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| Sheryl Sandberg never claimed she was writing a feminist manifesto, so why this chorus of jeers? | Sheryl Sandberg never claimed she was writing a feminist manifesto, so why this chorus of jeers? |
| (7 days later) | |
| Here's a little joke to warm the cockles on a cold winter day: if you are a liberal feminist woman, what's the best way to annoy other liberal feminist women? Write a book about feminism for women. Ha! Ha! Um, ha. | Here's a little joke to warm the cockles on a cold winter day: if you are a liberal feminist woman, what's the best way to annoy other liberal feminist women? Write a book about feminism for women. Ha! Ha! Um, ha. |
| OK, it might not have the making of Abbott and Costello's classic "Who's on first?" sketch, but what that knee-slapper lacks in laughs it makes up for in timeliness. | OK, it might not have the making of Abbott and Costello's classic "Who's on first?" sketch, but what that knee-slapper lacks in laughs it makes up for in timeliness. |
| Sheryl Sandberg has had a lot of impressive and high-profile jobs in her time. She's been the chief of staff at the United States Treasury. She had a job with too long a title for my wordcount at Google. She is currently the chief operating officer at Facebook. She is, by any measurement, a pretty formidable dame. | Sheryl Sandberg has had a lot of impressive and high-profile jobs in her time. She's been the chief of staff at the United States Treasury. She had a job with too long a title for my wordcount at Google. She is currently the chief operating officer at Facebook. She is, by any measurement, a pretty formidable dame. |
| Yet the funny thing is – and yes, I promise it's funnier than the opening joke – the job for which she's received the most criticism and arguably the most attention is a job that she has never had, or even claimed to have: that of a feminist leader. | Yet the funny thing is – and yes, I promise it's funnier than the opening joke – the job for which she's received the most criticism and arguably the most attention is a job that she has never had, or even claimed to have: that of a feminist leader. |
| Sandberg has recently published a book entitled Lean In: Women, Work And The Will To Lead. It is not, she insists very firmly in the introduction, "a feminist manifesto" but a "sort-of feminist manifesto". It is, to a certain extent, an American corporate version of Caitlin Moran's How To Be A Woman, in that it mixes stories from Sandberg's own life with lessons that she has learned and offers advice on what other women who want to be like her should do to improve their careers and those of the women behind them. Sandberg's book might have fewer jokes and more jaw-dropping statistics than Moran's, but ultimately the modus operandi is the same: here is my story, here is what I think you can learn from it, now let's move things forward. It's a fun, inspiring read and, predictably, Sandberg has been duly excoriated for it. | Sandberg has recently published a book entitled Lean In: Women, Work And The Will To Lead. It is not, she insists very firmly in the introduction, "a feminist manifesto" but a "sort-of feminist manifesto". It is, to a certain extent, an American corporate version of Caitlin Moran's How To Be A Woman, in that it mixes stories from Sandberg's own life with lessons that she has learned and offers advice on what other women who want to be like her should do to improve their careers and those of the women behind them. Sandberg's book might have fewer jokes and more jaw-dropping statistics than Moran's, but ultimately the modus operandi is the same: here is my story, here is what I think you can learn from it, now let's move things forward. It's a fun, inspiring read and, predictably, Sandberg has been duly excoriated for it. |
| "Why Sheryl Sandberg is no Betty Friedan," fumed one headline in The New Republic (did I mention that Sandberg says very clearly in her introduction that she has not attempted to write a feminist manifesto?), sniping that "Friedan didn't share a view from the corporate boardroom". In the same publication another article by Judith Shulevitz was headlined "The Corporate Mystique: The Folly of Davos Feminism". Maureen Dowd, the New York Times columnist, was similarly dismissive of Sandberg, claiming "she has a grandiose plan to become the PowerPoint Pied Piper in Prada ankle boots" (designer shoes and feminism being inherently contradictory, of course), while others – many of whom had not even read the book – sneered at Sandberg's "vanity project". (If this was a vanity project, incidentally, one could argue this made Sandberg more Friedanesque, seeing as the latter was famously fond of her celebrity status.) | "Why Sheryl Sandberg is no Betty Friedan," fumed one headline in The New Republic (did I mention that Sandberg says very clearly in her introduction that she has not attempted to write a feminist manifesto?), sniping that "Friedan didn't share a view from the corporate boardroom". In the same publication another article by Judith Shulevitz was headlined "The Corporate Mystique: The Folly of Davos Feminism". Maureen Dowd, the New York Times columnist, was similarly dismissive of Sandberg, claiming "she has a grandiose plan to become the PowerPoint Pied Piper in Prada ankle boots" (designer shoes and feminism being inherently contradictory, of course), while others – many of whom had not even read the book – sneered at Sandberg's "vanity project". (If this was a vanity project, incidentally, one could argue this made Sandberg more Friedanesque, seeing as the latter was famously fond of her celebrity status.) |
