Had I Known

by Barbara Ehrenreich

  What this study shows, if anything, is that neither marriage nor children make women happy. (The results are not in yet on nipple piercing.) Nor, for that matter, does there seem to be any problem with “too many choices,” “work-life balance,” or the “second shift.” If you believe Stevenson and Wolfers, women’s happiness is supremely indifferent to the actual conditions of their lives, including poverty and racial discrimination. Whatever “happiness” is…

  So why all the sudden fuss about the Wharton study, which first leaked out two years ago anyway? Mostly because it’s become a launching pad for a new book by the prolific management consultant Marcus Buckingham, best known for First, Break All the Rules and Now, Discover Your Strengths. His new book, Find Your Strongest Life: What the Happiest and Most Successful Women Do Differently, is a cookie-cutter classic of the positive-thinking self-help genre: First, the heart-wrenching quotes from unhappy women identified only by their email names (Countess1, Luveyduvy, etc.), then the stories of “successful” women, followed by the obligatory self-administered test to discover “the role you were bound to play” (Creator, Caretaker, Influencer, etc.), all bookended with an ad for the many related products you can buy, including a “video introduction” from Buckingham, a “participant’s guide” containing “exercises” to get you to happiness, and a handsome set of “Eight Strong Life Plans” to pick from. The Huffington Post has given Buckingham a column in which to continue his marketing campaign.

  It’s an old story: If you want to sell something, first find the terrible affliction that it cures. In the 1980s, as silicone implants were taking off, the doctors discovered “micromastia”—the “disease” of small-breastedness. More recently, as big pharma searches furiously for a female Viagra, an amazingly high 43 percent of women have been found to suffer from “Female Sexual Dysfunction,” or FSD. Now, it’s unhappiness, and the range of potential “cures” is dazzling: Seagrams, Godiva, and Harlequin, take note.

  Our Neighborhood Porn Committee

  Mother Jones, 1986

  Ever since the attorney general declared open season on smut, I’ve had my work cut out for me. I’m referring, of course, to the Meese commission’s report on pornography, which urges groups of private citizens to go out and fight the vile stuff with every means at hand—spray paint, acetylene torches, garlic, and crucifixes. In the finest spirit of grassroots democracy, the commission is leaving it up to us to decide what to slash and burn and what to leave on the library shelves. Not that we are completely without guidance in this matter, for Commissioner Frederick Schauer (“golden Schauer” to those wild and crazy boys at Penthouse) quotes approvingly a deceased judge’s definition of hard-core porn: “I know it when I see it.”

  Well, so do I, thanks to the report’s thoughtful assertions that pornography is something that “hurts women” and, in particular, “bears a causal relationship to the incidence of various nonviolent forms of discrimination against or subordination of women in our society.” My little group of citizens—recruited from the PTA, Parents without Partners, and the YWCA aerobics class—decided to go straight to the heart of the matter: all written, scrawled, and otherwise-depicted manifestations of sexism, whether found on daytime TV, in the great classics of Western civilization, or in the published opinions of Donald (“Women can’t understand arms control”) Regan.

  I can understand why the commission decided to restrict its own inquiry to the sexier varieties of sexism, commonly known as pornography. How often, after all, does a group composed largely of white male Republicans (you will pardon the redundancy) get to spend months poring over material that would normally only be available in dark little shops on the seamy, low-rent side of town, and to do so entirely at public expense?

  But with all due respect, I believe they erred by so limiting themselves. Violence against women, to take the most unpleasant form of “subordination,” predates the commercial porn industry by several millennia. Those Romans who perpetrated the rape of the Sabines, for example, did not work themselves up for the deed by screening Debbie Does Dallas, and the monkish types who burned thousands of witches in the Middle Ages had almost certainly not come across Boobs and Buns or related periodicals.

  I thought my citizens’ group should start its search for materials damaging to women with the Bible, on the simple theory that anything read by so many people must have something to do with all the wickedness in the world. “Gather around,” I said to my fellow citizens. “If those brave souls on the Meese commission could wade through the likes of Fellatio Frolics and Fun with Whips and Chains, we can certainly get through Genesis.”

