Suddenly, Sheryl Sandberg's Critics Care About Working-Class Women

[redqueen]

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Most of America's most influential voices have little familiarity with lower-class lives. The idea of pulling out your coupon caddy to get 80 cents off a jug of Tide is as familiar to them as a lunar landing. The Marshall's layaway line might as well be on Mars. As MSNBC's Ned Resnikoff noted recently, "The news media's current economic climate doesn't just shrink newsrooms and kill magazines: it also reifies professional class barriers." Or as one particularly salty cameraman once said to me while I was at ABC News, "I thought they only hired from the Ivys here." (I assured him I had not hidden my public-school education or my Prince George's County, Maryland roots.

I thought of this class mismatch recently as I've followed the discussion surrounding Sheryl Sandberg's upcoming book, Lean In. Suddenly, and for the first time in a while, a bunch of major news outlets are talking about working-class women. All of a sudden a media that has rarely written or cared about the issues facing the women I grew up with—single moms, working days and nights and odd jobs, often at hourly wages and with no paid maternity leave—invokes their example as a reason to challenge Sandberg's argument about women and ambition.

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Sandberg is an easy target: she is successful and extraordinarily rich and is preaching the power of personal ambition and overcoming professional barriers at a time when most Americans - including the high-gloss, Ivy League set - feel they are stomping through molasses to get ahead despite their most determined efforts. But how about commenting on the merits of her argument rather than her class? When was the last time people asked Warren Buffett if it was appropriate to talk about the tax bracket of his secretary? Or Bill Gates if it was appropriate for a billionaire to talk about entrenched global poverty? Or is talking to the really wealthy and the really poor okay, but talking to working-class people not?

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Sandberg is right on one point she makes in her book: For women there is a direct connection between power and likability in others' eyes. The more power you have, the less other people seem to like you. Her own example illustrates it despite the fact that she made clear she understood the firmness of the economic terrain from which she was writing.

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http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/03/suddenly-sheryl-sandbergs-critics-care-about-working-class-women/273676/

[Kber]

1. I think it is unreasonable to expect a "feminist" to simultaneously address every segment

of the population that happens to be female and the fact that Sandberg cannot speak to and for everyone should not preclude her trying to speak out at all.

I think we feminists can hold ourselves to an impossible standard sometimes. It's OK to have different perspectives, experiences, etc. without expecting all of our leaders to be all things to all people.