Once feminist ideas entered the mainstream, advertisers and corporations did not simply accept them. They repackaged them. They took the language of liberation and turned it into a sales pitch. Empowerment became a brand identity. Independence became a lifestyle aesthetic. Equality got flattened into individual choice, with one consistent action attached: buy.
That process has a name. In 1991, scholars Robert Goldman, Deborah Heath, and Sharon L. Smith coined commodity feminism to describe how feminist ideals were absorbed by advertising and redeployed as marketable symbols. The politics were softened. The message was individualized. The outcome was profitable.
And once you see it, you start noticing it everywhere: empowerment campaigns that celebrate confidence while ignoring structural barriers, “you’ve earned it” messaging that translates liberation into purchasing power, and a culture that frames progress not as changing systems, but as consuming the right products.
The consumer republic and the expansion of the earner
Post–World War II America did not just experience economic growth. It built an identity around mass consumption. Historian Lizabeth Cohen describes how consumption became intertwined with national purpose and the American dream in The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America.
In a society organized around growth through spending, expanding the number of earners expands the number of consumers. That does not require a boardroom conspiracy. It is the logic of the system.
As women entered the workforce in greater numbers, they gained income, autonomy, and options. That is real. At the same time, businesses gained a larger labor pool and a massive new consumer segment: wage earners with purchasing power who were still culturally positioned as primary household decision-makers.
Work and consumption began reinforcing each other.
The second shift and the convenience solution
Then came the pressure point.
In The Second Shift, sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild documented how women’s entry into paid work often did not come with an equal exit from domestic labor. Many women worked one shift at the job and another at home.
Time scarcity became the defining condition of the dual-income household.
And when time becomes scarce, markets do what markets do. They sell relief.
Packaged food as “liberation,” and the health costs that followed
This is where the story gets even more uncomfortable, because it is not only about what people bought. It is about what people ate.
As more households relied on two incomes, demand for convenience skyrocketed. The food industry was ready. Processed and packaged foods had been building for decades, but the postwar era accelerated their normalization. Breakfast cereals, boxed mixes, canned soups, frozen dinners, and instant meals were marketed as modern solutions. They were not just food. They were time. They were ease. They were the promise that you could “do it all.”
Convenience was framed as progress.
This dovetailed perfectly with commodity feminism’s logic. Empowerment was not framed as changing workplace expectations, redesigning hours, or redistributing domestic labor. It was framed as optimizing the individual, especially the woman: be efficient, be capable, be modern. And buy the products that make it possible.
Over time, the convenience food revolution also reshaped public health. Research reviews have linked higher consumption of ultra-processed foods to increased risk of obesity and other adverse health outcomes.
What was sold as liberation through efficiency also became a pipeline of chronic health risk.
School hours, care gaps, and outsourcing life
There is another structural layer people rarely name.
The standard school day does not match the standard workday. That mismatch created a care gap that families filled with afterschool programs, paid childcare, and a whole economy of outsourcing. The Afterschool Alliance documents this persistent gap in reports like Working Families and Afterschool.
The pattern repeats:
more paid work
less time
more outsourcing
more consumption
more dependence on consumption to sustain growth
The predictable pushback
This argument is not “women should not work.” Workforce participation expanded opportunity and independence for many women. That matters.
The critique is about how markets used the language of feminism to sell products and normalize a lifestyle that kept the burden on individuals.
Rosalind Gill’s work on postfeminist media culture explains how empowerment messaging often becomes individualized and depoliticized, emphasizing personal choice and self-management rather than collective structural change.
In plain terms: empowerment becomes something you perform, not something society guarantees.
What comes next
For most of modern history, many families structured life around one primary income, not because it was easy or perfect, but because the household economy was organized differently. Then consumer culture shifted the baseline. Commodity feminism helped sell a new story: real empowerment looks like doing it all, and if you feel stretched, the solution is not redesigning work, school, or care. The solution is buying your way through it.
Work more so you can pay for childcare.
Work more so you can afford cleaning, convenience food, and labor-saving devices.
Work more so you can keep up with the lifestyle that now requires two incomes to sustain.
That is not liberation. That is a treadmill.
Here is the opportunity in 2026: we have tools previous generations did not. Remote and hybrid work can reduce commuting. Automation can remove busywork. AI can compress tasks that used to take hours into minutes. The promise should not be that we cram more work into the same day. The promise should be that we reclaim time.
The next chapter of empowerment is not buying better products with bigger paychecks. It is designing a life where work serves living, not the other way around.
That means making different choices, individually and collectively:
Using technology and AI to reduce low-value labor, not intensify it
Treating time as a primary form of wealth
Resisting the narrative that outsourcing is the only path to survival
Rebuilding shared responsibility at home and in communities
Pushing for systems that match real life: work hours, school hours, childcare, and care for elders
We do not need to go backward. We need to go forward with intention.
If consumerism co-opted feminism to sell us a world where we must work more to afford the costs of working, then the response is not guilt. It is clarity.
Take back time. Reduce the unnecessary. Use automation and AI to create margin. Build a life with enough space to cook, connect, rest, and care. That is what a modern version of liberation can look like.
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