Women's New Servitudes in the Age of Freedom of Choice

The neoliberal order is imposing epochal transformations on the conceptions of subjectivity and legal and political institutions. Moreover, it is severely undermining the relevance of several principles that are fundamental for law in general and for women’s rights in particular. Indeed, the neoliberal ideology seems to redefine the principle of freedom, reducing it to mere freedom of choice, and to dismantle the principle of equality in favour of a return to the regime of inequality (legal, political and economic). In this essay, I propose reopening the discussion on women’s freedom and its genealogy in order to understand the thread of continuity that still keeps women mostly in a condition of servitude, which is seemingly being reinforced in the context of neoliberalism.