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The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism
Catherine Rottenberg
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THE RISE OF NEOLIBERAL FEMINISM
HERETICAL THOUGHT
Series editor: Ruth O’Brien,
The Graduate Center, City University of
New York
Assembly
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
THE RISE
OF NEOLIBERAL
FEMINISM
C AT H E R I N E R O T T E N B E R G
1
1
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the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

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© Oxford University Press 2018
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

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You must not circulate this work in any other form

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Rottenberg, Catherine, author.
Title: The rise of neoliberal feminism /Catherine Rottenberg.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, [2018] |
Series: Heretical thought | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018005396 (print) | LCCN 2018012225 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190901233 (Updf) | ISBN 9780190901240 (Epub) |
ISBN 9780190901226 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Feminism. | Neoliberalism.
Classification: LCC HQ1155 (ebook) | LCC HQ1155 .R687 2018 (print) |
DDC 305.42—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018005396
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
To Ari and Avivi, my wilde khayes
CONTENTS
Foreword ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction: Feminism in Neoliberal Times 1

1. How Superwoman Became Balanced 23
2. The Neoliberal Feminist 53
3. Neoliberal Futurity and Generic
Human Capital 79
4. Back from the Future: Turning to
the “Here and Now” 105
5. Feminist Convergences 135
6. Reclaiming Feminism 162
Notes 179
Bibliography 217
Index 247
FOREWORD
In recent years, feminism has seen a resurgence in the pop-

ular media, with celebrities proudly declaring themselves
feminists and bestselling books teaching women how to
shatter the glass ceiling without neglecting their families.
In this book, however, Catherine Rottenberg shows us how
such “neoliberal feminism” forsakes the vitally important
goals of emancipation and social justice, substitutes positive
affect for genuine change, and adopts the theory and often
the very language of neoliberalism—which, in turn, needs
feminism in order to resolve its own internal contradictions.
With passion and rigor, Rottenberg reveals that neoliberal
feminism is not a philosophy but rather a self-help program
for upper-middle-class women, one that leaves behind those
who do not fit the template of a privileged professional.
She begins by mercilessly dismantling neoliberal
feminism’s preoccupation with maintaining “balance” be-
tween family and career. Rottenberg shows how this focus
on the self dovetails with neoliberal rationality, particularly
in its emphasis on the individual’s “cost-benefit calculus” of
x | F oreword
personal fulfillment (which relies on low-paid, outsourced

care work to make the numbers come out right). Instead of
benefiting all women, neoliberal feminism divides women
into aspirational and non-aspirational cohorts, with different
roles and expectations for the two groups.
Rottenberg carries this provocative analysis further with
her counterintuitive exposure of the way neoliberalism needs
feminism. In neoliberal rationalism, people are “human cap-
ital” consisting of ungendered productive units—yet for the
neoliberal system to be sustainable, women must also play
a reproductive role by creating future workers. To resolve
this contradiction, she argues, neoliberalism embraces “a
new ‘technology of the self ’ structured through ‘futurity,’ ”
which encourages women to postpone maternity (notably
by freezing eggs) until a time when it will interfere less with
their productive capacity. The popularity of neoliberal-
feminist books by women from across the political spectrum
shows how widespread approval of this brand of feminism is.
In detailing the deficiencies of neoliberal feminism,
and the fissures within the feminist movement that its rise
has accentuated, Rottenberg eschews any calls for unifica-
tion based on compromise, accommodation, or commonly
agreed-upon goals. Instead, she advocates “alternative femi-
nist visions [that] not only challenge but also constitute a pro-
found threat to our contemporary neoliberal order. Indeed,
given our grim and frightening reality, it is precisely such a
threatening feminism that we need to cultivate, encourage,
and ceaselessly espouse.” She concludes by invoking Judith
Butler’s concept of “precarity” as a unifying factor—not only
for women, but for all who are marginalized or who struggle
for social justice. With the times ripe for converting neolib-
eral feminism into a more vigorous and inclusive ideology,
F oreword | xi
women can turn around the unfortunate “mutual entangle-

ment of neoliberalism with feminism”—and subvert neolib-
eralism by killing it from within.
Like all works that challenge convenient untruths, this
book will disturb some readers and ruffle some feathers.
By disputing a widespread notion of what feminism is; by
elucidating the insidious ubiquity of neoliberal thought; by
demanding that we pay attention to the oppressed and mar-
ginalized; and by paradoxically finding hope in the current
dark times, Catherine Rottenberg gives us the hard truth,
takes us to the edge of a cliff, and then maps the way back. For
all these reasons, her book makes an outstanding addition to
the Heretical Thought series.
Professor Ruth O’Brien,
The Graduate Center, CUNY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
LIKE MOST RESEARCH, THIS PROJECT has multiple roots

and many people have cultivated its growth over the years.
The first seeds were sown when I was a visiting scholar at the
Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where I met Joan
Scott and Sara Farris and where we began a three-way con-
versation about feminism. I am intensely grateful to Joan—
she is a fiercely unique feminist force, and she continues
to inspire me at every single turn. Sara has been a kindred
spirit in this long journey. Her support, intellectual perspi-
cacity, and friendship have been a mainstay during these
past years. She has read and commented on almost every
line in this book. Not only has her feedback been invaluable
but her economic critique has changed the way that I see
and understand the world.
That year at the Institute for Advanced Study was a truly
formative one—in large part because of the wonderful new
friendships forged. One new and precious relationship is
with David Eng, to whom I am grateful for all of his unwa-
vering support, his amazing work, and his crucial feedback,
xiv | Acknowledgments
as well as the many conversations that helped me think

through my arguments. Many thanks also go to Moon-Kie
Jung for his incisive comments as well as his honesty and
dry humor. Peter Thomas, Nicola Perugini, Farah Salah, and
Teemu Ruskola have also become dear friends and important
interlocutors in my life. Thank you all. A special thank you
goes to Zia Mann, who was instrumental in igniting my de-
sire to research the notion of work-family balance, as well as
to Lila Berman, who kept sending me crucial material. Lila
also offered me extremely insightful comments, and I am
grateful to her in more ways than one.
The Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics
at Ben-Gurion University in the Negev has been my bed-
rock for almost a decade. I have been profoundly privileged
to have such fantastic colleagues. I would like to thank, in
particular, Barbara Hochman from whom I have learned
so much. I am absolutely indebted to her for her steadfast
and gentle guidance. To Yael Ben-Zvi, I would like to extend
my admiration and gratitude, especially for her razor-sharp
mind and passionate commitment to justice. Eitan Bar-Yosef
is not only a bundle of energy that illuminates every space
he enters, but I have never met someone who can do so
much at one time while simultaneously providing ongoing
support and encouragement. I could never have made it
this far without these beloved colleagues. My debts at Ben-
Gurion University, however, are many. The Gender Studies
Program has also been my second home for many years,
and I would like to thank Amalia Ziv for putting up with my
congenital impatience. Although I may not express it nearly
enough, I am very grateful to you, Amalia. My students at
Ben-Gurion, and particularly students in the Introduction
to Feminist Theory course, have taught me so much about
Acknowledgments | xv
contemporary feminism, and I owe them an enormous debt

of gratitude as well.
A huge and special thank you needs to go to two other
colleagues who have been absolutely central to my intel-
lectual journey, Niza Yanay and Nitza Berkovitch— two
brilliant and amazing women. Niza and Nitza’s feedback on
sections of this book has been absolutely crucial. Niza Y al-
ways challenges me from unexpected directions, and I have
learned so much from our conversations—as well as our
disagreements—over the years. And I am forever grateful
for Nitza B’s thoroughness, generosity, and insights. The two
Nitzot/Nizot have taught me so much about what it means to
live a feminist life. Then there is Yinon Cohen, whom I have
not only come to admire and adore but who has provided
me with all kinds of sustenance—intellectual and otherwise,
over the years.
The last two years in the United Kingdom have utterly
transformed my life— both intellectually and personally.
I have found a wellspring of feminist intellectuality, com-
radery, and solidarity here, something unlike anything
I have ever experienced before. I am humbled by the way
that I have been embraced in London. I have no words
to express my gratitude to a number of astonishing femi-
nist thinkers whose work I have admired for years and fi-
nally met in person; each of these women has profoundly
influenced my research and my intellectual journey. I would
like to express a deep and profound debt to Lynne Segal. She
literally adopted me and my family; she radiates warmth,
solicitousness, and sparkling intellect. She is a vibrant fem-
inist force and her ability to combine theory and praxis is
truly inspiring. Lynne has become one of my key feminist
interlocuters as well as my walking companion and chosen
xvi | Acknowledgments
kin. She has read parts of this book and provided me with
invaluable feedback. I would also like to express a deep and
profound debt to both Rosalind Gill and Angela McRobbie.
Ros has read much of this manuscript, offering so many ab-
solutely brilliant insights and critiques. I admire her spec-
tacular work and generosity to no end. Angela McRobbie,
too, has so warmly welcomed me into her world, and for this
I am eternally grateful. Angela has also read much of this
manuscript, and her feedback and our many conversations
have enriched my thinking in ways too numerous to limn.
Thank you, Angela—for your encouragement, friendship,
and amazing mind. Shani Orgad and Christina Scharff are
two incredible feminist thinkers whose work has not only
profoundly influenced my own but with which this book is
in constant conversation. In addition to her formidable in-
tellect, Shani’s critical eye, rigor, and sensitivity are simply
phenomenal. I would also like express my gratitude to Jo
Littler, who has become part of my life, both intellectually
and personally. I have already learned so much from her
research and from her comments on sections of this book.
Thanks also go to Jeremy Gilbert and Sarah Banet-Weiser.
This project was funded by two generous grants—The
Marie Curie Individual Fellowship (The EU Horizon 2020,
RNF 704010), which has enabled me to spend two forma-
tive years in London as a visiting professor at Goldsmiths,
University of London. I also received an individual grant
from the Israel Science Foundation (No. 602/16), which
has allowed me to continue my research under enviable
conditions. I am extremely grateful to Vikki Bell for spon-
soring me—without her these two years would not have been
possible. I first read her amazing work as a graduate student,
and her graciousness and wisdom have provided me with a
Acknowledgments | xvii
safe haven in the United Kingdom. She, too, has become an

important feminist interlocuter for me.
I am indebted to my two wonderful editors at Oxford
University Press: Ruth O’Brien and Angela Chnapko. Ruth’s
and Angela’s enthusiasm for this project from the very begin-
ning has been a lifeline. Their astute comments and respon-
siveness alongside their unfaltering belief in the manuscript
has made the publication process seamless and (unexpect-
edly) enjoyable. I wish to thank the anonymous readers of
the manuscript as well; their insightful comments helped to
push me forward.
Judith Butler and Wendy Brown are two feminist
thinkers whose work has shaped my intellectual path at
every step of the way and whose sheer brilliance, integrity,
and generosity are unparalleled. I was incredibly fortunate to
be able to spend a year with them as a young scholar. They
are my gold standard (forgive the market metaphor!), and it
is important for me to mention my awesome intellectual and
political debt to them.
I would also like to take a moment to thank many dear
friends—old and new—who have sustained me over the
years in different ways: Maya Barzilai, Lisa Baraitser, Yigal
Bronner, Andreas Chatzidakis, Hagit Damri, Orit Freiberg,
Laleh Khalili, Halleli Pinson, and Raz Shpeizer. Thank you all.
I would, of course, also like to thank my family—David
and Shelly Rottenberg as well as my sister, Elizabeth. They
have supported me unconditionally, each in their different
way. I would also like to thank Rachela Gordon for rescuing
me when no one else could. It has been a long and interesting
journey for all of us, and I love you all dearly.
Finally, I have a debt that accumulates with each passing
day. It is a debt unlike any other. Neve Gordon, my partner of
xviii | Acknowledgments
over twenty years, has read, discussed, and argued with me

about every single aspect of this book. He has taught me the
true meaning of care work, and it was from him that I first
learned what expansive generosity looks like. His passion and
intrepidity have enriched my life more than I can even begin
to express. He is my partner in every sense of the word—and
our life together is as rare as it is precious.
This book is dedicated to my two sons, Ari and Avivi,
both of whom have become fierce feminist forces in their
own right. They challenge me every single day, and their ir-
repressibility has made my life so much more meaningful.
They are gorgeous human beings who give me hope for the
future. I love you both more than you can ever imagine.
Different versions of Chapter 1 were published in Feminist

