The turn to the positive affect of happiness and the intensified individualization defined
by neoliberal logic represents the turn away from the political questions related to the common
good, whether social justice or gender equality. When discussing their future plans, these young
expressed personal needs, self-centered interests, and personal satisfaction only, as evidenced
through Martha’s voice when describing her collage: “I am the central character of my collage, a
female lawyer, working for the police, I have a family with two kids, I live in my own house, a
good one, I have my car. That is my happy life, a life of achievements.” Thus, Martha and these
Brazilian college women, when asking for work-life balance, autonomy, freedom, and pleasure,
were in fact attending to a motivation that was behind such quests, that is the fulfillment of their
own project of happiness. In the same way, in the rejection of “lean in”/ “opt out,” they are not
trying to promote a collective disidentification with such duality. The argumentation they bring
to move away from “lean in”/“opt out” shows a purely reasoning centered on the self with no
commitment to other women or society as a whole. It is not surprising that feminism as a
movement they could engage with resonates very little with them. If feminism has the goal of
promoting a collective change for women, they are not interested in that. The alternatives they
are envisioning for their lives, either balance or happiness, are oriented to the “I” and not to the
“we.”
Therefore, what can be concluded is that the process of individualization that leads to the
lack of a collective “journey,” is not a consequence of the freedom to choose. It is a condition
imposed by neoliberalism characterized by the absence of institutions that used to have the role
of creating collective ideals, like the local community, the school, the church, and even the
traditional family. These institutions, although still present today, have lost their capacity of
bonding people together in the name of a shared goal. Currently, if we think about school,
church, and family, they all gather people together as a means to the fulfillment of individual
By the same token, the Lean in Circles, created by Sandberg as a follow-up initiative of
her book with the intention empowering women through a circle of “equals,” bases its
functioning on an individualized scheme. Instead of truly transforming the gendered spaces of
organizations, what the Lean in Circles do is empower individuals to face their own fears to
achieve personal gains, as Rottenberg claims: “What is reinforced in these groups (Lean in
Circles), then, is precisely the entrepreneurial subject who is encouraged to take her own
personal initiative in order to improve her career prospects...” (10). It is about “my”
achievements and not “our” transformation as women; in other words, Lean in Circles indicate
working together for a similar but separate goal.
Moreover, these young women I interviewed were born and raised within a Western
consumerist mentality, as stated earlier, in which the personal fulfillment through consumption
has a greater value than the collective good, something that Nancy Fraser claims as the
privileging of recognition (i.e., identity claims) over redistribution (i.e., economic justice) (113).
This reality, for sure, is not exclusive to Brazil. However, in Brazil it assumes particular
contours, as social inequality is still a tremendous challenge to be defeated. Even when these
young college women talked about possibilities for a more inclusive change, the ultimate goal
was personal satisfaction and pride. Martha, for example, feels relieved seeing herself as a
person committed to the common good: “When I think about helping somebody with my work, it
gives me a sense of relief because I did my part, I fulfilled my role in society”; the same can be
seen when Andrea says: “I want to do my work, something that gives me pleasure and that could
be useful for other people as well, to humankind, to the nature. It means to combine a work that
speaks to me while helping people. I feel satisfied doing this.” As the consensus map shows, the
world with happiness. For these Brazilian college women, there is no collective action if the
personal is not rewarded somehow. It means that collective is at the service of the
entrepreneurial, resulting in someone who is focused on the development of the best “strategy”
to access personal happiness, whether through a common good or not. The “we” serves the “I.”
In analyzing Freud, Brown’s discussions of Freud’s conception of group identity adds
another layer for the understanding of the reasons behind the seeming impossibility for these
young women to build a group consciousness. Citing Freud, Brown says “we are bound to one
another through our collective experience of being in love with something that none of us can
have, a bond that itself sustains the love…” (29). Such reasoning is based on Freud’s assumption
that human beings are not “group animals” (Brown 29) but rather inherently socially rivalrous
and competitive. What binds them as a group is the possibility of having a shared love for
something or someone. A group is possible when individuals put one and the same object in
place of their ideal ego and identify themselves with one another through their ego, one that
urges the same object of desire and love. Freud makes me think about the inexistence of a
“shared loved object” of these young women. Although the “journey to happiness” defines a
common path for them, it does not mean that they “love” the same things. Each one of these
Brazilian college women creates her singular “love” and keeps her ideal ego separately. There is
neither a shared ego, or a shared love, or a shared purpose. The goal of happiness is the same but
the path to achieve such a state is individual. Brazilian college women do not represent a
coherent group of people; instead, they are isolated individuals living in the same context and
exposed to the same neoliberal logic while crafting their customized biography. It is interesting
to note that even the word “biography” that I am referring to in this text also brings this personal
singular person and not a collective construction. The motto “one woman at a time” suits these
young women well, based on a logic in which solidarity was replaced by their own particular
growth. Not coincidentally, this is also Sandberg’s motto, “one woman at a time.”