In a world where more and more women have been integrated into the social, cultural, and political logic of capitalism, the women who betray the people’s struggle tend to fall into two recognizable archetypes. This is not about women who are oppressed and fighting back, nor about women attempting to survive the violence of patriarchal and capitalist domination with dignity. This is about bourgeois, petite bourgeois, liberal, and far right women who, in political practice, are often far closer to one another than they would ever admit. They may differ in language, aesthetics, or branding, but they remain committed to the same world. Same structure, different font.
The tragedy is that women’s struggle, which has been shaped by generations of revolutionary women, anti-colonial women, anti-capitalist women, peasant women, working women, and women who died under the bullet of imperialism, has increasingly been emptied of its political content and turned into lifestyle. What was once struggle has been repackaged as self-development. What was once collective liberation has been reduced to representation. What was once a question of land, labor, social reproduction, war, and material survival is now too often discussed through the individualized and depoliticized lens of liberal feminism.
In this form, the struggle of women is severed from class struggle, from anti-imperialism, from national liberation, and from the overthrow of the structures that produce women’s oppression in the first place. Instead, women are encouraged to seek upward mobility within the very order that feeds off the exploitation of the masses. The result is a generation politically disarmed by trad wife fantasies, soft life ideology, entrepreneurial self-fashioning, and the reactionary belief that freedom can be found in climbing the ladder of domination rather than dismantling it.
Of course, patriarchy does not appear in identical form everywhere. In the Global South, the organization of patriarchy must always be read through concrete history, capitalism disruption, class formation, and local social relations. It cannot simply be copied and pasted from Western feminist frameworks and then universalized as truth. But one thing remains clear: in the imperial core, especially in NATO headquarters and its extended ideological world, white women have increasingly consolidated themselves as a strata with access to institutional power. This does not mean they are free. It means they have been incorporated into management. Into administration. Into the civilizing mission. Into the gendered face of empire.
Historically and now, white women were not all of one class. But as capitalism has advanced into its higher stages, more women of all races have been welcomed into elite institutions, high-paying professions, policy circles, media networks, corporate leadership, and state apparatuses. They may still experience sexism at the top of the imperial order, but this should never be confused with the condition of poor and working women, whose lives are shaped by compounded exploitation under capital. One woman struggles to become CEO. Another is displaced, underpaid, criminalized, overworked, and made disposable so that the whole system can continue. Liberal feminism has worked overtime to collapse these differences, because once class is removed, every woman can be made to appear as part of the same political camp. But this is a lie. There is no unified womanhood across antagonistic class interests.
Liberal women move through this world with the political consciousness of aspiration. They believe everything they desire is on the other side of access: the right connection, the right credential, the right room, the right institution, the right marriage, the right network, the right performance of confidence, the right proximity to power. They do not seek liberation from class rule. They seek favorable inclusion within it. They do not want the end of imperialism. They want a seat in its administration. They do not want to abolish exploitation. They want to rise high enough above its consequences that they no longer have to see it.
That is why the liberal woman, in her most politically developed reactionary form, tends to gather around two archetypes: Helen of Troy and Lot’s wife.
Helen of Troy
Helen is not simply beauty. That reading is too shallow. Politically, Helen represents the liberal woman whose vanity, entitlement, and class insulation make her indifferent to the historical consequences of her desires. She is cultivated, admired, pursued, and elevated, and because she is accustomed to being the center of attention, she begins to confuse her personal longing with political importance. She mistakes being desired for being right.
Helen is tied to aristocratic life, to courts, to kingdoms, to ruling men, to the kind of world in which private desire can become public catastrophe because the powerful are able to mobilize armies around personal grievance. She does not live in the world of ordinary women. She does not carry the burdens of peasant women, laboring women, enslaved women, colonized women, or women whose bodies are broken by work and war. She is protected by status and proximity. Her life is cushioned by hierarchy. Servants absorb inconvenience. The masses absorb consequence of her desires.
This is what gives Helen her political character. She is not merely selfish in a personal sense. She is socially insulated and historically irresponsible. She does not need to intend mass suffering in order to become one of its vehicles. Her desires are made possible by structures of power already waiting for an excuse to unleash violence. The ruling class is always looking for a pretext. Empire is always hungry for a romance to hide behind. Conquest is always searching for a moral cover. Helen gives history over to appetite and then stands above the ruins calling it tragic.