Studies 40, no. 1 (2014): 144–69 and Chapter 3 in Signs 42,
no. 2 (2017): 329–48. Chapter 2 is derived, in part, from an
article published in Cultural Studies 28, no. 3 (2014): 418–37.
All sections are reprinted with permission.
THE RISE OF NEOLIBERAL FEMINISM
INTRODUCTION
Feminism in Neoliberal Times
FOR MANY PROGRESSIVE AMERICANS, HILLARY Clinton’s

2016 presidential campaign as well as her strong endorse-
ment by feminist organizations marked one of the high
points of a resurgent feminist agenda in the United States.
In the days leading up to the election, there was heightened
and almost palpable anticipation among a great number of
people about the possibility of ushering in a new era when,
for the first time in US history, there would be a woman at
the helm of the most powerful nation. Consequently, in the
wake of Clinton’s unexpected—and, for many, horrifying—
defeat, it has proven difficult to assess the significance of a
female candidate running on a pro-woman and feminist-
identified ticket. For quite a few pundits and critics, Donald
Trump’s triumph simply signified an angry backlash against
feminist gains and rhetoric. The speed with which President
Trump has attempted to put his administration’s sexist and
anti-abortion agenda into action seems to lend credence to
the notion that we are witnessing yet another violent back-
lash against women’s progress.
There is little doubt that we have entered a particu-
larly frightening period in the history of the Unites States,
2 | T H E R I SE O F N E O L I B E R A L F E M I N I SM
especially since the new administration seems hell-bent on

eviscerating much of what remains of the country’s demo-
cratic institutions, agencies, and traditions, flawed as they
may have always been. In an interview not long after Trump’s
inauguration, the activist and author Naomi Klein suggested
that Donald Trump’s victory has led to a veritable corpo-
rate coup, while Cornel West has warned that the United
States is currently on the brink of neofascism.1 A full-blown
assault on women’s rights and gender equality appears to
be just around the corner. Indeed, the US administration’s
strike against reproductive rights has already begun, first
with the executive order reinstating the so-called Global
Gag Rule—prohibiting non-US nongovernmental organi-
zations that receive US funding from providing, educating,
or advising women about abortions—and subsequently with
the passage of legislation that aims to defund organizations
such as Planned Parenthood. Writing for the American
Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) website, Brigitte Amiri states
that “there is no question that President Trump hopes to
stop progress toward full LGBT equality and access to re-
productive rights.”2 Irrespective of how the rest of Trump’s
term transpires, it seems clear that an inordinate amount of
damage will already have been done.3
The majority of this book, however, was written during
what, today, feels like a very different period—a period
in which certain progressive positions, such as the long-
overdue acceptance of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender,
queer and questioning (LGBTQ) rights, appeared to be
moving ineluctably from the margins into the mainstream
and institutional consensus. One has only to think about the
Marriage Equality Act as well as the nomination of the first
woman and feminist-identified presidential candidate by a
I ntroduction : F eminism in N eoliberal T imes | 3
major national party. Many on the left—myself included—

were quite ambivalent about these developments, in large
part because the enfolding of progressive movements into
mainstream common sense seemed inevitably to entail
a willful elision of the devastation wrought by neoliberal
policies—not least on the lives of poor women and women
of color—as well as the rendering (even) more invisible of
vast structural inequalities and continued oppression on so
many different fronts.4
Since January 20, 2017, however, the political climate
has been transformed in ways few predicted. We now have
a ruthless business tycoon with no previous political expe-
rience in the Oval Office, a president who actually lost the
popular vote by a historic margin of at least three million
votes. The Trump administration is also riddled with
profoundly disturbing— and ostensibly irreconcilable—
contradictions. A vehemently anti- choice evangelical
Christian has become vice president and an unapologetic
white nationalist served as chief White House strategist,
while Trump’s cabinet members—those appointees who
are currently heading the most important governmental
agencies—literally embody neoliberal principles in their
most extreme form, namely, intensified deregulation, pri-
vatization, and capital enhancement, spelling doom for the
remaining vestiges of the New Deal safety net and urgently
needed policies protecting the environment. What is so
striking is that neoliberalism, which is most often linked
with promoting the unhindered transnational flow of cap-
ital and goods, has become the bedfellow of a hyped-up
version of economic and nativist nationalism. While this
current convergence of neoliberalism with what Cornel
West has termed neofascism is perhaps nothing new on the
contemporary political landscape—existing in other coun-

tries for some time—it is still shocking and terrifying for
many people across the globe to witness this merging in the
United States.5 Indeed, actions taken by the Trump admin-
istration, including his flurry of extremely controversial
executive orders, have already sparked mass mobilization
and protest on a scale not seen for decades.6 Perhaps we
have entered a new era of renewed mass popular resistance,
where notions of social justice and equality will be given
new life and potentially present an alternative to both the
neofascist tendencies of the new administration as well as
the neoliberal market rationality that continues to colonize
our world apace. This, at least, is my hope, and one that
I return to in Chapter 6.
As will become clear, however, The Rise of Neoliberal
Feminism tracks a different if interrelated phenomenon,
namely, the mutual entanglement of neoliberalism with
feminism, which has always been considered a progressive
political stance.7 This research odyssey began in 2012 when,
after a long period of latency in which few women—let
alone powerful women—were willing to identify publicly as
feminist, the status quo began to change both rapidly and
dramatically. All of a sudden, many high-profile women
in the United States were loudly declaring themselves
feminists, one after the other: from the former director of
policy planning for the US State Department Anne-Marie
Slaughter, the former president of Barnard College Debora
Spar and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, to young
Hollywood star Emma Watson and music celebrities Miley
Cyrus and Beyoncé. Feminism had suddenly become ac-
ceptable and intensely popular in ways that it simply had
never been before.8
The prospect of a resurgent feminist discourse was, of

course, exhilarating, particularly since the term “postfemi-
nism”—which Rosalind Gill describes as a complex “entan-
glement of feminist and anti-feminist ideas”—was already
in mass circulation and had been doing such a good job
at eschewing the necessity of an organized mass women’s
movement.9 And, yet, many long-time activists and scholars
were wary of the newest development due, in large part, to
the all but total disappearance of key terms that had tradi-
tionally been inseparable from public feminist discussions
and debates, namely, equal rights, liberation, and social jus-
tice.10 In their stead, other words, such as happiness, balance,
responsibility, and lean in, began to appear with stubborn
consistency. Fascinated by the widespread circulation and
acceptance of a new feminist vocabulary alongside the eli-
sion of so many key terms, I began to follow the individual-
izing and political anesthetizing effect of this new variant of
feminism.
It was the appearance of a new feminist vocabulary that
first motivated me to begin examining feminism’s new vis-
ibility in mainstream cultural outlets, ranging from news-
paper and magazine articles to television series, bestselling
autobiographies and “how-to-succeed” guides for women,
and so-called mommy blogs. I wanted to understand why
this form of feminism became publicly acceptable and
was gaining such widespread currency as well as to query
whether the changing vocabulary was indeed linked to the
legitimacy feminism had suddenly acquired in the US pop-
ular imagination. My interest in this novel cultural phe-
nomenon peaked when several conservative actors—from
Prime Minister Theresa May in the United Kingdom to
Ivanka Trump—joined the ranks of an already impressive
list of high-profile women publicly identifying themselves

as feminists.11
The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism thus offers an in-depth
analysis of these complex and confounding issues, and,
as readers will see, its theoretical framework expands and
changes over the course of the book as I attempt to account
for the rapid shifts within this new feminist discourse. As cer-
tain feminist themes permeated and began circulating widely
within the US mainstream media, their contours and emphases
morphed, sometimes quite significantly. The book follows
these shifts, tracing where and how the new variant of fem-
inism has appeared in the cultural and political arena—and
through what particular idioms it has operated—since 2012.12
It is always difficult to capture a particular cultural moment as
it happens—in real time, as it were—and this, of course, is par-
ticularly true when events are unfolding so quickly.
The following chapters chart as well as analyze the rise
of what I have come to term neoliberal feminism. The book
begins by flagging what I perceived to be an intensifying
crisis in liberalism’s construal of space—namely, the bifur-
cation between the public and private—a crisis that has had
significant repercussions for liberal feminist thinking as
well as for its agenda for social change.13 This spatial crisis
is not particularly new and its genesis is clearly multifaceted,
involving liberalism’s own internal contradictions, not least
of which is the way that space is always already gendered in
the liberal political imaginary. However, I suggest that this
crisis became acute as more and more middle-class women
in the United States entered the professional classes on the
one hand and as neoliberal rationality has become increas-
ingly hegemonic on the other.
Drawing on the work of Wendy Brown, Michel Feher, and

Wendy Lerner, I understand neoliberalism not merely as an
economic system or a set of policies that facilitates intensified
privatization and market deregulation, but as a dominant po-
litical rationality or normative form of reason that moves to
and from the management of the state to the inner workings
of the subject, recasting individuals as capital-enhancing
agents.14 Neoliberalism’s ongoing and relentless conversion
of all aspects of our world into “specks” of capital, including
human beings themselves, produces subjects who are indi-
vidualized, entrepreneurial, and self-investing; they are also
cast as entirely responsible for their own self-care and well-
being.15 It is perhaps important—and paradoxical—to note
that precisely as market rationality has gained ascendency,
postfeminism, which scholars such as Angela McRobbie and
Rosalind Gill have argued is itself a product of neoliberalism,
has been eclipsed by this new form of feminism.16 Indeed,
the entrenchment of neoliberal rationality seems to have led
not only to the corrosion of liberal feminism and the advent
of postfeminism, but more recently, it has spawned a new
form of feminism.
All of which raises a series of fascinating questions: why
might neoliberalism need feminism? What does neoliberal
feminism do that postfeminism could not or cannot accom-
plish? What kind of cultural work does this particular variant
of feminism carry out at this particular historical moment?
And, finally, what exactly are its modes of operation? This
book provides an in-depth analysis of the underlying logic
of neoliberal feminism, its intricate mechanisms, and how it
operates to advance a series of objectives, including the pro-
duction of new feminist subjects.
MAINSTREAM FEMINIST
N A R R AT I V E S O F W O M E N ’ S
PROGRESS: THEN AND NOW
To make sense of the current moment in which neoliberal

