Corporate-Feminist Self-Help Was Always A Scam
Last week, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg was revealed in an exposĂ© in the New York Times to be the kind of scheming, amoral corporate defender that weâre used to seeing mainly as a movie villain. The explosive piece detailing the social-media behemothâs role in disseminating actual fake news in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election included the revelation that Sandberg had covered for the firm as it, among other ethical offenses, employed a Republican opposition-research that used the time-honored anti-Semitic dog whistle âGeorge Sorosâ as a way to undermine efforts to hold Facebook accountable. The breaking news led some to wonder: How could this be the same woman who wrote 2013âs corporate-feminist manifesto Lean In, who referred to herself as a âpom-pom girl for feminismâ and saw herself as the leader of a âsocial movementâ devoted to helping women assert their worth in a corporate culture thatâs never made allowances for the realities of womenâs lives?
But the connection between Sandberg the concealer and Sandberg the corporate feminist is no accident. There is a clear link between the bestseller that hectored women to demand more from and for themselves in the workplace and the Facebook executive who ignored warnings about disinformation campaigns infiltrating the network, put peopleâs information at risk, and then complained about being criticized. Indeed, Sandberg could even be said to embody a type: the gender traitor who works tirelessly on behalf of systems built to exclude, marginalize, and imperil other women. Though the term was coined in The Handmaidâs Tale as Gileadâs justification for the exile and punishment of queer women, the contemporary gender traitor is ultimately faithful not to her fellow women, but to her class status and her fellow corporate titans. At the pinnacle of Americaâs elite, Sandberg has thrivedâbut, make no mistake, she herself is a handmaiden.
Sandberg isnât the only bestselling writer whose malfeasance has recently come to light and, in the process, underlined the connection between motivational advice and questionable real-world politics and professional behavior. The outpouring of news surrounding Brett Kavanaughâs confirmation hearing and Christine Blasey Fordâs accusations against him in September included revelations about Yale Law School professor Amy Chua, author of the controversial 2011 parenting tome Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Chua, along with her husband, allegedly advised female students interested in clerking for Kavanaugh to be as alluring as possible, and told potential male clerks that Kavanaugh preferred pretty female clerks.
Both Chua and Sandberg are enthusiastic members of the legal and corporate mega-elite, but the advice in their books was directed at the same ordinary, ambitious women they were willing to sacrifice in their private and professional activities. One fomented self-doubt in female professionals: âI continue to be alarmed not just at how we as women fail to put ourselves forward, but also at how we fail to notice and correct for this gap,â chastised Lean In. The other planted the seeds of self-loathing in mothers: âA lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids. They wonder what these parents do to produce so many math whizzes and music prodigies,â wrote Chua. âWell, I can tell them, because Iâve done it.â
But both books said little about the very possible consequences of following their adviceânothing about the way that leaning into hostile workplaces brands women âtroublemakersâ and gets them fired, nothing about the fact that Tiger Mothering their children without Chuaâs social and financial advantages was more likely to result in angry, resentful kids than in piano prodigies. And yet these architects of female self-doubt masquerading as self-help have not simply sold women a lie, but put them in actual danger, whether itâs compromising the security of political dissidents, or serving the political and personal interests of a compromised Supreme Court judge.
This class of gender traitor is faithful to success itself without acknowledging that success in a country with such limited class mobility isnât generally the result of speaking up in the conference room or making your kids do hours of math drills every night so much as it is the product of wealth, skin color, access, and a slew of related advantages. They tell their female readers that success requires working within corporate or political structures rather than making attempts to change them. (The goal of childhood âsuccessâ that Tiger Mother trafficked in had everything to do with mastery of musical instruments or math, but little to do with self-actualization and the psychological toll of forced âenrichmentâ of kids, a subject on which Iâve also written.) There is no systemic critique in their books or most of the books like theirs: in fact, these sorts of popular works are anti-systemic critique. But thatâs exactly what we need.
