By Cathy Smith

Under a freeway overpass in Los Angeles, a houseless woman in her sixties slides into a shopworn child’s tent, her sole possessions assorted into a shopping bag. The evening air smells of freeway exhaust, wet cardboard, and hopelessness. 

In downtown Los Angeles the same night, Indra Nooyi steps out from a black SUV, her Personal Assistant opening the shiny door for her, a gourmet gala waiting for her. Cameras click to capture for posterity her “advancement of women in global business.” It is far more than a contrast, it is emblematic of an ailing society that discards thousands, millions of women as homeless refuse kicked to the curb. 

The feminism of chauffeurs vs. the feminism of hunger – one marketed, filmed and traded on New York Stock Exchange, the other punished and abandoned, cited for illegal camping and made to pay fines and pick up trash along the freeway.

20^th Century Feminists vs 21^st Century Marketing Hubris

The radical feminists of the early 20th century-Alice Paul, Emmeline Pankhurst, Marion Wallace Dunlop-risked their lives, endured starvation, imprisonment, and violent state incarceration, to secure the most basic realization of their political equity: the vote. Alice Paul’s hunger strikes in prison led to her being force-feed through rubber tubes, a torturous symbol of the state’s paranoia of a woman asserting agency over her own body. 

Pankhurst spearheaded public riots and shattered windows to assert that repressive political and social constructs could no longer ignore women’s rights. Wallace Dunlop deliberately starved as a form of social protest, a militant protest that the female body, denied freedom, could become the engine of revolution. These women and their peers were not abstract Ted Talkers, not Public Relations gurus. Their feminism lived in the material reality, the corporal, and the revolutionary. They were troublesome, messy, and highly threatening to entrenched patriarchies (Schein, 2014).

21^st Century Femi-Capitalism

Jump forward to the 21st century: feminism has been retailed, prepackaged, and marketed to patronize the appetites of patriarchal global capital. Sheryl Sandberg preaches Lean In™, instructing women to internalize financial ambition, to negotiate pay raises, to climb the corporate ladder; all while persisting loyal to the very structure she claims to challenge. Indra Nooyi is celebrated for “empowering women through soda,” expanding PepsiCo’s junk-food world into global markets where diabetes-driven sickness is already rampant. 

For Sheryl Sandberg and Indra Nooyi, feminism has become an operational brand, a set of behaviors that produce wealth and admiration for some rather than structural change for all. And while they luxuriate in masseuses, personal assistants, and domestic staff, millions of women sleep under freeway overpasses, endure sweat shops, and endure systemic neglect. The material reality of oppression for most has been superseded by the optical mirage of individual achievement (Banet-Weiser, 2018).

The revolutionary energy of Paul, Pankhurst, and Dunlop has been subverted and subsumed into boardroom memos, Snapchat quotes, and TED Talk soundbites.

Sandberg and Nooyi represent two axes of this financial cultural absorption of the Women’s Movement. Sandberg’s Lean In is the deification of corporate feminism as obedience to Patriarchal Social Constructs. 

Sandberg’s mandates to negotiate raises, network strategically, and claim authority assume that structural power is benign and that women’s work exists to validate, not contest, patriarchal institutional authority. Nooyi’s feminism, in contrast, is consumer-oriented: PepsiCo’s marketing is designed to feminize consumption itself, selling “empowerment” alongside sugar and processed snacks. Both instances showcase how neoliberalism morphs The Women’s Movement into retail product: one sells ambition, the other sells brand loyalty, both systematically divorced from the laboring women who sustain these empires (Gunnarsson Payne & Tornhill, 2021).

The historical contrast is striking. When Paul starved herself in a prison cell, she asserted her sovereignty against a coercive state. When Pankhurst smashed windows, she challenged property as a shield of patriarchal power. Wallace Dunlop weaponized her body to insist on political recognition. 

Today, Postfeminist women like Sandberg and Nooyi operate within corporate structures they do not dismantle; they market empowerment while profiting and predating from the exploited labor, and in Nooyi’s case, the consumptive vulnerability of women globally. Hunger, imprisonment, and systemic violence remain, but are now invisibilized, naturalized, and externalized. 

This transformation is not incidental; it is strategic. Corporations learned to monetize liberation without materially redistributing power. Feminist organizing is transformed into a PR strategy: conferences, paid panels, executive programs, and marketing branded content. Feminist history is vaporized in favor of sanitized exemplars of success: the first female CEO, the woman who “has it all,” the woman who turns empowerment into shareholder value. Radical insurgency is replaced by marketable ‘heroism’. Historical memory suffers the same fate as other inconvenient truths: entombed under glossy content and TED Talk platitudes (Sangster & Luxton, 2013).

Consider the global inequities embedded in Nooyi’s rise. PepsiCo’s expansion into low- and middle-income countries relies on the commodification of sugar, salt, and fat-products that disproportionately affect women and children in the Global South. Her feminism celebrates market penetration as empowerment, while local women bear the brunt of dietary harm and structural neglect. 