feminism has been on the ascendant, it is vital to under-
stand at least some its historical underpinnings, or more
precisely, the way feminism has been perceived, narrated,
and depicted in the popular imagination. Since the 1970s,
a certain liberal feminist narrative of women’s progress has
emerged and been accepted in the United States, particularly
within the mainstream media. It unfolds in the following
manner: middle-and upper-class women were confined to
the private sphere until first-wave feminism’s mobilization
in the latter part of the nineteenth century, when women
began, en masse, to demand recognition as public subjects.
Women’s participation in the war effort, the passage of the
Nineteenth Amendment giving women the right to vote,
and the coalescing of the modern New Woman norm
were all fruit of this long-standing demand and activism.
Throughout the twentieth century, many women took ad-
vantage of newfound freedoms, and yet upwardly mobile
women were very often forced to make difficult choices
between having a family or pursuing a career—namely,
between traditional definitions of womanhood and pro-
gressive ones. The second wave of the women’s movement,
the narrative continues, significantly transformed this re-
ality. Although difficulties remain—and the 1980s were, in
particular, fraught with various backlashes against femi-
nist gains—the last three to four decades have witnessed
unprecedented freedoms and choices for women in the
United States.17
This relatively uncritical progressive narrative has, not

surprisingly, been profoundly challenged on many fronts by
a range of feminist writers, academics, and activists over the
years. Some of the more well-known critiques include black
feminist writers, such as Hazel Carby and bell hooks, who
have crucially underscored the total erasure of race as well as
the privileging of a certain class within this narrative.18 Other
influential critiques include Arlie Hochschild and Anne
Machung’s The Second Shift, which spotlighted women’s dif-
ficult negotiation between work and home life, particularly
given the deeply entrenched assumption that women are still
ultimately responsible for domestic duties;19 Susan Faludi’s
Backlash: The Undeclared War against Women, which de-
tailed the anti-feminist counterattack of the 1980s;20 and
Naomi Wolf ’s bestselling The Beauty Myth, which famously
argued that contemporary beauty ideals constitute a psycho-
logical weapon against women whose objective is to slow
down their progress.21
Notwithstanding these trenchant interventions and
critiques, there was still a very widely held assumption,
particularly among middle-class whites, that women had
thrown off their historic shackles and gender equality had
been substantially realized. The 1990s and the first decade of
the new millennium have, accordingly, often been referred to
and understood in the mainstream media as the postfeminist
era that, like the notion of the post-racial era, promulgates
the conviction as well as the sensibility that the goals of
feminism have already—more or less—been achieved and
that there is no longer any raison d’être for a mass woman’s
movement.22 Not surprisingly, postfeminism coincided with
the increasing hegemony of neoliberal rationality, which
eliminates from view political stratification and the disparate
position of social groups and individuals.23 These years were

also precisely the ones in which high-profile women were
wary of admitting any feminist tendencies and where women
would often invoke feminism publicly only in order to dis-
miss its continued relevance.
Since 2012, however, we have witnessed yet another
transformation in the mainstream cultural landscape.
Indeed, in the past few years, feminism has become “in”
again. A flurry of self-proclaimed feminist manifestos have
appeared in the cultural and political arena, garnering in-
tense media attention and reenergizing feminist debates,
most prominently around the question of why well-educated
middle-class women are still struggling to cultivate careers
and raise children at the same time. Two of these, former
Princeton University professor and dean of the Woodrow
Wilson School of Public and International Affairs Anne-
Marie Slaughter’s “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” and
Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg’s best-
selling Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead might
well be said to have initiated a trend of high-power women
publicly and unabashedly identifying as feminists.24 These
two feminist manifestos feature prominently in the following
pages precisely due to the inordinate amount of the media
attention they have received. Considered together with ac-
tress Emma Watson’s September 2014 speech at the UN
Women #HeforShe campaign launch and the enormously
positive response she received, Beyoncé’s “spectacular” ap-
propriation of Chimamanda Adichie’s talk “We Should All
Be Feminists”25 (see Figure I.1), as well as other widely pub-
licized feminist enunciations, these recent developments
suggest that we have moved from liberal feminism through
an arguably postfeminist moment to a new era characterized
Figure I.1 Beyoncé performing her song “Flawless” against a giant and
illuminated “FEMINIST” backdrop during the MTV Video Music Awards,
2014. Michael Buckner/Staff/Getty Images
by the ascendency, visibility, and widespread popularity of a

novel feminist discourse.26
This book argues, however, that feminist themes have
not merely been popularized and “mainstreamed,” but they
have also become increasingly compatible with neoliberal
and neoconservative political and economic agendas. The
Rise of Neoliberal Feminism tracks how and in what ways this
new and increasingly popular form of feminism has been
curiously and unsettlingly unmoored from those key terms
of equality, justice, and emancipation that have informed
women’s movements and feminism since their inception. It
is crucial to remember in this context that even classic liberal
feminism, arguably the least radical of all feminisms, con-
ceived itself as oppositional, offering a critique of dominant
society by revealing the gendered contradictions from within
liberalism’s proclamation of universal equality.27 Today, by
contrast, feminist discourse—as it appears and circulates in

mainstream outlets—is increasingly dovetailing with domi-
nant ideologies and conservative forces across the globe, thus
defanging it of any oppositional potential.
As the feminist sociologist Sara Farris has demonstrated,
in Europe, right-wing nationalist parties, such as Marine Le
Pen’s National Front and Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom,
have embraced and utilized gender parity to further a racist,
anti-immigrant agenda.28 In the United Kingdom, long-
time activist and feminist scholar Lynne Segal points out
that Theresa May, the conservative Tory prime minister, has
publicly declared herself a feminist while supporting every
single one of the austerity measures that make the lives of
poorer women much harsher.29 In the United States, not
only has gender oppression been brandished to justify im-
perialist interventions in countries with majority Muslim
populations halfway across the globe,30 but, more recently,
high-powered and extremely visible corporate women, such
as Sandberg, have publicly endorsed a type of feminism that
is informed by the prevailing market rationality. While this
volume engages critically with the rapidly expanding schol-
arship that addresses feminism’s “co-optation” by neoliberal
capitalism,31 it argues that the concept of co-option is ulti-
mately inadequate since it fails to capture the intricate and
complex interactions between neoliberalism and feminism.
It is also important to underscore here that what is new
on the contemporary landscape is not the continued life of
feminism. Over the past decades, there have been unceasing
and diverse forms of feminist activism on the ground, and
there has also been debate about whether we can identify a
third-wave (or even fourth-wave) feminism.32 The inability
to reach any kind of consensus around third-wave feminism
and the reason it plays a minimal role in the mainstream

progress narrative outlined above derives not only from its
diffuseness and its tendency to focus on women’s individual
choices, but also from the way it has been taken up by the
media as virtually indistinguishable from a postfeminist sen-
sibility.33 Indeed, as I argue in Chapters 1 and 3, popular and
mainstream media have represented and helped to transmute
liberal feminism into choice feminism (which, again, can be
said to be one manifestation of third-wave feminism) and
eventually into postfeminism, or choice as postfeminism.
These mediated forms of feminism, I maintain, provided fer-
tile ground for the rise of neoliberal feminism, which, how-
ever, constitutes something new on the cultural landscape.
Neoliberal feminism’s newness is marked and manifests
itself in two central ways. First, in contrast to an open-
ended libertarian “choice feminism” of the third-wave va-
riety, a happy work-family balance has become neoliberal
feminism’s ultimate ideal, and this ideal has been enfolded
into mainstream common sense. Second, the dizzyingly pace
at which so many high-powered women have embraced
feminism is unprecedented. No form of feminism has ever
been as welcomed and championed by iconic, mainstream,
and highly visible figures as this current form. The following
chapters therefore attempt to account for this new variant of
feminism’s emergence as well as the cultural work it is cur-
rently carrying out.
T H E BA L A NC E D F E M I N I ST
The notion of a happy work- family balance constitutes

the central axis of this book’s empirical and theoretical
analysis. Its careful examination of diverse cultural sites—

from New York Times bestselling books, through widely read
articles in the mainstream print media, to popular televi-
sion shows and well-trafficked “mommy” blogs—lays bare
how discussion about work-family balance has surged in the
past few years, becoming a key feminist term in the United
States. The proliferation of this balance discourse as feminist
is as striking as it is significant. Balance has been incorpo-
rated into the social imagination as a cultural good, helping
to engender a new model of emancipated womanhood: a
professional woman able to balance a successful career with
a satisfying family life. A “happy work-family balance,” in
other words, is currently being (re)presented as a progres-
sive feminist ideal. Insofar as this is the case, then this new
feminist ideal must not only be understood as helping to
shape women’s desires, aspirations, and behavior, but also, as
this book demonstrates, as producing a feminist subject in-
formed through and through by a cost-benefit calculus.
In Chapter 1, I track the surge in balance discourse, while
discussing the cultural transformation in conceptions of
“progress” for middle-class women in the United States. I do
so first by examining Anne-Marie Slaughter’s “Why Women
Still Can’t Have It All” in the Atlantic, which not only sparked
heated debate but also catapulted the former Princeton dean
into the national spotlight. Reading Slaughter’s article in
conjunction with television series such as The Good Wife,
I suggest that these cultural texts register a reorientation of
the liberal feminist discursive field toward balance and pos-
itive affect, and demonstrate how women’s “progress” has
been reconceived as the ability to create a felicitous balance
between public and private aspects of the self. I suggest that
this transformation of liberal feminism is the result of an
intensifying crisis in liberalism’s construal of space and is

predicated precisely upon the erasure of notions of freedom,
equal rights, and social justice. I further argue that notions
like a felicitous work-family balance become a normalizing
matrix that helps govern women by shaping their desires,
aspirations, and behavior.
In Chapter 2, I move to explore the contours of an in-
creasingly dominant neoliberal feminism. Concentrating on
the shifting discursive registers in Sandberg’s Lean In, I pro-
pose that this hugely popular feminist manifesto can give us
insight into the specific ways in which the husk of liberalism
has been mobilized to spawn a neoliberal feminism as well
as a new feminist subject. Disavowing the socioeconomic
and cultural structures shaping our lives, this feminist sub-
ject accepts full responsibility for her own well-being and
self-care, which is predicated on crafting a felicitous work-
family balance based on a cost-benefit calculus. While this
new form of feminism can certainly be understood as simply
another domain neoliberalism has colonized by producing
its own variant, I suggest that it simultaneously serves a par-
ticular cultural purpose: it hollows out the potential of main-
stream liberal feminism to provide a critique of the social
injustices generated by the structural contradictions of lib-
eral democracy, and in this way further entrenches neolib-
eral rationality.
I next proceed to examine much more closely the wider
contemporary embrace of feminism by the mainstream
media. Thus, in Chapter 3, I expand my previous claims by
arguing that neoliberal feminism is producing a new form
of neoliberal governmentality for young middle-class and
“aspirational” women, namely, a governmentality structured
through futurity and based on careful sequencing and smart
self-investments in the present to ensure enhanced returns in

