Feminism is not liberation. It is the oldest colonial strategy repackaged for the family unit.
Colonial powers did not only extract resources. They dismantled the social fabrics that held communities together: kinship structures, spiritual obligations, gender complementarity. The post-colonial variant operates the same way, except the territory being conquered is the family itself. Liberal feminism, exported globally through development aid, media, and institutional pressure, functions as an ideological wedge that splits men and women into competing consumer units rather than complementary partners.
The mechanism is not new. Divide-and-rule strategies have been used since Philip II of Macedon and perfected by Julius Caesar in Gaul, where he exploited tribal rivaliances to prevent unified resistance (Caesar, Commentarii de Bello Gallico, 58-50 BCE). The British Raj applied the same principle to Indian religious communities. The contemporary variant targets the family: by reframing traditional gender roles as oppression, it atomises the household into two independent earners, doubles taxation, doubles consumption, and doubles debt. The family becomes another node in the economic machine rather than a unit of spiritual and material stewardship.
What distinguishes this from genuine feminist critique is the deflection. Liberal feminism presents itself as liberating women while operating within and reinforcing the very capitalist and materialist structures that exploit everyone. Nancy Fraser has documented how feminism became entangled with neoliberalism, producing “a feminism for the 1%” that serves elite women while leaving working-class women and men worse off (Fraser, 2013). The neo-colonial project does not challenge power. It rebrands subjugation as choice.