The same logic applies, albeit differently, to Sandberg’s sphere: her advocacy assumes a protected, salaried, office-based constituency, insulated from homelessness and precarity. The feminism of wealth and the feminism of impoverishment is not metaphorical; it is material, measured in calories, paychecks, and shelter.

The neoliberal makeover of feminism reframes agency as optimization within constraints rather than transformation of them. Empowerment becomes a commodity, distributed to the few who can afford coaching, branded experiences, and executive mentoring. The rest, meanwhile, remain invisible: living in tents, working informal labor, navigating a society that applauds their exploitation while fetishizing the success of their overseers. This is the structural continuation of the same power hierarchies the suffragettes sought to dismantle, now legitimized by hashtags, glossy biographies, and keynote speeches (Caddell, 2015; Harcourt, 2017).

Governance By Corporatists

Consider the co-optation pipeline. A feminist concept emerges in struggle: wages for housework, reproductive rights, labor equity. NGOs, corporations, media industries and banksters adopt the language, sanitize it, and distribute it as consumer content or product. Conferences, panels, and books celebrate exceptional women while leaving the material conditions of most women untouched or worsened. This is not merely marketing; it is governance: the privatization of feminist critique into consumable forms that pacify dissent and reinforce existing corrupt hierarchies (Calkin, 2017; Eschle & Maiguashca, 2018).

Moreover, the neoliberal feminists’ rewards underscore systemic hypocrisy. Sandberg commands global attention, bestselling books, speaking fees, and board positions; Nooyi accrues wealth, accolades, and influence. These privileges are maintained not by dismantling barriers for all women, but by reproducing inequality in subtle and visible ways. 

The lesson is structural. Feminism cannot survive as a brand without abandoning its radical promise. History demonstrates that material struggle, collective mobilization, and bodily risk are inseparable from genuine liberation. When empowerment is monetized, feminists themselves become instruments of capital, absorbing critique into corporate governance rather than confronting it. 

Looking forward, the path for feminism is uncertain. The post-Girlboss collapse, layoffs in corporate feminist media, and global anti-gender backlash reveal the fragility of empowerment detached from structural change. Unless contemporary feminism reconnects to the material conditions of the majority-precarious labor, homelessness, global health inequities-it risks remaining a luxury commodity for the few. Globalist’s Cash-Register Feminism will not survive the oncoming financial collapse.

The radical insurgency of Paul, Pankhurst, and Dunlop reminds us that liberation is neither comfortable nor palatable. It is embodied, dangerous, and collective. To ignore this history is to trade moral and political substance for optics and profitability.

Ultimately, the contrast is stark and inescapable: Sandberg and Nooyi, celebrated for leadership and “empowerment,” reside in fleets of SUVs, private planes, and curated entourages, insulated from precarity; Paul, Pankhurst, and Dunlop endured bodily starvation and incarceration to demand recognition as political agents. 

Feminism is a measurement of both achievement and failure: a critique of what has been gained, what has been commodified, and what has been lost. Radical history has not disappeared-it has been overwritten, repurposed, and monetized, leaving a society in which empowerment is aspirational for a few and lost amidst survival for the rest.

Capitalism did not liberate women; it sorted them. It absorbed insurgency into spectacle, hunger into hashtag, risk into keynote. Feminism now exists in two coexisting realities: one served by butlers and personal assistants, photographed for glossy magazines, TED Talks, and LinkedIn endorsements; the other inhabited by women in tents under freeways, by the millions, whose labor, bodies, and needs are the silent scaffolding of the very structure that “empowers” the elite few. Until this divide is acknowledged and confronted, feminism will remain a brand, not a movement.

Corporate feminism does not merely function as a domestic branding exercise; it doubles as U.S. soft power, exported through IMF austerity regimes, NGO development discourse, and the philanthropic arms of multinational capital. 

The language of “women’s empowerment” is now a diplomatic accessory-deployed to justify structural adjustment, microloan debt traps, and privatized health and education initiatives that transfer public resources to foreign investors. 

USAID gender grants, World Bank “women’s entrepreneurship” loans, and NGO capacity-building programs all instrumentalize feminism as a lubricant for neoliberal policy-one that disciplines women into entrepreneurial self-management while erasing the colonial extraction that impoverished them in the first place. The modern “empowered woman” is not a political subject but a credit-compliant laborer, made responsible for her own survival inside the very austerity architecture that guarantees her immiseration. Capitalism did not absorb feminism accidentally; it deployed it as rationale for global market penetration.