the future. Providing two representative examples—the glo-
rification of college hookup culture and the new technology
of egg-freezing being offered as part of corporations’ benefits
package—I demonstrate how upwardly mobile middle-class
women are currently being encouraged to invest in their
professions first and to postpone maternity until some later
point. By encouraging these women to build their own port-
folio and to self-invest in the years once thought of as the most
“fertile,” I lay bare how neoliberal feminism is increasingly
interpellating young middle-class women as generic rather
than gendered “human capital.”
While this form of interpellation is part and parcel
of neoliberalism’s rationality, one of The Rise of Neoliberal
Feminism’s central theses is that neoliberalism may actually
“need” feminism to resolve—at least temporarily—one of
its internal tensions in relation to gender. As an economic
order, neoliberalism relies on reproduction and care work in
order to reproduce and maintain human capital. Professional
women (and men), for example, frequently purchase and
thus outsource care work for their children or aging family
members. Yet, on the other hand, as a political rationality,
neoliberalism has no lexicon that can recognize let alone
value reproduction and care work. This is not only because
human subjects are increasingly being converted into generic
human capital (where gender is disavowed) but also because
the division of the public-private spheres—informing liberal
thought and the traditional gendered division of labor—is
being eroded through the conversion of everything into cap-
ital and the infiltration of a market rationality into all spheres
of life, including the most private ones. In stark contrast to
liberalism, in other words, neoliberalism has no political im-
aginary outside of the market and a market metrics—and
these are colonizing all spheres of life including the private

domain.
Indeed, the book’s underlying premise is that both
men and women—and particularly those subjects already
endowed with a certain volume of economic, social, cultural,
and symbolic capital34—are increasingly being hailed as ge-
neric human capital, as part of a process that strips them
of any value (or identity markers) except market ones. This
interpellation helps produce subjects who are informed by
a cost-benefit metric and who, in order to remain viable,
let alone thrive, must carefully sequence their lives while
making smart self- investments in the present to ensure
enhanced returns in the future.
Ultimately, though, my argument is that neoliberal fem-
inism must be understood as operating as a kind of push-
back to the total conversion of educated and upwardly
mobile women into generic human capital. By paradoxi-
cally and counterintuitively maintaining reproduction as
part of “aspirational” women’s normative life trajectory and
positing balance as its normative frame and ultimate ideal,
neoliberal feminism helps to solve one of neoliberalism’s
constitutive tensions by maintaining a distinctive and
affective lexiconic register of reproductive and care work,
and by helping to ensure women desire work-family balance
and that all responsibility for reproduction falls squarely
on the shoulder of individual women.35 Yet, as reproduc-
tive technology develops in the future, this population of
high-potential women will likely be able to outsource re-
production and care work more and more, thus ensuring
the re-entrenchment of the aspirational subject as generic
human capital on the one hand, and a whole other class of
women who are conceived as not fully responsibilized and
thus exploitable and disposable on the other. As I document
in more detail in Chapter 6, precisely at the moment when

more middle-class women have entered positions of power,
domestic and care workers have become the fastest growing
occupations in the US. The overwhelming majority of these
workers are women—while most are women of color and
immigrants—and they often work without any job security
or social benefits, earning poverty wages.36
In Chapter 4, I shift my analysis to another cultural
site, namely Internet blogs that fall loosely into the genre of
“mommy blogs.” I analyze two well-trafficked blogs written
by Ivy League– educated professional women with chil-
dren. Reading these blogs as part—and symptomatic—of
the larger neoliberal feminist turn, I show how neoliberal
feminism is currently interpellating middle- aged women
differently from their younger counterparts. I suggest
that in earlier articulations of the promise of work-family
balance, happiness is either linked to the balancing act it-
self (in Slaughter and Sandberg, for instance), or held out as
a promise for the future (for young aspirational women, as
I show in Chapter 3). Yet, for maturing feminist subjects—
those who have managed to approximate the balanced
woman—notions of happiness have expanded to include
the normative demand to live in the present as fully and as
positively as possible. Work-family balance is, in a sense,
already assumed and positive affect is then enfolded in a
new temporal dimension. The turn from a future-oriented
perspective to “the here and now,” in other words, reveals
how different temporalities function as part of the technol-
ogies of the self within contemporary neoliberal feminism.
I show how positive affect is the mode through which tech-
nologies of the self direct subjects toward certain temporal
horizons.37 Finally, I suggest that exhortation to live in “the
here and now,” particularly for aging women, is not neces-

sarily an anomaly or challenge to neoliberalism in general or
neoliberal feminism more specifically—where notions of fu-
ture returns remain key—but make up one part of the larger
apparatus of technologies of the self that are constitutive of
neoliberalism in our present moment.
In Chapter 5, I proceed to examine Ivanka Trump’s Women
Who Work in conjunction with Megyn Kelly’s memoir Settle
for More and Ann-Marie Slaughter’s Unfinished Business.38 On
the one hand, I demonstrate how Trump’s manifesto registers
and helps constitute the newest permutation of the neolib-
eral feminist subject that I have been tracking throughout
this book. Indeed, Women Who Work conjures up a subject
who further propels the conversion of aspirational women
into generic human capital, which is best exemplified in the
reworking of motherhood in managerial terms. It brilliantly
exposes, for example, how affect, even toward one’s own chil-
dren, becomes subsumed under neoliberal rationality and is
transformed into a form of investment and calculation that
helps to procure a felicitous balance. Simultaneously, the
ideal of a happy work-family balance continues to serve as a
pushback to this conversion process. These two concurrent
movements or trajectories bring neoliberal feminism closer
to its logical limit as well as render Women Who Work a neo-
liberal feminist manifesto par excellence. On the other hand,
through a careful comparative analysis of all three “how-to”
books, I reveal that an identical rationality undergirds all of
them—despite having been authored by women who identify
with opposing political camps. In this way, I highlight how
neoliberal rationality’s colonization of more domains of our
lives has undone conceptual and political boundaries con-
stitutive of liberalism and liberal thought, while refiguring
these domains through market metrics. Not only does the

private-public divide collapse, but so, too, does the distinc-
tion between one’s “private” self and one’s “public” enterprise
as the self itself becomes an enterprise. This dual process
of collapse and reconfiguration shapes the neoliberal femi-
nist subject, which, in turn, makes it increasingly difficult to
pursue a vocabulary of structural inequality and oppression.
Given the reality that, most often, women of color, poor,
and immigrant women serve as the unacknowledged care-
workers who enable professional women to strive towards
“balance” in their lives, neoliberal feminism is therefore
helping to produce and legitimize the exploitation of these
“other” female subjects. The detailed descriptions of new
forms of governmentality and technologies of the self offered
in the following pages expose how neoliberal feminism in-
creasingly produces a splitting of female subjecthood: the
worthy capital- enhancing feminist subject and the “un-
worthy” disposable female “other” who performs most of the
reproductive and care work. This feminism, in sum, forsakes
the vast majority of women and facilitates the creation of
new and intensified forms of racialized and class-stratified
gender exploitation, which increasingly constitutes the invis-
ible yet necessary infrastructure of our new neoliberal order.
It is important to stress—even at the risk of repetition—
that neoliberal feminism is an unabashedly exclusionary
feminism; it reinscribes white and class privilege and het-
eronormativity, while, at least until the time of writing,
presenting itself as post-racial and LGBTQ friendly. This new
variant of feminism, in other words, can indeed accommo-
date women of color, queer or trans women who espouse the
happy work-family balance ideal, even as neoliberalism does
not really require anti-racism or LGBTQ acceptance in the
same way that I suggest it “needs” feminism to help resolve

the quandary that reproduction and care work continue to
present for neoliberal rationality, at least for the moment.
Consequently, neoliberal feminism must be understood as
a key contemporary discourse that is overshadowing other
forms of feminism, rendering it more difficult to pursue a vo-
cabulary of social justice. Indeed, the notion of balance helps
“disarticulate” structural inequality by promoting individua-
tion and responsibilization.
In the concluding chapter, then, I return to the question
of hope, raising questions about whether and how we can re-
claim feminism for a radical democratic project. While some
scholars have insisted that neoliberal feminism should not be
considered feminist in any way, I argue that this approach is
problematic on a number of fronts. It assumes that feminism
has a stable essence or universal foundation that we know in
advance rather than leaving its definition open to democratic
contestation.39 As women of color and poststructuralist
feminists have already demonstrated, any attempt to define
feminism once and for all or to police its borders results in
violent exclusions. Such an approach also underestimates the
affective power of neoliberal feminism, which, as this book
stresses, is a crucial mode through which the new feminist
and neoliberal subject is being cultivated. In an effort to
offer a different path for reclaiming feminism, I engage with
Judith Butler’s recent work on precarity and ask whether her
notion of precariousness, which describes a social and eco-
nomic condition that cuts across identity claims, can provide
us with an alternative vocabulary, one that can help reorient
feminism toward a vision of social justice and egalitarian re-
distribution of vulnerability in these increasingly scary neo-
liberal and neofascist times.40
It is precisely during such a critical historical juncture,

where hard-won feminist gains are in imminent danger of
being undone on the one hand and where there has been a
resurgence in popular feminist mobilization on the other—
the #MeToo campaign as the most recent manifestation of
this41—that it becomes necessary to stand back and examine
the particular—and peculiar—ways in which feminism has
reentered public discussion in the United States in the past
few years. Indeed, by tracing the recent surge in feminist dis-
course in popular and mainstream media venues, we may
not only gain crucial insight into the powerful forces that
have helped to produce neoliberal feminism, but we may also
gain a greater understanding into the kind of cultural work
this strand of feminism is carrying out and will likely con-
tinue to carry out for many years to come. The reclaiming of
feminism as a vehicle with which to address the increasing
distribution of precarity across the globe is thus more urgent
now than it has ever been.
1
✦
HOW SUPERWOMAN
BECAME BALANCED
IN THE SECOND DECADE OF the twenty-first century, high-

profile women seemed, suddenly, to leave any lingering ret-
icence behind and began vocally and publicly espousing
feminism. Indeed, these media-attracting declarations have
successfully reinserted feminism into the mainstream pop-
ular imagination and have very often revolved around the
need to renew discussion about how women can cultivate
a better work-family balance. One crucial and formative
moment in this changing atmosphere was the publication of
an article by Anne-Marie Slaughter in the July/August 2012
edition of the Atlantic. In “Why Women Still Can’t Have It
All,” Slaughter describes the reasons behind her decision to
leave the State Department at the end of her two-year term
as the first female director of policy planning.1 She returned
home to Princeton—where she still held a tenured position
in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International
Affairs—because she simply wanted to spend more time with
her husband and two adolescent boys who had not accom-
panied her to Washington. Slaughter’s personal story then
prompts an extended articulation of what she argues is a
much larger cultural problem in the United States: the fact
that high-powered professional women are still finding it

