"It is capitalist America that produced the modern independent woman. Never in history have women had more freedom of choice in regard to dress, behavior, career, and sexual orientation"
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Paglia’s line is a provocation dressed up as a victory lap: a feminist achievement story told in the language of markets. Calling out “capitalist America” as the engine of the “modern independent woman” isn’t just praise; it’s a deliberate slap at academic feminism’s preferred villains. Paglia’s intent is to reroute credit away from theory, movements, and institutions toward a blunt material claim: money, consumer choice, and a relatively open labor market did more to loosen women’s lives than manifestos did.
The subtext is classic Paglia: contrarian, allergic to pieties, suspicious of victim narratives. “Dress, behavior, career, and sexual orientation” is a carefully chosen quartet. She starts with the visible (style, presentation), moves through social conduct, lands on work (the hard infrastructure of independence), then pivots to identity and desire. The list implies a ladder of autonomy where cultural permission follows economic capacity: if you can earn, spend, leave, and relocate, you can also experiment, refuse, and reinvent. Capitalism here becomes less a system of exploitation than a solvent that dissolves old gatekeepers - church, family, small-town surveillance - by offering alternatives.
Context matters because Paglia emerged as a loud internal critic during late-20th-century culture wars, when feminism often framed itself against patriarchy plus corporate power. Her claim is strongest as a comparative argument about liberal democracies and modernity; it’s weakest where capitalism’s freedoms are unevenly distributed and purchased at the price of precarious work, beauty economies, and commodified sexuality. That tension is part of why it works: it dares the reader to admit that liberation can arrive through imperfect mechanisms, and that moral clarity is rarely how history delivers options.
The subtext is classic Paglia: contrarian, allergic to pieties, suspicious of victim narratives. “Dress, behavior, career, and sexual orientation” is a carefully chosen quartet. She starts with the visible (style, presentation), moves through social conduct, lands on work (the hard infrastructure of independence), then pivots to identity and desire. The list implies a ladder of autonomy where cultural permission follows economic capacity: if you can earn, spend, leave, and relocate, you can also experiment, refuse, and reinvent. Capitalism here becomes less a system of exploitation than a solvent that dissolves old gatekeepers - church, family, small-town surveillance - by offering alternatives.
Context matters because Paglia emerged as a loud internal critic during late-20th-century culture wars, when feminism often framed itself against patriarchy plus corporate power. Her claim is strongest as a comparative argument about liberal democracies and modernity; it’s weakest where capitalism’s freedoms are unevenly distributed and purchased at the price of precarious work, beauty economies, and commodified sexuality. That tension is part of why it works: it dares the reader to admit that liberation can arrive through imperfect mechanisms, and that moral clarity is rarely how history delivers options.
Quote Details
| Topic | Freedom |
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