Liberal feminism does not question whether women should live like men. It assumes that wanting to is proof they already should.
Liberal feminism is a specific intellectual tradition within the broader feminist movement, not feminism itself. Its roots trace to Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and were formalised in the second wave by Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) and the founding of the National Organization for Women in 1966. Where earlier feminist movements challenged legal exclusion and violent oppression, liberal feminism centres the elimination of constraints on women’s access to public life, professional opportunity, and economic independence.
The critique here is not of the broader feminist project but of this particular variant’s core assumption: that fulfilment comes from entering traditionally masculine roles, and that being a wife and mother is insufficient. Liberal feminism, as documented by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, divides between egalitarian-liberal feminism, which seeks state-backed structural reform, and classical-liberal feminism, which emphasises individual freedom from coercion. Both share the assumption that autonomy and self-sufficiency are the central feminist ideals. Care ethicists like Eva Feder Kittay and Virginia Held have challenged this, arguing that centring independence obscures the value of caregiving and the relational goods on which human beings depend throughout their lives.
Naomi Wolf’s “power feminism” (1994) extended the liberal tradition into what critics identify as its terminal phase: celebrating competition, ambition, and aggression as feminist virtues while locating change in individual attitude rather than structural transformation. The result is a feminism that seamlessly integrates with capitalism, treating personal empowerment as a commodity to be marketed rather than a collective condition to be built.