The Archetypes of Liberal Womanhood Under Empire - Yohana

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The Archetypes of Liberal Womanhood Under Empire<br>On Desire, Class Aspiration, and the Refusal of Revolution<br>Apr 23, 2026

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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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>Helen of Troy<br>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.<br>Helen is...