Selfish Women

This book proceeds from a single and very simple observation: throughout history, and up to the present, women have received a clear message that we are not supposed to prioritize ourselves. Indeed, the whole question of "self" is a problem for women – and a problem that issues from a wide range of locations, including, in some cases, feminism itself. When women espouse discourses of self-interest, self-regard, and selfishness, they become illegible. This is complicated by the commodification of the self in the recent Western mode of economic and political organization known as "neoliberalism," which encourages a focus on self-fashioning that may not be identical with self-regard or self-interest. Drawing on figures from French, US, and UK contexts, including Rachilde, Ayn Rand, Margaret Thatcher, and Lionel Shriver, and examining discourses from psychiatry, media, and feminism with the aim of reading against the grain of multiple orthodoxies, this book asks how revisiting the words and works of selfish women of modernity can assist us in understanding our fraught individual and collective identities as women in contemporary culture. And can women with politics that are contrary to the interests of the collective teach us anything about the value of rethinking the role of the individual? This book is an essential read for those with interests in cultural theory, feminist theory, and gender politics. This volume proceeds from a single and very simple observation: throughout history, and up to the present, women have received a clear message that we are not supposed to prioritise ourselves. Indeed, the whole question of 'self' is a problem for women - and a problem that issues from a wide range of locations, including, in some cases, feminism itself. When women espouse discourses of self-interest, self-regard and selfishness, they become illegible. This is complicated by the commodification of the self in the recent Western mode of economic and political organisation known as 'neoliberalism', which encourages a focus on self-fashioning that may not be identical with self-regard or self-interest Cover 1 Half Title 2 Title Page 6 Copyright Page 7 Contents 8 List of figures 9 Acknowledgements 10 Introduction 12 1 The psychopathology of selfishness: On narcissism and norms of gender 35 2 The philosophy of selfishness: On Ayn Rand and rational self-interest 61 3 The politics of selfishness: On Margaret Thatcher and exceptional women 88 4 Personal and professional practices of selfishness: On babies, boardrooms, and ballot boxes 111 5 A feminist ethics of selfishness? Beyond individualism and collectivism 139 Conclusion 162 Index 168 Drawing on figures from French, US, and UK contexts, including Rachilde, Ayn Rand, Margaret Thatcher, and Lionel Shriver, and discourses from psychiatry, media, and feminism, this book revisits the words and works of selfish women of modernity to understand our fraught individual and collective identities as women.