The feminist case for capitalism is one of the most powerful arguments nobody seems to be making. Zoe Strimpel has decided to make it anyway.
A columnist for The Telegraph and author of Good Slut: How Money, Sex and Power Set Women Free, Zoe joins CapX editor Marc Sidwell to make the conservative case for winning over feminists at the next election. Her argument is simple and unfashionable: throughout history, the ability to earn money and keep it has been the most reliable route to female autonomy — more so, in many contexts, than legislation or social movements alone. The reflexive anti-capitalism of contemporary feminism, she contends, is not just intellectually confused but actively harmful to the women it claims to represent.
Zoe traces how feminism, born from the socialist left of the 1970s, was briefly hijacked by the Sheryl Sandbergs of the early 2000s before swinging back hard against so-called neoliberal feminism — leaving young women with a politics that discourages ambition, pathologises wealth and mistakes destruction for progress. The polling bears it out: young women are now among the most enthusiastic supporters of anti-capitalist parties.
Nobody, right or left, is making much of an economic argument at all: cultural questions are more vivid, more emotionally compelling and considerably easier than engaging seriously with how prosperity is actually created. But Zoe thinks that style of politics might be reaching its use by date.
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