| All of these articles and many more suggest that Sandberg's wealth and high status render her interest in feminism dubious and blind her to the fact that her advice is irrelevant to most women and thus worthless. They all add up to one giant snark of "Check your privilege, Sandberg!" (Incidentally, as well as Sandberg stressing that her book is not really a feminist manifesto, she writes that "the vast majority of women are struggling to make ends meet" and "parts of this book will be most relevant to women fortunate enough to have choices". But why let facts get in the way of snark?) | All of these articles and many more suggest that Sandberg's wealth and high status render her interest in feminism dubious and blind her to the fact that her advice is irrelevant to most women and thus worthless. They all add up to one giant snark of "Check your privilege, Sandberg!" (Incidentally, as well as Sandberg stressing that her book is not really a feminist manifesto, she writes that "the vast majority of women are struggling to make ends meet" and "parts of this book will be most relevant to women fortunate enough to have choices". But why let facts get in the way of snark?) |
| The tendency to dismiss a woman discussing feminism because of her background is not a new development. Intersectionality in feminism – which argues that any feminist theory that does not take into account the different levels of oppression experienced by minority groups, such as women of colour and gay women – has been around since the 1980s and is, to a large extent, beneficial. Second-wave feminism in its early incarnation was notoriously bad at looking beyond the white middle classes and clearly greater representation is a positive development. But there comes a point when a well-intentioned move for greater inclusivity becomes an excuse for bullying exclusivity and a way for women to shut one another up. When Donald Trump writes a book about how to get ahead in business – which ultimately is what Sandberg's book is about, but with a female emphasis – men don't write articles claiming he is being elitist (they might write articles claiming he is an idiot, but that is another story.) No, Trump is not attempting to speak for all men in his book but neither is Sandberg attempting to speak for all women. | The tendency to dismiss a woman discussing feminism because of her background is not a new development. Intersectionality in feminism – which argues that any feminist theory that does not take into account the different levels of oppression experienced by minority groups, such as women of colour and gay women – has been around since the 1980s and is, to a large extent, beneficial. Second-wave feminism in its early incarnation was notoriously bad at looking beyond the white middle classes and clearly greater representation is a positive development. But there comes a point when a well-intentioned move for greater inclusivity becomes an excuse for bullying exclusivity and a way for women to shut one another up. When Donald Trump writes a book about how to get ahead in business – which ultimately is what Sandberg's book is about, but with a female emphasis – men don't write articles claiming he is being elitist (they might write articles claiming he is an idiot, but that is another story.) No, Trump is not attempting to speak for all men in his book but neither is Sandberg attempting to speak for all women. |
| When a book about feminism and women becomes hugely successful, like Moran's, or is gifted with an outsize amount of attention, like Sandberg's, it is easy to see it as a sine qua non feminist tome and thus, by insinuation, speaking for all women, and those who are left out of the book can feel attacked or imperiously ignored. But no book can speak for all women because women – as intersectionality emphasises – are not a homogeneous group, and I have yet to come across any book on women or feminism that claims to do so. (In any event, Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, despite what The New Republic might suggest, hardly spoke for all women either.) Certainly, any feminist advice – or just advice – that assumes everyone has the speaker's privilege is unhelpful and irritating, but that is not what Sandberg is doing. Her book is flawed, sure, but it is germane because it is important, as she argues, that there is greater female representation at the top of companies and in governments around the world. That affects all women. Just because someone's story is not personally relevant to you does not mean it is not relevant at all. |