and reproduction.
    In fact, the initial wave of postwar feminism had an ambivalent relationship to social democracy. On the one hand, much of the early second wave rejected the latter’s étatism and its tendency to marginalize class and social injustices other than “maldistribution.” On the other hand, many feminists presupposed key features of the socialist imaginary as a basis for more radical designs. Taking for granted the welfare state’s solidaristic ethos and prosperity-securing steering capacities, they too were committed to taming markets and promoting equality. Acting from a critique that was at once radical and immanent, early second-wave feminists sought less to