On Wednesday, after a disappointing showing in the Super Tuesday primary, Nikki Haley, the first Republican woman to win a presidential primary, announced she was ceasing her campaign. If she does, some will no doubt remember her as an “example of women’s empowerment,” as a conservative National Review article suggested. But she’s not alone. In the first week of February alone, a “celebration of women’s empowerment” event was held in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Woman’s Day magazine featured a “women’s empowerment song,” and Bechtel announced a “pioneering women’s empowerment program” in Saudi Arabia. With Women’s History Month now in full swing, examples of women’s empowerment are everywhere, appearing frequently in articles about politics, business, and popular culture.
A Google search of the term produces over 17 million hits. Websites list the “9 Best Charities for Women’s Empowerment,” “10 NGOs Working for Women’s Empowerment,” and “11 Nonprofits Advocating for Women’s Empowerment.” The United Nations has established the Women’s Empowerment Principles for equality in the workplace, which are endorsed by over 8,000 companies. Empowerment permeates American culture from high-level politics to the entertainment world, with celebrities like Beyoncé and Taylor Swift being praised for empowering their female fans.
Empowerment has become a ubiquitous buzzword in part because it’s hard to push back against. It’s a slippery, feel-good word that can be adopted by many different people with many different goals. It’s a way to allude to progress for women without being specific about what progress means. Even a politician like Haley, who claims most mainstream feminists don’t stand for women’s rights, can bask in the popularity of the word empowerment.
A brief history of the term “empowerment” shows that it dates back to at least the 17th century. However, despite its long history, the term only gained attention surprisingly recently, in the 1980s, when psychologists introduced the “empowerment model” and, as the title of one book put it, conducted “empowerment research.”
Their goal was to weaken the paternalistic control exercised by experts and instead promote the participation of the disadvantaged in local politics. Empowerment was broad enough to manifest as an attitude, a process, and a behavior. It might be registered as an individual’s rejection of a sense of powerlessness, the development of acquired skills, or collective political influence in local city elections. “Empowerment is difficult to define precisely because it takes different forms for different people and situations,” one psychologist wrote in 1984.
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By 1990, “empowerment” had caught the eye of vocabulary expert William Safire, who featured it in his weekly column, “On Language,” in The New York Times Magazine. Safire described the word as a new “fashionable political noun” with appeal across ideological lines. He found the word, which originated in the “power to the people” protests of the 1960s, on the left and on the right. According to Safire, prominent conservative and future Republican vice presidential candidate, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Jack Kemp, was “Mr. Empowerment” in the executive branch. Kemp’s empowerment was not in the collective power of social movement protest, but in tax cuts, private homeownership, and individual ingenuity in a free-market economy.
By the time Safire wrote his column, empowerment had moved beyond national politics and had permeated several specific contexts. Among black activists, “community empowerment” meant local influence; for example, the Brooklyn-based Community Empowerment Coalition worked to elect black candidates to public office. The term “community empowerment” could also refer to economic development, promoting black-owned businesses in black neighborhoods, children’s education, public housing, and civic engagement in crime prevention.
Among management experts, “employee empowerment” had a very different connotation: it was a way for managers to encourage their subordinates. The aim was to boost morale, inspire, motivate, energize, and ultimately increase productivity. But it did so without fundamentally challenging the hierarchical and pay structures in the workplace to which subordinates remained subordinate.
By the late 1990s, one report said there were hundreds of publications about employee empowerment, and numerous companies, including Polaroid, Boeing, Visa, and United Airlines, had adopted employee empowerment practices. These typically involved teamwork and a little bit of shared decision-making. At that time, critics saw empowerment programs as “nothing more than a new form of exploitation by management” and believed that employees had “no real control” over their own work. The programs were corporate mandates emanating from on high, with management preaching empowerment and pretending to share power, while still maintaining control.
Today, the term “women’s empowerment” has surpassed “community empowerment” and “employee empowerment,” terms that also gained prominence in the 1980s and 1990s.
In the field of international development, this was part of a larger movement to include poor women in economic programs that had previously ignored them. Left-wing feminist networks in the Global South, such as DAWN (Development Alternatives for a New Era Women), saw democratic grassroots organization among the poor and marginalized as key to women’s empowerment. They introduced groups like SEWA (Self-Employed Women’s Association) in Ahmedabad, India, a trade union of women street vendors, domestic workers, and others working in the informal economy. But the term empowerment quickly spread to technocratic bureaucracies, including the World Bank, where women’s empowerment was concomitant with top-down lending programs that provided small loans to women entrepreneurs.
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By the 1990s, the phrase had appeared repeatedly in English-language publications around the world.
Today, as in the past, the concept of empowerment is flexible enough to take whatever form its advocates desire. For some, empowerment envisions women gaining the power to challenge long-standing social hierarchies and achieve substantive equality. For others, however, empowerment simply means giving women a sense of power (a morale boost sometimes expressed as self-confidence), small loans, and low-paying jobs.
And the term’s ambiguity helps explain why women’s empowerment is still so often mentioned: Sometimes it refers to the power that female workers win through collective bargaining, other times it implies self-reliance and independence, and sometimes it suggests that the public attention given to prominent women like Nikki Haley empowers other women, even if that’s just shorthand for “women’s empowerment.”
These different variations of empowerment, with their different visions, should remind us that positive expressions of empowerment can obscure as much as they reveal: “empowerment” only makes sense when we look beyond the buzzword and ask exactly how, for whom and what it proposes to change.
Joan Meyerowitz is Arthur Anobsky Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University and a Public Voices Fellow at the OpEd Project.
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about TIME’s Made by History here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.
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