exceedingly difficult to balance career demands with their
wish for an active home life. This is not due to any failure on
women’s part, Slaughter repeatedly insists, but rather due to
social norms surrounding success and the inflexibility of US
workplace culture, which (still) values professional advance-
ment over family.
Slaughter’s essay struck a deep cultural chord. It imme-
diately went viral and within a week of its publication, more
than one million people had accessed the online version.
It has since become the most widely read essay in the his-
tory of the Atlantic, and more than three million readers
have accessed it since its initial publication (see Figure 1.1).2
What emerges from an examination of the many and varied
responses on different blog sites and comments is a relatively
broad consensus that the essay’s power stems from its cogent
and succinct articulation of what “having it all” has come
to signify for educated middle-class women in the United
States, as well as from its simple explanation of why many
professional women continue to feel bitterly divided between
career and family.3 As many in the X and Y Generations
seem intuitively to know, “having it all” for upwardly mo-
bile women has meant— quite mundanely— pursuing a
meaningful career and cultivating an intimate family life.
Yet, even when women have managed, somehow, to juggle a
demanding career with being a “present” mother, Slaughter
argues, “having it all” has not translated into Zen-like well-
being; it has not brought happiness. Finding a way to “have it
all” is difficult enough for most professional women—unless
they are “superwomen, rich or self-employed”—but finding a
way to “have it all” happily is virtually impossible for the vast
majority of women.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Mr. Glanvil and the Popish Writers tell me so? I hope not; for the
Text telleth us plainly, that the rich man presently after his death was
in Hell in torments, and could not come hither unto earth again to
warn his brethren, otherwise he would not have prayed Abraham to
have sent Lazarus. And whether it be taken for a real History of
things done, or but a Parable, yet the spiritual meaning of our
Saviour must be infallibly true, that immediately after death the
souls of the godly are by Angels carried into Abrahams bosome, and
the wicked go down into Hell, from whence there is no redemption;
and therefore do not wander up and down here, nor make any
Apparitions: for I imagine that the authority of holy King David, a
Prophet and a man after Gods own heart, is to be preferred before
the authority of a thousand Popish Writers, and he tells us, when the
child was dead: But now he is dead, wherefore should I fast? can I
bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he shall not return to
me. And Job tells us: As the cloud is consumed, and vanisheth
away: so he that goeth down to the grave, shall come up no more,
he shall return no more to his house, neither shall his place know
him any more. And therefore it was a vain argument of Bellarmine
when he said: “Apparitiones animarum ex Purgatorio venientium
idem testantur.” To which the Protestants answer: “But who shall
bear witness of these Apparitions, that they were not either feigned
fables, or Satanical illusions? They were men, and might be deceived,
even the best of them, with whom doth rest the faith of these
Narrations.” 5. And whereas he audaciously asketh, “Who saith that
happy Souls were never imployed in any Ministeries here below?” I
shall tell him who they are that say, that happy Souls departed are
never imployed here in any Ministeries; and they are all the learned
Divines of the Reformed Churches, and all those that were true Sons
of the Doctrine of the Church of England, such as were Bishop Jewel,
Bishop Hall, Dr. Willet, Dr. Whitaker, Mr. Perkins, and many more
such, the authority and reputation of the least of which is far above
the simple question of Mr. Glanvil. And therefore saith the latter
Confession of Helvetia: “Now that which is recorded of the Spirits or
Souls of the dead sometimes appearing to them that are alive, &c. we
count those Apparitions among the delusions and deceits of the
Devil.”
5. And as the Scriptures are sufficient both in respect of matters of
Faith, and concerning divine Worship, that their silence in those two
particulars are fully argumentative, to deny whatever is not
contained in them, as unfit to be received to either purpose. So in
respect of a Christians warfare, all things for the obtaining of a
perfect and compleat victory, and for standing and perseverance, are
in them fully declared, and what they mention not is to be rejected,
as wanting the seal of Divine Authority, whether it be in regard of
eschewing what is prohibited, or in following what is commanded.
And therefore we affirm, that what the Scriptures have not revealed
of the power of the Kingdom of Satan, is to be rejected, and not to be
believed, and what weapons we are to use against the wiles of the
Devil, we are to be furnished withal, but have need of no others but
what the Holy Ghost in the Scriptures hath made known unto us, the
rest are to be cast off, as fables and lyes, or humane inventions,
because the Scriptures are silent of any such matter, and that for
these weighty grounds and considerations.
1. We shall take the Concession of De Doctrin.
Bellarmine himself, who saith: Nullum est Christian.
vitium ad quod sanandum non invenitur in Scriptura aliquod
remedium. And again: Illa quæ sunt simpliciter omnibus necessaria,
Apostoli consueverunt omnibus prædicare: & aliorum quæ sunt
omnibus utilia. And to the same purpose is the saying of St. Austin:
Titubat fides, si divinarum Scripturarum vacillet authoritas: porrò
fide titubante, etiam ipsa charitas languescit. Therefore if there be
no fault for which the Scripture doth not yield some remedy, then
surely to make a visible League with the Devil, or to have carnal
Copulation with him, either must have no verity at all in it, or that
the Scripture hath provided no remedy for it, for of such things there
is no mention. And if Faith must stumble, where the authority of the
Scriptures is wanting, then surely the belief of all rational men must
needs be staggering, to believe what these common Witchmongers
affirm of the Witches visible League and carnal Copulation with the
Devil, when there is no authority of Scripture at all to strengthen or
countenance any such matter.
2. The 1 Pet. 5. 8, 9. Eph. 6. 11, 12, 13.
Scriptures do fully 2 Cor. 10. 4, 5.
and abundantly inform us of the Devils
spiritual and invisible power, and against the same declares unto us
the whole Armor of God, with which we ought to be furnished, as the
Apostle saith: Put on the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to
stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh
and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the
rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in
high places. Wherefore take unto you the whole armor of God, that
ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to
stand. And the Apostle St. Peter telleth us: Be sober, be vigilant,
because your adversary the devil, like a roaring lion, walketh about
seeking whom he may devour; whom resist stedfast in the faith.
And in another place: For the weapons of our warfare are not
carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds,
casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth it
self against the knowledge of God. From which Scriptures we may
take these remarkable observations.
1. We are to 1 Tim. 3. 7. 2 Cor. 2. 11.
consider the 2 Tim. 2. 26.
nature of this Warfare, that it is spiritual
and against spiritual wickedness in high places, and not against flesh
and blood; and the Holy Ghost could not be wanting nor defective,
but superabundantly full in describing the nature of this warfare,
that it is spiritual, not carnal; and therefore we are to prepare our
selves against all spiritual assaults: but as for any visible, carnal, or
bodily, there is not, nor can be any such, because the Apostle that
declared by his Preaching and Writings the whole counsel of God,
hath revealed no such thing as the visible appearing of Satan, much
less of his making of a visible League with the Witches, or the
sucking of their bodies, or the having carnal Copulation with them,
which must of necessity be lyes and figments, because the Holy
Ghost hath not warned us of any such, which we ought certainly to
believe he would have done, if there had been any such matter. And
the holy Apostle, who was not ignorant of the devices νοήματα,
notions or intentions of Satan, would not have omitted to have
warned the godly, if there had been any such matter as a visible
League, sucking of their bodies, or carnal Copulation, the thing being
of so great weight and concern. For as one said well: Grave est de
vita & bonis periclitari, sed multò gravius insidiantem habere
Satanam. And he that so often hath given us warning of the wiles,
devices, and snares of the Devil, if there had been any such
dangerous snare as this, would without doubt have given us notice of
it.
2. We are to consider the end of this Warfare, that it is for no less
than a Crown, and that not a terrestrial, but a celestial one, not a
fading one, but an everlasting one, a Crown of eternal life, of
immortal glory, even for an house given of God, eternal in the
Heavens. Therefore this being a thing of the greatest concern that
belongs to a Christian, the Apostle would not doubtlesly omit any
thing that had been necessary to the obtaining of such an inestimable
prize, and such an important Victory; and therefore cannot in reason
have concealed or omitted such a weighty matter as a visible League,
and the like, if there had been any such thing.
3. We are to consider that this Armor Eph. 6. 14, 15, 16,
prescribed for the Souldiers of Jesus Christ, 17, 18.
is the whole armor of God, πανοπλίαν, the compleat armor of God
(as Dr. Hammond renders it) perfect both for defence and offence.
And therefore the Apostle describes it fully by a Metaphor, taken
from such Arms as the Roman or other Nations in his time use,
saying: Stand therefore, having your loyns girt about with truth,
and having on the breast-plate of righteousness: And your feet shod
with the preparation of the Gospel of peace. Above all taking the
shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery
darts of the wicked. And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword
of the spirit, which is the word of God. Praying always with all
prayer and supplication in the spirit, and watching thereunto with
all perseverance and supplication for all Saints. And as it is a
compleat and perfect Armor, both in respect of defence and offence;
so it is a spiritual, not a carnal, corporeal, or bodily armor, because
the warfare is not against flesh and blood, but against spiritual
wickedness in high places, against spiritual enemies, not against
corporeal and carnal ones; for as the enemies are and the warfare, so
are the armor and weapons. From whence we truly urge, that the
Apostle led by the Holy Ghost, and the Wisdom of the Father, and
knowing the whole counsel of God (especially in this point) hath
omitted nothing that is fitting armor for a Christian either of defence
or offence, whereby he may be inabled to get the victory against
Satan, and all his spiritual Army. And therefore that either Satan
hath not power, or doth not assault Christians after a visible, carnal,
and bodily manner, or else that the Holy Ghost hath been defective
in prescribing armor against such assaults, and consequently that the
armor of a Souldier of Jesus Christ is not compleat, or else there is
no such bodily assaults of Satan at all, as to tempt visibly, to make a
corporeal League, to suck upon the Witches bodies, nor to have
carnal Copulation with them. But we affirm, and that (as we
conceive) with sound reason, that the Scriptures in this particular of
a Christians armor, and the compleatness of it, is abundantly
sufficient against all spiritual assaults whatsoever, and consequently
that there is no other kind of assaults but meerly spiritual, and
therefore the Word of God, the most proper Medium with sound
reason, to judge of the power of Spirits and Devils by.
3. That the 1 Tim. 1. 17. Gregor. sup.
Scriptures and Heb. 12. 9. Ezekiel. Homil. 6.
sound reason are
the only true and proper Medium to decide these Controversies by, is
most undeniably apparent, because God is a Spirit, and the invisible
God, and therefore best knows the nature and power of the spiritual
and invisible World, and being the God of truth, can and doth inform
us of their power and operations, better than the vain lyes and
figments of the Heathen Poets, or the dreams of the Platonick
School, either elder or later, nay better than all the notional and
groundless speculations of the Schoolmen, of whom it may truly be
said that, Rivulo divinæ Scripturæ relicto, in abyssos vanarum
opinionum incidêrunt. Nay these can better inform us in this point,
than the Writings of all Mortals besides, and therefore whatsoever
may be said to the contrary, may receive its answer from the Father:
Quod de Scripturis sacris authoritatem non habet, eâdem facilitate
contemnitur, quâ probatur. Therefore he being the King eternal,
immortal, invisible, and the only wise God, of none can we so truly
and certainly learn these things, as of him who hath plentifully
taught us in his Word all things necessary to Salvation, that the man
of God may be perfect, throughly furnished to every good work. Nay
he is the Father of Spirits, and therefore truly knoweth, and can and
doth teach us their Natures, Offices, and Operations.
4. The Levit. 18. 22, 23, 24. Vid. Orig. sacr. l. 1.
Scriptures c. 1. p. 15.
(especially the Writings of Moses) considered only as Historical, are
of more antiquity, verity, and certainty both as to Doctrine, Precepts,
matters of Fact, and Chronology, than all other Histories whatsoever,
whether of the Phenicians, Egyptians, Chaldeans, or Grecians, as the
learned person Dr. Stillingfleet hath sufficiently proved. Now if there
had been such an one as a Witch, that made a visible League with the
Devil, and upon whose body he suckt, and with whom he had carnal
Copulation, something of that nature would doubtless have been
recorded in the Scriptures, of which notwithstanding there is not the
least tittle or mention. And Moses who was so perfect a Law-giver, as
in a manner to omit no kind or sort of sin or evil that men possibly
could commit, but to forbid it, and make a Law against it, could
never have left out such an horrid, unnatural, and hellish wickedness
as carnal Copulation with the fallen Angels, if there had been any
such matter. For he saith, after he had forbidden all sorts of
Fornications, Adulteries, and Incests: Thou shalt not lye with
mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination. Neither shalt thou
lye with any beast to defile thy self therewith: neither shall any
woman stand before a beast to lye down thereto: it is confusion.
Defile not your selves in any of these things: for in all these the
nations are defiled, which I cast out before you. Now it cannot be
rationally imagined, that Moses having named and prohibited the
less sins of bestial Copulation and Sodomy, would have left out that
which is the most horrid and execrable of all others, to wit, carnal
Copulation with Devils, if there had been any such thing either in
possibility or act. And therefore we may conclude according to the
rules of sound reason, that there is no such matter, and that the
Scriptures are the most fit Medium to decide these Controversies.
5. The Scriptures and sound reason are 2 Thess. 3. 2.
the most fit Mediums to determine these
things by, because there is nothing that any hath written upon this
Subject (though the Authors be superfluously numerous) but if it
agree not with the principles of right reason, and the rules of the
Scriptures, they ought to be rejected. For what is not consonant to
right reason, ought not to be received by any that truly are rational
Creatures; and what agrees not with the Word of God, ought not to
be entertained by any that are or would be accounted good or true
Christians. And if all the gross fables, lyes, impossibilities, and
nonsensical stories that Demonographers and Witchmongers have
related and accumulated together, were brought to the test of the
Scriptures and sound reason, they would soon be hissed off the
Stage, and find few believers or embracers of them. But alas! all (nay
few men) have the right use and exercise of their rational faculty, but
men to see to are in themselves as beasts; and therefore we may all
pray with the Apostle to be delivered from unreasonable men, or
men without reason, or absurd men, that make no right use of
reason, ἀτόπων ἀνθρώπων.
6. The Gal. 4. 4. Dan. 4. 35.
Scriptures and Joh. 5. 14. Joh. 9. 1, 2, 3.
right reason have Ut supr. Vid. Thom. Aquin.
declared all things caten. aur. in loc.
concerning Spirits either good or bad, as
also all sorts of Diviners (or Witches, if you will have them called so)
