I wanted to share some of the authors who influenced my piece above, "Why is Michelle Obama channeling Jackie O?" I had to cut references to most of them due to the publisher's word count limit. The term "social sanctions" came from "Women Don't Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide," by economist Linda Babcock and writer Sara Laschever. They caution that women who are simply self-confident can be punished by “outright hostility and censure.” The authors state what should be obvious by now, that “fear of these penalties makes many women hesitate to pursue their goals too directly.” They note the area of "social sanctions" has been little studied - but most of us in the corporate world have been unwitting subjects. Women who don't defer are treated with all the subtlety of Whack-a-Mole, that old Santa Cruz Boardwalk game.
In "The Feminine Mistake," Vanity Fair writer Leslie Bennetts addresses the problem of highly educated or driven women who pretend they've lost their ambition and instead devote themselves to their husband's ambitions because "it's just easier." I'm badly paraphrasing, but with deft handling, Bennetts lets the reader wonder whether these women bear some responsibility for how their actions affect all women. Recently, I read a Harvard admissions counselor - a woman - ask why graduate schools should continue to invest so much in women if they're not really going to pursue their careers. This was 2009- -- not 1959.
And yet I realize not everyone's comfortable carrying the banner against sexism, so why do I care if they just give up and go home (to supervise nannies and housecleaners that actually take care of the home)?
My concern is with supremely ambitious women like Michelle who renounce their former selves, in a way that validates and perpetuates the social stigma against ambitious women. She is publicly repeating a new mantra that directly contradicts all the facts about her and quotes before Barack's election. Her own friends publicly spoof the idea that she would ever deign to garden. A glance at the ostentatious mansion she chose in Chicago, with a 1,000-bottle wine cellar and bookcases fashioned from Honduran mahogany, speaks more to the imperious legal types that she reminds me of, rather than her current attempt to pass as a humble woman who wants a simple life gardening with her family. She told Vogue before the election that she goes crazy if she has to spend too much time with her children -- again, fully consistent with the Type A legal women and men that I know, and yet now, post-election, she declares that being home with her children is her only aspiration. (How is it, by the way, that her children benefit from her being home while they're in school all day?)
Which led me to Germaine Greer's feminist classic, the Female Eunuch. A male friend from London suggested I learn more about Greer's work and I thank him for that. Greer has this line about female dependency on men that sticks with me. Again I'm paraphrasing, but she said life isn't easier for women who challenge the social constrictions for women, "but it is more interesting, nobler even." It is women who play a dependent role who, acting "out a series of contingencies falsely presented as destiny," are irresponsible. To do so is to "abdicate one's own moral understanding."
I recently supervised a graduate my age from Vassar college and Yale Law School. She ranks up there with the most ruthless, competitive people I’ve encountered. She used to run around saying, “Gosh! I must be the dumbest person in the room!” Gosh. Vassar and Yale Law don’t add up to dumb. Both of her parents are law professors. I wonder how women like that would answer the great Dr. Phil question, “What are you getting out of it?” In my mind, dumbing yourself down is no different than Mattel programming Barbie to say “Math is hard.” Sadly, I’ve found the most ambitious women often put on an exaggerated show of indifference. I had the great fortune to talk a few years back with San Francisco State Professor Talia Ben-Zeev, who publishes in the area of stereotype threat pioneered by Stanford’s Claude Steele. Professor Ben-Zeev helped me see how ambitious women who’ve grown up under conditions where they were stereotyped or made to feel self-conscious about those ambitions often renounce them out of some kind of self-protective mechanism. One take I got out of it is that the women with the brightest potential have the most to lose if they’re not taken seriously. They know they’re equally capable of running the company or shepherding that deal, and rather than sit back and watch the men get all the credit, they save face by renouncing interest or developing a newfound desire for homemaking… and, in Michelle Obama's case, a brand new interest in gardening.
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