Liberal 'lean-in' feminism measures success by whether a small stratum of elite women can climb the corporate ladder to parity with men of their class, leaving the hierarchy itself intact. The manifesto counters with a 'feminism for the 99%' that rejects advancement through the exploitation of other, poorer women and instead targets the class structure that produces inequality.
Capitalism relies on the unpaid or underpaid labor of bearing, raising, and caring for people (social reproduction) while refusing to count it as real work and systematically starving it of resources. Because profit-making cannibalizes the very care-work that makes workers available to be exploited, the system generates a recurring 'crisis of care.'
A political formation pairs emancipatory language about diversity, meritocracy, and women's empowerment with ongoing financialization and dispossession. The gender rhetoric functions as a charm that legitimizes a predatory economic order rather than challenging it, so symbolic representation of women masks worsening material conditions for most.
Rather than treating sexism as a free-floating cultural attitude or male prejudice, the book locates women's subordination in capitalism's institutional split between waged production and unwaged reproduction. Viewed this way, fights over abortion, wages, and care are symptoms of a single structural division, not separate issue-silos.
The authors ground their program in the wave of women's strikes that began in Poland, Argentina, Spain, and Italy around 2016-2017, where women withdrew both waged and unwaged labor to make care-work visible. They read these coordinated walkouts as proof that a mass, cross-border feminism can act on economic power, not just demand legal reform.
The manifesto proposes building feminism as an alliance that joins with anti-racist, environmental, migrant, and labor struggles on the shared ground of opposing capital, rather than organizing around womanhood as a standalone identity. The organizing principle is the common enemy (a profit-driven system) that links seemingly separate grievances into one movement.