and the nature, power, operations, and actions of them, more than
any other Book that was written before the time of our Saviours Birth
(the dreams and whimsies of the Platonists only excepted) or for the
space of three hundred years after, and therefore are the most fit
Medium and Authority to determine these things by. 1. For first it is
manifest, that all things are ordered by the wisdom of the Almighty,
who hath done whatsoever he would both in Heaven, and he doth
according to his will in the army of heaven, and among the
inhabitants of the earth: and none can stay his hand, or say unto
him, What dost thou? And these things God doth not by a naked
prescience, but by his divine will, providence, and ordination, as a
learned Divine hath taught us in these words: Est hoc inprimis
necessarium & salutare Christiano nôsse, quòd Deus nihil præscit
contingenter, sed quòd omnia incommutabili & æternâ, infallibilíq;
voluntate & providet, & præponit, & facit. So it was only his will,
decree, and determination, that Christ should not be born, or assume
humane nature visibly, but at that precise time that he had
appointed, according to the evidence of the Apostle. But when the
fulness of time was come, God sent forth his Son made of a woman,
made under the law. And when that fulness of time was come that he
sent him, then did the divine Wisdom and Providence ordain all
means, objects and occasions, whereby the fulness of the Godhead
that dwelt in him bodily, might be made manifest, by working of
miracles, both by himself and his Apostles, therefore were there so
many several sorts of Demoniacks, blind, lame, dumb, deaf, and
diseased, not by chance, but by the providence of the Father, and
only and chiefly that the work of God might be manifest in them, for
the Evangelist tells us: And as Jesus passed by, he saw a man which
was blind from his birth. And his Disciples asked him, saying,
Master, who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born
blind? Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his
parents, but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.
Upon which place Dr. Hammond doth give this clear Paraphrase:
“And some of his followers asked him, saying, Sir, was it any sin of
his own, when his soul was in another body, or was it some sin of his
parents at the time of his conception, which caused this blindness in
him? Neither his own, nor his parents sins were the cause of this
blindness of his, but Gods secret wisdom, who meant by this means
to shew forth in me his miraculous power among you.” And though
the Doctor would bring in the opinion of Pythagoras of the
Transmigration of Souls (of which vain traditional fancies he is
almost every where guilty) as received and imbibed in by some of the
Jews that then followed him: yet it appeareth plainly, that it was not
interrogated by the Jews, but by his Disciples, ὁι Μαθηλαὶ, and
therefore it is a wonder the Doctor should be so grosly mistaken; and
Theophylact tells us thus much plainly: Neq; enim Apostoli Gentiles
nugas receperunt, quo anima ante corpus in alio mundo versans
peccet, ac deinde pœnam quandam recipiat in corpus descendens.
Piscatores cùm essent, neq; audiverant tale quiddam, quia hæc
Philosophorum dogmata erant. And so declareth, that the Disciples
having seen Christ heal the man that had thirty eight years been
impotent and lame, and had said unto him, Behold thou art made
whole, sin no more lest a worse thing come unto thee, did conceive,
that this man being born blind, it had been a punishment upon him,
either for his own sins, or the sins of his parents, and so doubting
asked the question. And so also do St. Austin and Chrysostome
expound the place, which is both sound and rational. And of our
Saviours responsion, That neither had this man sinned, nor his
parents, the learned Father giveth a satisfactory answer, saying:
Nunquid vel ipse sine originali peccato natus erat, vel vivendo nihil
addiderat? Habebant ergo peccatum, & ipse & parentes ejus, sed
non ipso peccato factum est ut cæcus nasceretur. Ipse autem
causam dicit quare cæcus sit natus, cùm subdit: sed ut
manifestentur opera Dei in illo. And to the same purpose Gregory
hath this notable passage: Alia itaq; est percussio, quâ peccator
percutitur, ut sine retractatione puniatur: Alia quâ peccator
percutitur, ut corrigatur: Alia quâ quisq; percutitur, non ut
præterita corrigat, sed ne ventura committat: Alia per quam nec
præterita culpa corrigitur, nec futura prohibetur. Sed dum
inopinata salus percussionem sequitur, salvantis virtus cognita
ardentiùs amatur. From whence it is manifest, that as the Father in
the fulness of time, by his Decree and Providence sent out the Son, in
whom dwelt the fulness of the Godhead bodily, with a purpose to
manifest the same by his great and wonderful Miracles: so in his
divine Wisdom he had ordered fit subjects and objects upon whom
that power might be made manifest. And therefore were there such
strange diseases offered, especially in Demoniacks, that can hardly
be parallel’d in any one Country of that small compass, and in so
short a time, and all that the works of God might be manifest by that
ever-blessed Saviour of Mankind, Jesus Christ. And though there
were so many persons, so many several ways perplexed and afflicted
both in their minds and bodies, as some made deaf and dumb, some
torn and contorted in their members, some thrown on the ground,
some into the fire, some driven to live amongst the graves and
monuments, and yet all these cured by our blessed Saviour: Yet is
there no mention made of any that had made a visible League with
the Devil, nor upon whose bodies he suckt, nor with whom he had
carnal Copulation, nor whom he had transubstantiated into Wolves,
Dogs, Hares, Cats, or Squirrels; to have cured which would have been
as great a miracle as any of the rest, but there were no such matters;
and therefore we may safely conclude, there never were, are, or can
be any such matters, whatsoever may be said to the contrary.
2. In the New Act. 13. 8. Act. 8. 9, 10, 11.
Testament there is Act. 19. 13, 16. Ibid. 16. 16, 18.
mention made of Chrysost. in loc. 2 Thess. 2. 9.
several sorts of
deceiving Impostors, Diviners, or Witches, who were all discovered
and conquered by that power that Christ had given unto the
Apostles; as for instance: Simon, which before-time in the same city
used sorcery, and bewitched μαγεύων κὶ ἐξισῶν the people of
Samaria, giving out that himself was some great one. To whom
they gave heed from the least to the greatest, saying, This man is
the great power of God. And to him they had regard, because that of
long time he had bewitched them with sorceries; τῶς μαγείαις
ἐξεσακέναι αὐτὺς, seducebat populum suis magicis præstigiis,
saith Tremellius; and Beza, Exercuerat artem magicam, & gentem
Samariæ obstupefecerat; who when he would have bought the gift of
the Holy Ghost with money, was rejected by Peter as an Impostor
and Counterfeit, and declared, that he was in the gall of bitterness.
Such another was Elymas the Sorcerer (for so is his name by
interpretation) ὁ μάγος who was stricken blind by St. Paul. Such an
one was the Damsel that was possessed with a Spirit of Divination,
which St. Paul cast forth. And such were the Jewish Exorcists, that
took upon them to call over them which had evil Spirits, the Name of
the Lord Jesus, saying, We adjure you by Jesus whom Paul
preacheth. But the man in whom the evil spirit was, leapt on them,
and overcame them, and prevailed against them, so that they fled
out of that house naked and wounded. But amongst these several
sorts of Diviners, Impostors, or Witches, there were none that had
made a visible League with the Devil, nor upon whose bodies he
suckt, nor that had carnal Copulation with him, nor were changed
into Cats, Dogs, or Wolves: but if the Devil had had any such power,
or had there been any such sort of Witches, the divine Wisdom and
Providence would have ordained some of them then to have been
made apparent, that his power by Christ and the Apostles, might
have been shewed as well in the greater as in the less: and that for
the more full manifestation of the Works of God, as for a more
triumphant declaration of the power of Christ in conquering him and
his Kingdom, and for a more ample warning and instruction to the
Children of God to avoid the snares and wiles of the Devil; but there
being no such, then we must rationally conclude, that there now is
not, nor ever was, or can be any such matter, but the vain believing of
such figments and forgeries, is only the cunning and delusion of
Satan, who works by lying and deceiving wonders τέρασι ψεύδοις, of
which St. Chrysostome saith thus: Hoc est, omnem ostentabit
potentiam, sed nihil veri, verùm omnia ad seductionem. Et
prodigiis, inquit, mendacii. Aut ementitis ac ludificantibus, aut ad
mendacium inducentibus.
Having now sufficiently proved, that the Pag. 9.
Scriptures and sound Reason are the proper
Mediums to decide these difficulties by, we shall in the next place
shew the invalidity of some ways used by the most Authors, to prove
and defend these Tenents, and ab uno disce omnes, take Mr. Glanvil
for all, in his own words: “That this being matter of fact, is only
capable of the evidence of authority and sense: and by both these, the
being of Witches and Diabolical Contracts, is most abundantly
confirmed.” To which we shall give this smart Reply. Not to make the
Proposition universal, generally to deny the evidence of authority
and sense; no, far be it from me to run into that wild and senseless
absurdity, which were in a manner to destroy the credibility of all
humane testimony: But we shall here speak of the evidence of
authority and sense with this restriction and limitation, to these
Particulars. 1. Those Authors that write of Apparitions and Spirits. 2.
Those that treat of Diabolical Leagues and Contracts. 3. Those that
mention the Devil sucking of the Witches body, carnal Copulation
with them, their being changed into Hares, Dogs, Cats, and Wolves,
and the like. These Authors we say are to be read with caution, and
their relations not to be credited, except better proof be given to
evidence the matters of fact, than hitherto hath been brought by any,
and that for these especial reasons and necessary cautions.
1. The Authors De defect. oracul. p. Epist. lib. 7. pag.
that have recorded mihi 700. 252.
stories of this nature, are to be seriously Plutarch. in vit.
considered, whether they have related the Marc. Brut. pag.
matter of fact by their own proper 361.
knowledge, as eye and ear-witnesses of it, or have taken it up by
hear-say, common fame, or the relation of others: and if what they
relate, were not of their own certain knowledge or αὐτοψία, then is it
of little or no credit at all; for the other that relates it, might be guilty
either of active or passive deception and delusion, or might have
heard it from another, or by common report: of all which there is no
certainty, but leaveth sufficient grounds for dubitation, and is
sufficient to caution a prudent person altogether to suspend his
assent, until better proof can be brought. There is a story related by
Plinius Cæcilius to his friend Sura, of a House in Athens that was
haunted by a Spirit in so terrible and frightful a manner, that it was
left utterly forsaken, and none would inhabit in it, until that
Athenodorus the Philosopher adventured upon it, and abode the
coming of the Apparition or Phantasm, and upon its signs followed it
to a place below, and then it vanished: he marked the place, and went
to the Magistrate, and caused the place to be digged up, and found
the bones of a person inchained or fettered, and caused the bones to
be buried, and so the House remained free afterwards. It is a wonder
to think how many Authors have swallowed this relation (nay even
Philip Camerarius himself, who though a very Learned man, yet in
things of this nature too extremely credulous) and urged it for proof,
as a matter of great credit and authority, when we cannot discern
that it affords any credible ground to a rational man to believe it, not
only because the very matter it self, and the circumstances of it, do
yield sufficient grounds of the suspicion of its verity; but chiefly
because Pliny doth but relate it by hear-say, exponam ut accepi, and
of it and the rest he desires the opinion of his Friend Sura, from
whom we do not find any answer. The story taken from Plutarch (a
grave Author, if he be considered as an Heathen and a Moralist) yet
of no authority to decide such points as these are of the voice that
called upon Thamus, and commanded him to declare when he came
at Palodes, that the great God Pan was dead, which he performed,
and that thereupon followed a great lamentation of many: the story
at large is related by many, and urged as a matter of great weight and
credibility, when indeed there is no ground sufficient to perswade
any that it was true. For if it had been related by Plutarch as an ear-
witness of it, yet was he but an Heathen, that we know believed many
fond, lying, and impossible things, especially of their Gods; and
therefore in this case to a considerate Christian could be of no great
authority. And if his authority had been great, or of weight in such
matters as these, yet was he but singularis testis, which is not
sufficient in these things to be relied upon. And lastly (to our present
purpose here) he doth not record it as a thing of his own certain
knowledge, but of hear-say from Epitherses, who was but a single
Relator, and a man of no certain veracity; and therefore we can have
no rational ground to believe the truth of the story, but it may be
rejected with more reason, than it can be affirmed by. Of no greater
credit can his story be of Brutus his malus Genius appearing unto
him, because he received this by meer Tradition and hear-say,
neither could it have any other rise, but from the relation of Brutus
himself, whose guilty confidence, and troubled brain, fancied such
vain things; for those that were near Brutus neither saw nor heard
any such matter, and therefore must have been a deception of
Phansie, and no real Apparition ad extra.
2. And as Jo. à Jesu Mar. lib. The invisible World,
evidence of the 5. de Vit. Theres. p. 245, 246, 247.
matter of fact cap. 3.
recorded from the Ibid. p. 284. The invisible World,
relation of others, is of no validity to a p. 305.
judicious person: so if the matter of fact be witnessed but by one
single testimony (though an eye or an ear-witness) it is not sufficient,
because one single person may be imperfect in some senses, or under
some distemper, and so be no proper Judge of what it sees or hears;
and the Word of Truth tells us, That in the mouth of two or three
witnesses every word shall be established; and therefore we are not
(especially in such abstruse matters as these) to trust the evidence of
one single testimony. To make clear this Particular, we shall relate a
story or two from the credit of the Reverend and Learned Bishop
Hall, joyned with his judgment of such weak and feigned Tales, one
of which runs thus: “Johannes à Jesu Maria, a modern Carmelite,
writing the Life of Theresia (Sainted lately by Gregory XV.) tells us,
that as she was a vigilant Overseer of her Votaries in her life, so in
and after death she would not be drawn away from her care and
attendance: For (saith he) if any of her Sisters did but talk in the set
hours of their silence, she was wont by three knocks at the door of
the Cell, to put them in mind of their enjoyned taciturnity. And on a
time appearing (as she did often) in a lightsome brightness to a
certain Carmelite, is said thus to bespeak him; Nos cœlestes, ac vos
exules amore ac puritate fœderati esse debemus, &c. We Citizens of
Heaven, and ye exiled Pilgrims on earth, ought to be linked in a
League of love and purity, &c. Methinks the Reporter (saith the
Bishop) should fear this to be too much good fellowship for a Saint; I
am sure neither Divine nor Ancient story had wont to afford such
familiarity: and many have misdoubted the agency of worse, where
have appeared less causes of suspicion. That this was (if any thing)
an ill Spirit under that face, I am justly confident; neither can any
man doubt, that looking further into the relation, finds him to come
with a lye in his mouth. For thus he goes on; [We Celestial ones
behold the Deity, ye banished ones worship the Eucharist, which ye
ought to worship with the same affection wherewith we adore the
Deity] such perfume doth this holy Devil leave behind him. The like
might be instanced in a thousand Apparitions of this kind, all worthy
of the same entertainment.” This is a story from one single person, a
lying Carmelite, one that for interest, and upholding of Superstition
and Idolatry, had feigned and forged it; for in it self it appeareth to
be a meer falsity and figment, as any rational man may easily
discern, and so are a thousand stories of this kind worthy of the like
entertainment, that is, to be condemned for most horrid lyes.
Another he tells us: “Amongst such fastidious choice of whole dry-
fats of voluminous relations, I cannot forbear to single out that one
famous of Magdalen de la Croix, in the year of our Lord Christ 1545,