  It was rough going, let me tell you, what with the incest (Lot and his daughters), mass circumcisions, adultery, and various spillings of seed. But duty triumphed over modesty, and we were soon rewarded with examples of sexism so crude and so nasty that they would make The Story of O look like suffragist propaganda. There was the part about Eve and her daughters being condemned to bring forth their offspring in sorrow, and numerous hints that the bringing forth of offspring is in fact the only thing women have any business doing. There were injunctions against public speaking by women, and approving descriptions of a patriarchal dynasty extending, without the least concern for affirmative action, for countless generations from Isaac on. And then there were the truly kinky passages on the necessity of “submitting” to one’s husband—an obvious invitation to domestic mayhem.

  We wasted no time in calling the newly installed Meese commission hotline to report we had discovered material—widely advertised as “family” reading—that would bring a blush to the cheek of dear Dr. Ruth and worry lines to the smooth brow of Gloria Steinem. “Well, yes,” said the commissioner who picked up the phone, “but could this material be used as a masturbatory aid? Is it designed to induce sexual arousal in all but the most priggish Presbyterian? Because it’s the arousal, you know, that reinforces the sexism, transforming normal, everyday male chauvinism into raging misogyny.”

  We argued that we had seen a number of TV preachers in states of arousal induced by this book, and that, furthermore, religious ecstasy might be far more effective at reinforcing sexism than any mere tickle of genital response. But we reluctantly agreed to stop our backyard Bible burnings and to try to focus on material that is more violent, up-to-date, and, preferably, with better visuals.

  A week later we called the hotline to report we’d seen Cobra, Raw Deal, three episodes of Miami Vice, and a presidential address on the importance of Star Wars, and felt we now had material that was not only damaging to women but disrespectful of human life in all forms, male and female, born and unborn. “But is it dirty?” asked a weary commissioner. “You know, sexy?” And we had to admit that neither the sight of Arnold Schwarzenegger without a shirt nor the president in pancake makeup had ever aroused in us any feeling other than mild intestinal upset.

  Now I think we’re finally getting the hang of it. The problem, as identified by the Meese commission, isn’t violence, sexism, or even sexual violence. The problem is sex, particularly those varieties of sex that might in any way involve women. So in the last few weeks, our citizens’ antismut group has short-circuited six vibrators, burned three hundred of those lurid little inserts found in Tampax boxes, and shredded half the local supply of Our Bodies, Ourselves. It’s a tough job, believe me, but as Ed Meese keeps telling us, someone’s got to do it.

  Strategies of

  Corporate Women

  New Republic, 1986

  Some of us are old enough to recall when the stereotype of a “liberated woman” was a disheveled radical, notoriously braless, and usually hoarse from denouncing the twin evils of capitalism and patriarchy. Today the stereotype is more likely to be a tidy executive who carries an attaché case and is skilled in discussing market shares and leveraged buyouts. In fact, thanks in no small part to the anger of the earlier, radical feminists, women have gained a real toehold in the corporate world: About 30 percent of managerial employees are wome
n, as are 40 percent of the current [1986] MBA graduates. We have come a long way, as the expression goes, though clearly not in the same direction we set out on.

  The influx of women into the corporate world has generated its own small industry of advice and inspiration. Magazines like Savvy and Working Woman offer tips on everything from sex to software, plus the occasional instructive tale about a woman who rises effortlessly from managing a boutique to being the CEO of a multinational corporation. Scores of books published since the mid-1970s have told the aspiring managerial woman what to wear, how to flatter superiors, and, when necessary, fire subordinates. Even old-fashioned radicals like myself, for whom “CD” still means civil disobedience rather than an 8 percent interest rate, can expect to receive a volume of second-class mail inviting them to join their corporate sisters at a “networking brunch” or to share the privileges available to the female frequent flier.

