Jan 9

Jan 9 Capitalism, Feminism, and She Spends

When we began talking internally about the work we’re doing at She Spends, Jemma, our designer, had a brilliant idea.

We had been trying to figure out what it meant for us to be teaching our community -- a feminist, intersectional, unconventional group -- how to succeed in a system that we view as fundamentally broken.

What Jemma came up with was this:

“We’re exploiting capitalism to a feminist end, rather than the other way around.”

Let me explain. In recent years, we’ve seen a crop of new brands, particularly in the personal finance sector, that are essentially doing the opposite -- exploiting feminism for profit.

Need some examples? This exploitation is how Ivanka Trump is able to claim that she and her business ventures deserve support, simply because she is a woman. It’s the self-proclaimed girlbosses who do nothing more to “fight the patriarchy” than exist in a corporate role, it’s every feminist slogan slapped onto a t-shirt and sold so a corporation can profit. It’s how self-care, an idea with its roots in the Black Panther party and American feminism, became a way to sell you more skincare products than you know what to do with.

Corporate feminism [n.]: a method of convincing us to buy something instead of helping us work to create a more fair, just, and equal world. Instead of working for all women’s equality, corporate feminism focuses on uplifting women who are already in positions of power so they can rake in more money. “That girlboss planner is quintessential corporate feminism.”

So what does exploiting capitalism to a feminist end look like? It means that we’re working to educate you on how to survive in a system designed to exploit nearly everyone for the benefit of a few people at the top.

We believe that there’s a world where you’ve figured out how to pay rent on time each month, where you understand what the newscaster on CNBC means when she talks about the bond market, and where you know enough to critique a system that wasn’t built for all of us. In other words, we believe that there exists a balance in being a feminist who cares about finance. We need to survive in a capitalist system while exploring alternatives where we can all thrive.

Before we get any further, it’s important to pause here to define capitalism: an economic and political system in which a nation’s trade and industry are controlled by companies for profit, instead of by the government.

Key to capitalism is the idea of “capital,” which can simply be defined as wealth. There are different types of capital, according to philosopher Karl Marx, who noted that “natural” capital consists of natural resources like trees or land that can be sold for profit, and “social” capital, which consists of one’s network and ability to influence social mores.

In your own life, capital could be cold hard cash. It could be the fancy handbag your mom got you for your birthday. It could be the fact that you know an industry executive with lots of power.

Some economists believe that a capitalist system offers the greatest benefit to workers and buyers. In a free market, buyers will ostensibly only pay for what a service or good is worth, no more, and no less. Meanwhile, workers will only do the work if it is worth their time. As a result, they will be fairly compensated.

The belief is that this is what drives innovation: a worker will want to create a better service or good so they can get paid more, which will then allow them to buy more. A buyer will constantly look for the best value, which means prices stay contained.

But for womxn, this system is particularly brutal. Scholar Barbara Ehrenreich wrote that:

“There is no way to understand sexism as it acts on our lives without putting it in the historical context of capitalism.”

Our labor has, historically, not been given the same value that work traditionally carried out by men. Even as that is the case, the uncompensated labor of housework and motherhood was -- and for many still is -- aspirational.

Scholar Silvia Federici wrote,

“By denying housework a wage and transforming it into an act of love, capital has killed many birds with one stone. First of all, it has got a hell of a lot of work almost for free, and it has made sure that women, far from struggling against it, would seek that work as the best thing in life.”

Beyond being uncompensated, the work of reproduction and housework can be viewed as one major thing that keeps capitalism chugging along. The book, Feminism for the 99 Percent, argued that in a capitalist system, reproduction is an essential tool for the creation of a labor force. A purely capitalist society views human reproduction as simply a means to gain more profits for the few, rather than benefits for the many.

“Far from being valued in its own right, the making of people is treated as a mere means to the making of profit.”

Beyond womxn’s work in the home, we are treated to lower wages, higher standards for what passes as “professionalism” in the workplace, and fewer opportunities, merely for the fact that we present as womxn. This epidemic is far worse for womxn of color, disabled womxn, queer womxn, and trans and nonbinary womxn.

As for the workers in minimum wage or below minimum wage jobs? Womxn account for 61 percent of that labor force. In other words, womxn are taking jobs at fast food chains, as house cleaners, and caregivers to provide for their families at a much higher rate than men do.

Corporate feminism, at its core, exists to uphold these capitalist structures. The ability of certain women to succeed is dependent on a veritable army of minimum wage workers covering everything from making their daily breakfasts to mopping the gym after they workout.

As is written in Feminism for the 99 Percent, the point of corporate feminism is “not equality, but meritocracy.”

At She Spends, we’re calling bullshit on this belief. We reject the notion that things are black and white. We know that we need to be able to buy groceries and start a retirement fund, but those things don’t abdicate us from our responsibility to push for change. We can see that the system is stacked against us, and we are actively working to change that through education and giving back.

Want to learn more? Here’s what we recommend:

(note: we’ve linked all the source material we quoted from above).