Both Sandberg and Chua made themselves household names by, intentionally or not, exploiting the fact that so many Americans are like dogs chasing their tails, unable to figure out why they canât pay their bills (wages are stagnating) or why their kids arenât getting into good colleges (they may well be blocked by an unholy percentage of legacy admittees).  Needless to say, these particular obstacles donât afflict Sandberg-esque purveyors of advice. Chua attended and teaches at Yale Law School, as does her husband (their daughter also attended); Sandberg graduated from Harvard. Their children are always a
lready ahead of others.
âI believe that if more women lean in, we can change the power structure of our world and expand opportunities,â wrote Sandberg. Of course, she didnât offer a convincing outline of how that might happen. Her book and Chuaâs align with the sort of ideological content that has tainted self-help books aimed at women for generations: The genre, from Dr. Laura to Goop to the many books promising happiness or well-being, often simplify, muddle, or just elide the realities of parenting and work and relationships.
Thirty years ago, in For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Expertsâ Advice to Women, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English wrote of the insidious power of self-help advice, âThe relationship between women and the experts was not unlike conventional relationships between women and men. The experts wooed their female constituency, promising the ârightâ and scientific way to liveâŠ. It was never an equal relationship, for the expertsâ authority rested on the denial or destruction of womenâs autonomous sources of knowledge: the old networks of skill-sharing, the accumulated lore of generations of mothersâŠâ Such books, which ranged from dour and self-serious to perky pabulum, were the output of what Ehrenreich and English called âa masculinist society, dressed up as objective truth.â
The dozens of women I interviewed about their families and finances over the last few years in the course of writing about economic precarity didnât identify with lean-in ladies or Tiger Mothers. Rather, the story unfolding in millions of households as you read this is the end of the dream of the middle class among those whoâd been promised that financial and personal success was available to anyone who worked hard for it. When some of the women I spoke to tried to âlean in,â they in fact âleaned overâ into joblessness, far from patrimonial capitalism. When working-class icon Dolly Parton was asked in a 2014 Billboard interview, what she thought of Sandbergâs book, she responded: âIâve leaned over. Iâve leaned forward. I donât know what âleaned inâ is.â The half-employed lawyers consumed with resentment as they tottered under their student-loan bills, the workers experiencing pregnancy discrimination, the retail workers forced to work shifts that made seeing their kids every day impossibleâthey were leaning over.
The self-focused exhortations of Lean In and Battle Hymn of The Tiger Mother were not unaware of the truth of American life: Anyone who has reached the upper echelons of business and academia certainly know the game, for women, is rigged. And Sandberg and Chua may well believe their own propaganda, despite occasionally issuing attempt mild corrections and mea culpas, as when a recently widowed Sandberg admitted to having overlooked the challenges of single motherhood. And a she-devilâs advocate might ask: Arenât these women just two canny self-promoters in a system already gone mad long ago? Isnât Facebook itself a far bigger problem?
These things are true. What sticks with me, though, is that while Chua and Sandberg knew exactly where real power resided in America, they filled millions of womenâs heads with the idea that they could easily get a greater share of that power and security if they simply tried harderâand if they didnât succeed, well, it was their own fault. The responsibility for our survival in this country is laid at our own feet. We might also question the atmosphere of acceptance that greeted this sort of one-percent feminism, and that softened the ground for the rise of this sort of unsavory advice-mongering.
What we need most, of course, is an understanding that individual success and transformative cultural, social, and economic change are not the same thing. Iâm still waiting for that kind of self-help bookâletâs call it What To Expect When Youâre Expecting Revolution.
Alissa Quart is the executive editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and co-founder of its present incarnation. She is the author of the recent book Squeezed: Why Our Families Canât Afford America (Ecco/HarperCollins) and four other books, including Branded, Hothouse Kids, and the poetry book Monetized.
Co-published with Bitch Media.