  But for all the attention lavished on them, all the six-figure promotion possibilities and tiny perks once known only to the men in gray flannel, there is a malaise in the world of the corporate woman. The continuing boom in the advice industry is in itself an indication of some kind of trouble. To take an example from a related field, there would not be a book published almost weekly on how to run a corporation along newly discovered Asian principles if American business knew how to hold its own against the international competition. Similarly, if women were confident about their role in the corporate world, I do not think they would pay to be told how to comport themselves in such minute detail. (“Enter the bar with a briefcase or some files…Hold your head high, with a pleasant expression on your face…After you have ordered your drink, shuffle through a paper or two, to further establish yourself [as a businesswoman],” advises Letitia Baldrige’s Complete Guide to Executive Manners.)

  Nor, if women were not still nervous newcomers, would there be a market for so much overtly conflicting advice: how to be more impersonal and masculine (Charlene Mitchell and Thomas Burdick’s The Right Moves) or more nurturing and intuitive (Marilyn Loden’s Feminine Leadership); how to assemble the standard skirted, suited uniform (de rigueur until approximately 1982) or move beyond it for the softness and individuality of a dress; how to conquer stress or how to transform it into drive; how to repress the least hint of sexuality, or, alternatively, how to “focus the increase in energy that derives from sexual excitement so that you are more productive on the job” (Leslie Aldridge Westoff’s Corporate Romance). When we find so much contradictory advice, we must assume that much of it is not working.

  There is a more direct sign of trouble. A small but significant number of women are deciding not to have it all after all, and are dropping out of the corporate world to apply their management skills to kitchen decor and baby care. Not surprisingly, these retro women have been providing a feast for a certain “I told you so” style of journalism; hardly a month goes by without a story about another couple that decided to make do on his $75,000 a year while she joins the other mommies in the playground. But the trend is real. The editors of the big business–oriented women’s magazines are worried about it. So is Liz Roman Gallese, the former Wall Street Journal reporter who interviewed the alumnae of Harvard Business School, class of ’75, to write Women Like Us.

  The women Gallese interviewed are not, for the most part, actual dropouts, but they are not doing as well as might have been expected for the first cohort of women to wield the talismanic Harvard MBA. Certainly they are not doing as well as their male contemporaries, and the gap widens with every year since graduation. Nor do they seem to be a very happy or likable group. Suzanne, the most successful of them, is contemptuous of women who have family obligations. Phoebe, who is perhaps the brightest, has an almost pathological impulse to dominate others. Maureen does not seem to like her infant daughter. Of the eighty-two women surveyed, thirty-five had been in therapy since graduation; four had been married to violently abusive men; three had suffered from anorexia or bulimia; and two had become Christian fundamentalists. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the high incidence of personal misery, two-fifths of the group were “ambivalent or frankly not ambitious for their careers.”

  What is happening to our corporate women? The obvious antifeminist answer, that biology is incompatible with business success, is not borne out by Gallese’s study. Women with children were no less likely to be ambitious and do well than more mobile, single women (although in 1982, when the interviews were carried out, very few of the women had husbands or children). But the obvious feminist answer—that women are being discouraged or driven out by sexism—does gain considerable support from Women Like Us. Many of the women from the class of ’75 report having been snubbed, insulted, or passed over for promotions by their male coworkers. Under these circumstances, even the most determined feminist would begin to suffer from what Dr. Herbert J. Freudenberger and Gail North (in their book Women’s Burnout) call “business burnout.” For nonfeminists, or, more precisely, postfeminists—like Gallese and her respondents, sexism must be all the more wounding for being so invisible and nameless. What you cannot name, except as apparently random incidents of “discrimination,” you cannot hope to do much about.

  Gallese suggests another problem, potentially far harder to eradicate than any form of discrimination. There may be a poor fit between the impersonal bureaucratic culture of the corporation and what is, whether as a result of hormones or history, the female personality. The exception that seems to prove the rule is Suzanne, who is the most successful of the alumnae and who is also a monster of detachment from her fellow human beings. In contrast, Gallese observes that men who rise to the top are often thoroughly dull and “ordinary”—as men go—but perhaps ideally suited to a work world in which interpersonal attachments are shallow and all attention must focus on the famed bottom line.

