Today’s crisis of capitalism is especially severe. Four decades of neoliberalism have driven down wages, weakened labor rights, ravaged the environment, and usurped the energies available to sustain families and communities—all while spreading the tentacles of finance across the social fabric.

This critique applies to the confidence culture more broadly, which, as we have argued, proposes ways in which women can positively and constructively develop strategies to change themselves within the existing capitalist and corporate realities they face rather than disrupting and seeking to change those very realities.