This arrangement is not sustained by Sandberg or Nooyi alone, but by a bipartisan political infrastructure that sanctifies their existence as proof of national progress. The Democratic Party touts women CEOs as evidence of “inclusive capitalism,” while Republican donors praise them as living rebuttals to welfare states and collective labor rights. Both parties converge at Davos, Aspen, the Clinton Global Initiative, the Obama Foundation summits, and Fortune’s Most Powerful Women conferences-spaces where “women’s leadership” is celebrated precisely because it poses no threat to private equity, corporate governance, or billionaire philanthropy. 

The same donors who bankroll Lean In circles fund anti-union Democrats, charter-school PACs, and Silicon Valley deregulation. Corporate feminism is not an interruption to American oligarchy; it is one of its most photogenic shields, a bipartisan consensus project that converts gender equality into a public-relations accessory for empire, austerity, and wealth concentration.

The corporate feminists hailed as proof of “progress” are not simply beneficiaries of capitalism, but active components of U.S. geopolitical infrastructure. Sheryl Sandberg’s former company, Meta, partnered with the Atlantic Council-an outfit funded by the State Department, NATO, and weapons contractors like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon-to police global speech under the banner of “election integrity.” Feminist branding thus became a soft-power instrument: “empowerment” on stage, intelligence-linked content control offstage. Sandberg’s feminism is not merely corporate-friendly; it is fully interoperable with national security objectives.

The same apparatus now deploys “women’s empowerment” as ideological camouflage for imperial policy. USAID gender grants accompany AFRICOM counter-insurgency projects on the African continent; State Department “female entrepreneur” programs run parallel to sanctions regimes that collapse public healthcare for women in Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela; the Clinton Global Initiative and Gates Foundation bankroll micro-loan schemes while supporting IMF debt discipline that strips public food and water subsidies from the very women they claim to “uplift.” 

In Gaza, the Biden administration’s “women and girls humanitarian initiative” functions as a moral fig leaf for weapons transfers to Israel, whose bombing has erased entire genealogies of Palestinian women and children. Feminism, in this configuration, is not liberation but laundering: a language deployed to deodorize siege, occupation, and financial strangulation.

Indra Nooyi’s rise followed the same pattern of elite integration. PepsiCo’s board and advisory networks overlap with Boeing, BlackRock, the Council on Foreign Relations, and World Bank development programs-entities that fuse food monopolies, austerity policy, and military contracting. PepsiCo’s global expansion depended less on “female leadership” than on U.S. trade leverage, IMF conditionality, and the forced opening of foreign markets. Nooyi’s empowerment narrative is inseparable from an imperial supply chain in which nutrition, debt, and disease are tools of economic domination.

"My husband, two children and I lost our house because of our Electricity Bill. We are living in our car, even though we both have full time jobs. We could not afford our mortgage, to eat, and to pay our Electricity Bill. We had to let go of the house." – society will label them as mentally ill addicts.

·  PepsiCo Inc spent approximately US $3.92 million on federal lobbying in the U.S. in 2024. 

·  Sheryl Sandberg has an estimated net worth of approximately US $1.6 billion as of March 2025. 

·  Approximately 12.6 % of U.S. women lived below the federal poverty line in 2020. 

Sandberg and Nooyi are not anomalies. Marissa Mayer, Tory Burch, Emma Watson, and even every woman clutching a new real estate license are funneled into the same corporate script-empowerment sold as compliance, ambition framed as obedience, liberation repackaged for profit.

Sheryl Sandberg's speaking fee is estimated to be in the range of
$50,000 to $100,000 through some booking agents, while others suggest a higher starting range of $150,000 to $299,000.

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How Capitalism Turned Feminism into a Brand: From Radical Liberation to “Girlboss™” Obedience

By Cathy Smith

References

• Banet-Weiser, S. (2018). Empowered: Popular feminism and popular misogyny. Duke University Press.


• Caddell, A. (2015). From center to margin: Feminism in an era of mainstream co-optation.


• Calkin, S. (2017). Disrupting disempowerment: feminism, co-optation, and the privatized governance of gender and development. new formations: a journal of culture/theory/politics, 91, 69–86.


• Eschle, C., & Maiguashca, B. (2018). Theorizing feminist organizing in and against neoliberalism: beyond co-optation and resistance? European Journal of Politics and Gender.


• Gunnarsson Payne, J., & Tornhill, S. (2021). The enemy’s enemy: feminism at the crossroads of neoliberal co-optation and anti-gender conservatism. Journal of Political Ideologies, 28, 62–82.


• Harcourt, W. (2017). Another hotel room, another city, another training: reflections on co-optation of feminism by development. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 19, 249–253.


• Sangster, J.I., & Luxton, M. (2013). Feminism, co-optation and the problems of amnesia: a response to Nancy Fraser. Socialist Register, 49.


• Schein, R. (2014). Hegemony Not Co-Optation: For A Usable History of Feminism. Studies in Political Economy, 94, 169–176.


• Gill, R. (2016). Postfeminism and the media. Feminist Media Studies, 16(4).