That is the liberal woman in political terms: the woman whose personal ambitions, romantic fantasies, and self-regard are so inflated that she cannot recognize when she has become useful to imperial violence, class consolidation, or social reaction. She may speak the language of freedom, choice, passion, and authenticity, but the real content of her politics is that the masses must bear the cost of her self-making. She is the NGO executive calling destruction “complex.” She is the imperial feminist demanding bombs in the name of women’s rights. She is the liberal careerist who will sacrifice workers, nations, and movements for her own ascent and then rename betrayal as pragmatism.
Helen is dangerous precisely because she is politically unconscious while socially rewarded. She is trained to believe that if something intensifies her life, it must be worth pursuing, regardless of what burns around her. She does not ask what her desires cost the people. She assumes the people exist to absorb the cost.
Lot’s Wife
If Helen represents vanity in service of destruction, Lot’s wife represents attachment to a dying order.
Lot’s wife is not wholly ignorant. She knows the world she inhabits is wicked. She knows it is saturated with pride, cruelty, decadence, neglect of the poor, and moral decay. She can see the rot. She can name the injustice. She may even position herself near the language of change, reform, or liberation. But when history demands a real break, she hesitates. And then she turns back.
That turn backward is not sentimental in a harmless sense. It is ideological. Lot’s wife represents the liberal woman who cannot detach herself from the comforts, securities, and symbolic rewards of the old order. She wants transformation, but not rupture. She wants justice, but not sacrifice. She wants emancipation, but not dispossession of the class world that fed her. She wants a new future while preserving pieces of the old arrangement that made her feel safe, superior, or chosen.
This is the woman who knows neoliberalism is violent, knows imperialism is destructive, knows capitalism is spiritually and materially bankrupt, knows the world is organized against the poor, and yet still clings to the institutions, habits, aesthetics, and moral compromises of the very order she claims to criticize. She will look back because the old world gave her something. Maybe comfort. Maybe status. Maybe protection. Maybe the illusion of innocence. Maybe all of it.
Lot’s wife is the liberal who romanticizes what should be destroyed. She is attached to a world built on exploitation because she benefited from its arrangement, even if unevenly. She may criticize the empire, but not enough to sever herself from its memories. She may condemn the system, but not enough to abandon the prestige, consumption, and social legitimacy it granted her. She wants the moral feeling of resistance without the material costs of breaking it down.
Politically, this is the woman of permanent compromise. The woman who always wants more time, more nuance, more moderation, more civility, more patience with structures that are already killing millions. She is the reformist at the edge of rupture. The progressive who always folds at the point of confrontation. The feminist who can speak endlessly about injustice but cannot stand with the people when the people threaten property, order, or imperial peace.
If Helen burns the world through appetite, Lot’s wife preserves it through attachment. If Helen is the liberal woman as vanity, Lot’s wife is the liberal woman as nostalgia. One cannot see beyond herself. The other cannot let go of what made her comfortable. One helps produce catastrophe. The other guarantees its continuation.
So the lesson is this: liberal women under capitalism often appear in these two forms. One will sacrifice the people for personal desire and call it freedom. The other will cling to a wicked world and call it complexity. One is animated by self-regard. The other by class attachment. But both remain incapable of revolutionary commitment because both remain fundamentally loyal to the order of domination.
This is why women’s struggle cannot be left in the hands of liberalism. Liberalism does not abolish women’s oppression. It reorganizes it. It grants a narrow class of women access to power while leaving the masses of women under the boot of capital, empire, racial hierarchy, and patriarchal violence. It turns struggle into branding, solidarity into networking, and emancipation into career mobility. It teaches women to seek equality with ruling men instead of joining the people in overthrowing the world that degrades them both differently.
A revolutionary politics of women must therefore be anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and rooted in the material lives of working and poor women, especially in the Global South, where the full violence of empire is most naked. It must reject the liberal woman’s hunger for admission into ruling structures. It must reject the backward glance toward the old world. It must reject the vanity that treats collective suffering as the acceptable price of personal fulfillment.
Because in the end, the question is not whether women can enter the house of empire. The question is whether they are prepared to help bring it down.