I was raised by a world that taught me I could ‘be anything I wanted’. I was born into a white, upper-middle class family headed by an educator and a nurse practitioner; I received a progressive, private school education; I was taught the values of service, equality, compassion and community activism. I grew up exploring a diverse American city where I was shown the structures of racist hierarchy that divided it and the exploitation that maintained it. I was also exposed to sexualization, misogyny and discrimination along with the tools to challenge them. I am a prime example of a young, educated feminist, and yet, I’m not sure I even know what that means anymore.  

In the summer of 2023, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie dominated the feminist atmosphere, reclaiming pink, girlhood, and self-actualization in a male-dominated world. Marketed as a film that resonated with all women, no matter what they looked like or where they came from, it offered an image for girls everywhere an image of women’s empowerment as economic mobility, racial diversity, or wearing a pastel pantsuit into the office. What it does not speak to, reflecting the broader blindspots within contemporary feminism, is how these ideals of women ‘shattering glass ceilings’ in business are ignorant to the fact that the very spheres that women, mostly white women, aspire to excel in, are built upon colonial and capitalist systems of exploitation. Of course, there is nothing wrong with how Barbie displayed women’s aspirations to be doctors, lawyers, or writers. Girl power (!), of course, is a great thing, as any person’s empowerment to follow their dreams is a social and economic good. What Barbie, and the contemporary cultural discourses equivalent to it, neglect is addressing who has the agency to climb the corporate ladder, get an education, or freely express themselves as a citizen within a society that inherently prioritizes certain people over others.  

 The ‘future is female’ discourse goes back further than the 20th century waves of popular ‘feminism’, and in fact begins with a critique of the emergence of the Enlightenment-era ideals in feminism. In her recent work, A Decolonial Feminism (2021), Francois Vergès makes an argument against ‘civilizational feminism’, that which advocates for universal women's rights without acknowledging the economic, racial, environmental and political boundaries that allow only some women, in some parts of the world, to achieve them. The prominence yet invisibility of certain racialized and gendered forms of labor, such as cleaners, caretakers, or domestic workers, enable white women’s position to further their own ability to advocate for liberation from systems of male domination.  

Her critique goes further than addressing the need for an intersectional feminism, but rather that without demolishing the colonial and capitalist structures that European feminism was built on, the idea of feminism that we commonly know is inherently misleading and reliant upon the invisibility of racialized women. In her work, it becomes clear that the racist hierarchies instilled long before our time (colonial dominance of the global south, the enslavement of African people, and the instillation of racial and gendered hierarchies in the very fabric of Western political society) inform the way we understand female liberation today. It is only in white women’s perception of the oppression of others that we came to understand the forms of dominance that regulated our lives in the early waves of feminist organization.  

As a student at an elite UK university, I have come to ask myself what I can contribute to a conversation addressing the intersectionalities of feminism in a global context. What do I really know of adversity, oppression or resilience when the world as I know it, aside from the structures of male domination, is historically built to my advantage? Yet, this is not a question of how comparably hard my life has been in order to justify my own feminism, but how have the ideals that I was raised with - empowerment, freedom, equality - neglected the people and movements that made my pursuit of them possible? By re-structuring our views and ideals of feminism, I wonder if this makes us more capable of making a difference. Are my hopes of building a career that contributes to creating a more equitable world ultimately reliant on cooperating in a socio-economic system that demands exploitation and oppression of someone less privileged than me? Or maybe, it isn’t about me at all.  

The ideal of ‘gender equality’ and ‘shattering glass ceilings’ becomes far more complex when considering the ways that it continues to rely on the disenfranchisement of others, especially racialized women. As many of us young women are climbing the corporate ladder, entering the spheres of the boss b*tches and the CEO-mom-yoga teacher hybrids of the world - what does all of this accomplish if the majority of us are white women? If the people that will clean our offices, scrub our toilets, sew together our blazers in sweatshops, and raise our children are predominantly going to be women of color, what kind of equality are we really aspiring to?  

 In writing this, I don’t mean to virtue signal or show some kind of superior woke-ness, I ask these questions because, despite a progressive upbringing and an urgency for equality from a young age, I began to question everything I thought I believed when I read this excerpt from Vergès:  

“When women’s rights are reduced to the defense of individual freedom—‘to be free to, to have the right to…’—without questioning the content of this freedom, without questioning the genealogy of this notion in European modernity, we are entitled to wonder whether all these rights were granted because other women were not free.”  

Applying this to the feminism that I believe many of us participate in, I don’t really know where to go from here. Is all of this just food for thought? Or can we take on a new responsibility to uplift all the women around us, especially those who are made invisible by the structures we attempt to excel in?