  To judge from the advice books, however, the corporate culture is not as impersonal, in a stern Weberian sense, as we have been led to believe. For example, The Right Moves, which is a good representative of the “how to be more like the boys” genre of books for corporate women, tells us to “eliminate the notion that the people with whom you work are your friends”—sound advice for anyone who aspires to the bureaucratic personality. But it also insists that it is necessary to cultivate the “illusion of friendship,” lest coworkers find you “aloof and arrogant.” You must, in other words, dissemble in order to effect the kind of personality—artificially warm but never actually friendly—that suits the corporate culture.

  Now, in a task-oriented meritocratic organization—or, let us just say, a thoroughly capitalist organization dedicated to the maximization of profit—it should not be necessary to cultivate “illusions” of any kind. It should be enough just to get the job done. But as The Right Moves explains, and the stories in Women Like Us illustrate, it is never enough just to get the job done; if it were, far more women would no doubt be at the top. You have to impress people, win them over, and in general project an aura of success far more potent than any actual accomplishment. The problem may not be that women lack the capacity for businesslike detachment, but that, as women, they can never entirely fit into the boyish, glad-handed corporate culture so well described three decades ago in The Lonely Crowd.

  There may also be a deeper, more existential, reason for the corporate woman’s malaise. It is impossible to sample the advice literature without beginning to wonder what, after all, is the point of all this striving. Why not be content to stop at $40,000 or $50,000 a year, some stock options, and an IRA? Perhaps the most striking thing about the literature for and about the corporate woman is how little it has to say about the purposes, other than personal advancement, of the corporate “game.” Not one among the Harvard graduates or the anonymous women quoted in the advice books ever voices a transcendent commitment to, say, producing a better widget. And if that is too much to expect from postindustrial corporate America, we might at least hope for some lofty organizational goals—to make X Corp. the
biggest damn conglomerate in the Western world, or some such. But no one seems to have a vast and guiding vision of the corporate life, much less a fashionably conservative belief in the moral purposefulness of capitalism. Instead, we find successful corporate women asking, “Why am I doing what I’m doing? What’s the point here?” or confiding bleakly that “Something’s missing.”

  In fact, from the occasional glimpses we get, the actual content of an executive’s daily labors can be shockingly trivial. Consider Phoebe’s moment of glory at Harvard Business School. The class had been confronted with a real-life corporate problem to solve. Recognizing the difficulty of getting catsup out of a bottle, should Smucker and Co. start selling catsup out of a wide-mouthed container suitable for inserting a spoon into? No, was Phoebe’s answer, because people like the challenge of pounding catsup out of the bottle; a more accessible catsup would never sell. Now, I am not surprised that this was the right answer, but I am surprised that it was greeted with such apparent awe and amazement by a professor and a roomful of smart young students. Maybe for a corporate man, the catsup problem is a daunting intellectual challenge. But a woman must ask herself: Is this what we left the kitchen for?

  Many years ago, when America was more innocent but everything else was pretty much the same, Paul Goodman wrote, “There is nearly ‘full employment’…but there get to be fewer jobs that are necessary or unquestionably useful; that require energy and draw on some of one’s best capacities; and that can be done keeping one’s honor and dignity.” Goodman, a utopian socialist, had unusually strict criteria for what counted as useful enough to be “man’s work,” but he spoke for a generation of men who were beginning to question, in less radical ways, the corporate work world described by William H. Whyte, David Riesman, Alan Harrington, and others. Most of the alienated white-collar men of the 1950s withdrew into drink or early coronaries, but a few turned to Zen or jazz, and thousands of their sons and daughters eventually joined with Goodman to help create the anticorporate and, indeed, anticareerist counterculture of the 1960s. It was the counterculture, as much as anything else, that nourished the feminist movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which is where our story began.