“A Feminism Aimed at Liberating All Women Must Be Anti-Capitalist”
Women workers, people of color, and white men in the Rust Belt may not see each other as natural allies. But as Nancy Fraser tells Jacobin, there is a path to uniting the social majority — so long as we recognize our common enemy in capitalism.

People demonstrate during International Women’s Day on March 08, 2019 in Madrid, Spain. (Pablo Blazquez Dominguez / Getty Images)
In the fight for equality, not all feminisms are just the same. Just as the youth climate strikes are utterly different in spirit to corporate greenwashing, the annual strikes on International Women’s Day have shown that the liberalism advanced by the likes of Hillary Clinton is far from the only kind of feminist politics.
Few writers have been as clear on this point as Nancy Fraser, a sharp critic of those feminisms that seek only to put more women in boardrooms and parliaments. Her Feminism for the 99%, written with Cinzia Arruzza and Tithi Bhattacharya, instead argues for a feminism focused on the needs of the social majority.
This isn’t a matter of limiting feminism to narrow workplace issues — far from it. Instead, the feminism for the 99 percent is about how to rally the social majority behind a common agenda, uniting the material interests of working people with fronts of struggle like anti-racism, LGBT liberation, and the fight against male violence.