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What does neoliberal feminism ask of us?

A reading guide to the difference between changing an individual life and changing the conditions around it.

The Review Desk · 5 November 2026 · 3 min read

In this essay
  1. Begin with a question, not a label
  2. Read across three levels
  3. A useful distinction: agency and responsibility
  4. Try a paired reading
Three women compare ideas over an open book at a round table

An illustration for this essay.

Begin with a question, not a label

An invitation to be more confident can be useful. It can also leave an unfair rule untouched. The question for a reader is not whether ambition is good or bad, but what a particular account of ambition makes visible. Does it explain unequal pay through institutions, negotiating skills, or both? What action follows from that explanation?

Catherine Rottenberg’s 2018 book examines a version of feminism organised around individual investment, happiness and work–family balance. That is a critical account of a particular cultural formation, not a claim that every career decision or every working woman shares one politics. Keep that distinction in view before using the term as a verdict.

Read across three levels

First identify the promise addressed to a person: a better job, a manageable day, recognition or security. Next identify the organisation that can make that promise easier or harder to fulfil. Finally ask which public arrangements sit outside the story: childcare, leave, migration rules, housing or collective bargaining. A text can discuss one level carefully while remaining silent about the others.

Silence is a question for further investigation, not proof of an author’s intentions. A practical reading note should separate the passage you observed, your interpretation, and evidence you still need. This makes disagreement more useful than attaching a broad label to an entire book or campaign.

A useful distinction: agency and responsibility

Being able to act is not the same as being responsible for everything that happens. A worker can make a careful decision in a setting she did not choose. A reading becomes reductive when it treats acknowledging that setting as a denial of her agency, or treats her agency as proof that the setting is fair.

Try describing the same situation twice. In the first account, a person changes her strategy. In the second, an organisation changes a rule. What becomes possible in each account, and for whom? The comparison does not require choosing between personal and collective action. It identifies what each can reasonably achieve.

Try a paired reading

Read a piece of career advice beside an account of how care is organised. Compare who can act, who pays, and whose time is assumed to be available. The ILO care report provides an institutional point of reference; a personal essay supplies a different kind of evidence. Neither should be asked to stand in for the other.

Finish with a concrete question: what would have to change for the proposed solution to work for someone with less money, a less predictable job or fewer choices about care? That question keeps structural analysis connected to ordinary life without dismissing individual strategies.

Sources and further reading