&c.” The third from the mouth of another lying Fryar named Jacobus
de Pozali, in his Sermon, “That St. Macarius once went about to
make peace betwixt God and Satan, &c.” Now whatsoever credit this
Learned man (who in things of this kind appeareth to be as vainly
credulous as any) doth seem to give unto these, or what use soever he
would make of them, it is undeniably manifest to all impartial
judgments, that they were but absolute forgeries and knacks of
Imposture and Knavery, and (according to his own opinion) may
justly be ranked amongst those thousand Apparitions of this kind, all
worthy of the same entertainment, that is, to be rejected for
abominable lyes or forgeries, and that for these reasons. 1. Because
they are not attested by any sincere and uncorrupt ear and eye-
witnesses, but by reports and relations, and that of those that were
corrupt and partial, or Accomplices to bring to pass the fraud and
imposture. 2. If they be run up to their first Author or Venter of the
Tale, he will but be found a single Witness, which is utterly
insufficient in evidencing truly a matter of fact. 3. The Relaters of
them did publish them for interest sake, and upon design to advance
false Doctrine, Worship, Superstition, and Idolatry, and therefore are
not of validity and credit. 4. In themselves (if strictly considered)
they will appear to be lying, ridiculous, contradictory in themselves,
and contrary to the authority of Divine Writ, and dissonant to sound
and right reason, and therefore ought to have no other
entertainment, but as abominable lyes and forgeries.
3. But if matters A serious Of Credul. and
of fact be Disswasive from Incredul. pag. 159.
witnessed and Popery, pag. 38, 39.
attested by many or divers persons that were ear and eye-witnesses,
yet may their testimony bear no weight in the balance of Justice or
right Reason, because they may be corrupt in point of interest, and
so have their judgments mis-guided and biassed by the corruption of
their desires and affections, or relate things out of spleen, envy, and
malice; and so may not in these mysterious matters be fit authority
to rely upon, nor competent evidence in these particulars, as Dr.
Casaubon is forced to confess in these words: “In the relation of
strange things, whether natural or supernatural, to know the temper
of the Relator, if it can be known: and what interest he had, or might
probably be supposed to have had, in the relation, to have it believed.
And again, whether he profess to have seen it himself, or taken it
upon the credit of others. And whether a man by his profession in a
capacity probable to judge of the truth of those things, to which he
doth bear witness.” Every one of these particulars would require a
particular consideration. For if there be interest in point of Religion,
then all authorities, all colour of reason is drawn in to make good this
interest, and verity is commonly stifled in this contest for selfness
and interest, and the adverse parties stigmatized with all the filthy
lyes and enormous crimes that can be invented, as is most manifest
in these instances. The Popish party finding themselves hindred and
opposed in point of the highest interest, have forged a thousand false
stories and tales to make good the interest of their Party, and have
left no dirt and dung unscraped up to throw in the faces of their
Opponents; and so have each Party done against other, where
religious interest was the quarrel, as Bishop Hall hath truly observed
in this passage, where he is shewing the abominable corruptions of
the Church of Rome: “A Religion that cares not by what wilful
falshoods it maintains a part; as Wickliffs blasphemy, Luthers advice
from the Devil, Tindals Community, Calvins feigned Miracle, and
blasphemous death, Bucers neck broken, Beza’s Revolt, the blasting
of Huguenots, Englands want of Churches, and Christendom, Queen
Elizabeths unwomanliness, her Episcopal Jurisdiction, her secret
fruitfulness, English Catholicks cast in Bears skins to Dogs, Plesses
shameful overthrow, Garnats straw, the Lutherans obscene Night-
Revels, Scories drunken Ordination in a Tavern, the Edict of our
gracious King James (An. 87.) for the establishment of Popery, our
casting the crusts of our Sacrament to Dogs, and ten thousand of this
nature, maliciously raised against knowledge and conscience, for the
disgrace of those whom they would have hated, e’re known.”
The rise of this opinion that we are disputing against, that the
Devil makes a visible and corporeal League with the Witches, that he
sucks upon their bodies, hath carnal Copulation with them, and that
they are changed into Hares, Dogs, Cats, or Wolves, and the like, was
soon after the thirteenth hundred year of Christ, when as Frederick
the Second had made a Law temporal, for the burning of Hereticks.
And not long after that, was the Inquisition set up in Rome and
Spain, and then did the Inquisitors and their Adherents, draw in
from the Heathen Poets, and all other Authors, whatsoever might
carry any colour of authority or reason, the better to countenance
their bloody and unjust proceedings, where they drew thousands of
people into the snare of the Inquisition for pretended Witchcraft,
which they made to be Heresie. And whatsoever these have written
concerning these things, such as Delrio, Bodinus, Remigius,
Springerus, Niderus, Spineus, Grillandus, and a whole rabble
besides not necessary to be named, are nothing but lyes and
forgeries, and deserve no credit at all for these reasons. 1. Because as
many of them as either were Inquisitors themselves, or those that
had any dependence upon them, or received benefit by their
proceedings, are all unjust and corrupt Authors and Witnesses, as
writing and bearing witness for their own ends, interest, and profit,
having a share in the Goods and Estates of all that were convicted
and condemned: and the Wolf and Raven will be sure to give
judgment on the Serpents side, that he may devour the man, though
never so innocent, because they hope to have a share of his flesh, or
at least to pick the bones. 2. These Authors that were the first
Broachers of these monstrous stories of Apparitions and Witches,
and are so frequently quoted by others, (that ought to have been
more wary, and might have seen reason enough to have rejected all
their feigned lyes and delusions) were not only sharers in the spoil of
the Goods of the condemned (who were judged per fas & nefas) but
also had another base end and interest, to wit, to advance the
opinion of Purgatory, praying for the dead, setting up the vain
Superstitions of the virtue of the sign of the Cross, holy Water, and
the like. And therefore they did forge so many stories of Apparitions,
and Souls coming forth of Purgatory, and recorded so many false,
lying, and impossible things from the forced, extorted, and
pretended confessions of the Witches themselves, which were
nothing else but an Hotch-potch of horrid and abominable lyes, not
to be credited, because the Authors only invented them, to promote
their own base ends and wretched interests.
Again, where Vit. Germ. medic. Lib. 2. de præstig.
Authors are pag. 16. Dæmon. cap. 5.
engaged for interest sake, they fall into heat, Anim. mag. præf.
passion, malice, and envy, and what they
cannot make out by strength of arguments, they labour to make good
by lyes and scandals, as is most apparent in this one Example we
shall here give. Henricus Cornelius Agrippa, a person in his time
well known to most of the Learned in Europe, and admired for his
general and universal skill in all kind of Learning, having published a
Piece which he styled, A Declaration of the incertitude and vanity of
Sciences and Arts, and the excellency of the Word of God: wherein
amongst other things he had sharply taxed the Monks and Fryars,
and other Orders, of their ignorance, idleness, and many other
crimes and misdemeanors, whereby certain Theologasters of Lovain
(netled with their own guilt) did in bitter malice draw up certain
Articles against him, therein accusing him of Errour, Impiety, and
Heresie, and had so far incensed Charles the Fifth then Emperour
against him, that he had commanded Agrippa unheard to make a
Recantation. But he writing a strong, polite, and pithy Apology, gave
them such a responsion, that afterwards they did never reply; by
which, and the mediation of divers learned Friends, who gave Cæsar
a right information of the end and drift of that Book, and of the
things therein contained, He was pacified, and brought to a better
understanding of the matter. Yet this could not protect Agrippa from
the virulent malice of the Popish Witchmongers, but that they forged
most abominable lyes and scandals against him, especially that
wretched and ignorant Monk Paulus Jovius, that was not ashamed to
record in his Book intituled, De Elogiis doctorum Virorum, that
Agrippa carried a Cacodemon about with him, in the likeness of a
black Dog, and that he died at Lyons, when it is certain he died at
Gratianople. From all which horrid aspersions and lying scandals he
is sufficiently acquitted by the famous Physician Johannes Wierus,
one that was educated under him, and lived familiarly with him; and
therefore was best able to testifie the whole truth of these particulars.
But any that are so perversly and wilfully blinded as to have a sinister
opinion of this person, (who ab ineunte ætate in literis educatus
esset, quâ fuit ingenii fælicitate, in omni artium ac disciplinarum
genere ita versatus est, ut excelluerit) may have most ample
satisfaction from the modest and impartial Pen of Melchior Adams,
who hath written his Life: as also from something that our
Countryman, who called himself Eugenius Philalethes, hath clearly
delivered: so that none can be ignorant of this particular, but such as
wilfully refuse to be informed of the truth.
Nay where Vid. vit. Germ. Inquir. into vulgar
interest hath a medic. pag. 29. Errours, pag. 34.
share, truth can hardly be expected, though it be but in more trivial
things, as even but for aery fame and vain-glory, as may be manifest
in Hierome Cardan, who was a man of prodigious pride and vain-
glory, which led him (as the learned Dr. Brown hath noted) into no
small errours, being a great Amasser of strange and incredible
stories, led to relate them by his meer ambition of hunting after fame
and the reputation of an universal Scholar. And of no less pride and
vain-glorious ambition was his Antagonist Julius Cæsar Scaliger
guilty, of whom it may truly be said, that he was of the nature of
those of the Ottoman Family, that do not think they can ever raign
safely, unless they strangle all their Brethren; so he did not think that
he could aspire to the Throne of being the Monarch of general
Learning, without stifling the fame and reputation of Cardan and
others, against whom he hath been most fell, and impetuously bitter.
But when men fall out about professional interest, then the stories
that through malice they invent and forge one against another, are
incredible, as is manifest in many Examples; but we shall but give
one for all, which is this. When Paracelsus, returning from his
Peregrination of ten years and above, was called to be Physical
Lecturer at Basil, where he continued three years, and more, having
by his strange and wonderful Cures drawn the most part of
Germany, and the adjacent Countries into admiration; so that he
was, and might (notwithstanding the envy and ignorance of all his
enemies) justly be styled, Totius Germaniæ decus & gloria: yet this
was not sufficient to quiet the violent and virulent mind of Thomas
Erastus, who coming to be setled at Basil, and finding that he could
not outgo nor equal Paracelsus in point of Medicinal Practice, and
being strongly grounded in the Aristotelian Philosophy, and the
Galenical Physick, did with all poyson and bitterness labour to
confute the Principles of Chymical Physick that Paracelsus had
introduced; and lest his arguments might be too weak, he backt them
with most horrible lyes and scandals, thinking that many and strong
accusations (though never so false) would not be easily answered,
nor totally washt off: which after were greedily swallowed down by
Libanius, Conringius, Sennertus, and many others: so apt are men to
invent, and suck in scandals against others, never considering how
false and groundless they are, or may be: for that he wrongfully and
falsely accused him in many things, will be manifest to any unbiassed
person, that will but take pains to read his Life, written by that
equitable Judge Melchior Adams, and that large Preface the learned
Physician Fredericus Bitiskius hath prefixed to his Works printed at
Geneva 1648.
4. But if the Vid. Resp. Rob. History 1.
Authors that Flud. ad Foster.
report matters of fact in reference to these History 2.
four particulars that we have named, were
ear and eye-witnesses, and not single, but a greater number, and
were not swayed by any corrupt or self-interest whatsoever; yet all
this is not sufficient to give evidence in these matters, except they be
rightly qualified in other things, that are necessarily requisite to
capacitate a person rightly to judge of these nice and difficult
matters, some of the chief of which we shall here enumerate. 1. The
persons that are fit to give a perfect judgment of these matters, ought
to be perfect in the organs of their senses, otherwise they may easily
be deceived, and think the things otherwise than indeed they are; so
some defects or distempers in the ears, eyes, or the rest of the
sensories, may hinder the true perception of things acted or done. 2.
They ought to be of a sound judgment, and not of a vitiated or
distempered Phantasie, nor of a melancholick Temper or
Constitution; for such will be full of fears, and strange imaginations,
taking things as acted and wrought without, when they are but only
represented within. These will take a bush to be a Boggard, and a
black sheep to be a Demon; the noise of the wild Swans flying high
upon the nights, to be Spirits, or (as they call them here in the North)
Gabriel Ratchets, the calling of a Daker-hen in the Meadow to be the
Whistlers, the howling of the female Fox in a Gill, or a Clough for the
male, when they are for copulation, to be the cry of young Children,
or such Creatures, as the common people call Fayries, and many
such like fancies and mistakes. 3. They ought to be clear and free
from those imbibed notions of Spirits, Hobgoblins, and Witches,
which have been instamped upon their Phantasies from their very
young years, through ignorant and superstitious education,
wherewith generally all mankind is infected, and but very few that
get themselves extricated from those delusive Labyrinths, that
parents and ignorance have instilled into them. From hence it is, that
not only the stolid and stupid Vulgar, but even persons otherwise
rational enough, do commonly attribute those sleights and tricks that
our common Jugglers play, unto the Devil, when they are only
performed by Leger-de-main, or sleight of hand, Boxes, and
Instruments aptly fitted; and will not stick to believe, and strongly to
affirm to others, that they have seen the Jugglers Familiar or Devil,
when it was but a poor Squirrels skin stuffed with hair or moss, and
nimbly agitated by the hands of the Juggler: which makes me call to
mind a very lepid and pertinent Accident that once in my younger
years happened in Burrow-bridge upon a great Fayr holden there
upon St. Barnabas day: I being in Company with divers Gentlemen,
whereof two were Masters of Arts, and walking in the Horse-Fayr, we
espyed a great crowd and ring of people, and drawing near, there was
a person commonly known through most of the Northern parts of
Yorkshire by the name of John Gypsie, being as black as any of that
Tribe, with a Feather in his Hat, a silk slasht Doublet, upon a fair
Holland Half-shirt, counterfeiting himself half drunk, and reeling to
and fro, with a fine Tape or Incle-string tyed fast together at the two
ends, and throwing it, (as it were) carelesly two or three times about
a smooth Rod, that another man held by both ends, and then putting
the bout of the Tape upon the one end of the Rod, and then crying, It
is now fast for five shillings; but no sooner reeling and looking aside,
the man that held the Rod did put off the bout of the Tape again, and
still John Gypsie, would cry and bet that it was fast, then would there
come two or three, and bet with him, and win, and go away (as it
were) laughing him to scorn, yet still he would continue, and pray the
Fellow that held the stick not to deceive him, and plainly shew the
people, that it would be fast when the bout was put on, then would
the Fellow that held the stick, still put off the bout when John Gypsie
looked away, whereby the people believed that he was in drink, and
so deceived by him that held the Rod, and so many would come and
bet with him, and lose: so that he used to win much money, though
the bout was put off every time, and none could discern any
alteration in the string. This strange Feat (which I confess, as he
handled and acted it, was one of the neatest that ever I saw in all my
life) did so surprize all my Companions, and in part himself, that

