A painfully oblivious book for basically no one
By Jia Tolentino 05:00 P.M.
... In the preface to the book—titled “Women Who Work,” after an “initiative” she launched, in 2014—Ivanka emphasizes that she wrote it before Donald Trump became President. She has since announced that she will donate the profits and refrain from publicizing the book “through a promotional tour or media appearances,” in the hopes of avoiding the appearance of ethical conflicts. (Instead, she has been shilling for the book on Twitter, where she has nearly four million followers.) Nonetheless, it is immediately obvious that circumstances have gotten entirely away from her. When Ivanka published her first book, “The Trump Card,” she was twenty-eight, and her air of oblivious diligence was a reasonable fit for her position as a hardworking heiress, the favored child of a celebrity tycoon. Now that her father is the President and she has assumed a post in the White House, it feels downright perverse to watch her devote breathless attention to the self-actualization processes at work in the lives of wealthy women while studiously ignoring the political forces that shape even those lives.
“Women Who Work” is mostly composed of artless jargon (“All women benefit immeasurably by architecting their lives”) and inspirational quotes you might find by Googling “inspirational quotes.” Her exhortations feel even emptier than usual in light of Trump’s stated policy goals. “We must fight for ourselves, for our rights not just as workers but also as women,” Ivanka writes, and, elsewhere, “Honor yourself by exploring the kind of life you deserve.” The imagined audience for the book is so rarefied that Ivanka confidently calls paying bills and buying groceries “not enormously impactful” to one’s daily productivity. Her nannies are mentioned twice, if you count the acknowledgments; no other household help is alluded to at all. On the book’s second-to-last page, she finally, briefly mentions the need for paid leave and affordable childcare ...
What’s more striking is that the book fails even to get its own story straight: Which came first, Ivanka’s women’s-empowerment initiative or her desire to sell more shoes? The initiative evolved “very organically,” she writes. And yet throughout the book she reverts to the tone of a pitch deck: “I designed my company around a larger mission. Whether you’re trying on a pair of my heels or perusing my Web site for interviewing tips, my ‘why’ is to provide you—a woman who works—with solutions and inspiration.” A few pages later, she describes her entry into the fashion business as a “market opportunity . . . ready to be seized.” The book ultimately doesn’t try very hard to obscure the fact that the Women Who Work initiative was created, as the Times recently reported, as a way to make Ivanka products more marketable. She seems unwilling to acknowledge — if this is something that she has even grasped in the first place — that there could, hypothetically, be a difference between what’s good for women and what’s good for her brand ...
... “Women Who Work” is written for an audience whose greatest obstacles are internal, and Ivanka’s advice is, once again, Ivanka-specific. Where, as a twentysomething, she advised women to go into the office on Sundays, she now counsels women to ask for flextime and commit to sending e-mails at night. By the end of the book, she’s basically speaking to no one. Wealthy upper managers with families don’t need to be reminded of the importance of setting goals, and Ivanka’s directives are utterly irrelevant to anyone struggling to pay for childcare and housing at the same time. Women outside the corporate world and creative class do not figure into her vision of endless upward mobility at all ...
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/ivanka-trump-wrote-a-painfully-oblivious-book-for-basically-no-one