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The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism

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Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data

Introduction: Feminism in Neoliberal Times 1

In recent years, feminism has seen a resurgence in the pop-

personal fulfillment (which relies on low-​paid, outsourced

women can turn around the unfortunate “mutual entangle-

LIKE MOST RESEARCH, THIS PROJECT has multiple roots

as well as the many conversations that helped me think

contemporary feminism, and I owe them an enormous debt

safe haven in the United Kingdom. She, too, has become an

over twenty years, has read, discussed, and argued with me

Different versions of Chapter 1 were published in Feminist

Feminism in Neoliberal Times

FOR MANY PROGRESSIVE AMERICANS, HILLARY Clinton’s

especially since the new administration seems hell-​bent on

major national party. Many on the left—​myself included—​

contemporary political landscape—​existing in other coun-

The prospect of a resurgent feminist discourse was, of

list of high-​profile women publicly identifying themselves

Drawing on the work of Wendy Brown, Michel Feher, and

To make sense of the current moment in which neoliberal

This relatively uncritical progressive narrative has, not

position of social groups and individuals.23 These years were

by the ascendency, visibility, and widespread popularity of a

contrast, feminist discourse—​as it appears and circulates in

and the reason it plays a minimal role in the mainstream

The notion of a happy work-​ family balance constitutes

analysis. Its careful examination of diverse cultural sites—​

intensifying crisis in liberalism’s construal of space and is

self-​investments in the present to ensure enhanced returns in

these are colonizing all spheres of life including the private

in more detail in Chapter 6, precisely at the moment when

here and now,” particularly for aging women, is not neces-

these domains through market metrics. Not only does the

same way that I suggest it “needs” feminism to help resolve

It is precisely during such a critical historical juncture,

IN THE SECOND DECADE OF the twenty-​first century, high-​

that high-​powered professional women are still finding it

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

personal fulfillment (which relies on low-paid, outsourced

especially since the new administration seems hell-bent on

major national party. Many on the left—myself included—

contemporary political landscape—existing in other coun-

list of high-profile women publicly identifying themselves

contrast, feminist discourse—as it appears and circulates in

The notion of a happy work- family balance constitutes

analysis. Its careful examination of diverse cultural sites—

self-investments in the present to ensure enhanced returns in

IN THE SECOND DECADE OF the twenty-first century, high-

that high-powered professional women are still finding it