The Trouble with White Women

by Kyla Schuller

  Sandberg’s feminism has much in common with the contemporary ideal of the optimized woman, who as essayist Jia Tolentino writes, is perfectly toned, coiffed, and salaried. This feminine ideal, Tolentino explains, reflects the values of the twenty-first century in which “work is rebranded as pleasure so that we will accept more of it” and women are encouraged to “understand relentless self-improvement as natural, mandatory, and feminist—or just, without question, the best way to live.”4 Parenting, executive leadership, and empowering women all become jobs to be performed with maximum efficiency and maximum results. Improving the self, and lifting up some other women from those lofty heights, has become white feminism’s ultimate goal.

  White feminism began in the 1840s with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others’ fight for white women to possess the rights and privileges afforded to white men, including the right to own property and to hold careers. By the 2010s, it had become a push to optimize one’s potential in every aspect of life. This represented a shift from the priorities of twentieth-century white feminists like Margaret Sanger and Betty Friedan, who largely campaigned to secure middle-class white women’s status among those chosen to thrive in part through cleansing society of those whom they deemed threatening to their cause, such as the poor and/or disabled, lesbians, and trans women. But now, in the twenty-first century, the idea that white women deserve to be among the chosen is becoming more secure—even if the reality of gender equity in the office remains a distant dream. As fewer people object to the presence of middle-class women in the professions and in government, removing so-called undesirables from the movement and the nation has become less of a priority for white feminism as a whole. TERFs, now joined by “gender-critical feminists” who similarly rail against trans rights, remain fiercely committed to the cause of cleansing and are gaining power. But at the same time, many white feminists have turned inward, finding the greatest enemy to their own success to be nestled within their own psyches and habits. Regulating the community has given way to a relentless self-discipline. Self-optimizing, for white feminists today, is the hallmark of liberation.

  The contemporary capitalist imperatives for efficiency, endless work, and the pursuit of excellence apply to professional-class men as well as to women. But white feminists saddle themselves with an extra burden. In a new kind of civilizing project arising out of white women’s traditional role as stabilizers of society, they set out not only to conquer the corner office—but to make reforms to capitalism itself. Success, for these women, entails both individual advancement and making corporate capitalism appear to be inclusive. Their task is not only to self-regulate; their duty at the top of Fortune 500 companies is to redeem capitalism, turning cutthroat companies like Google into the kinds of places with pregnancy parking spots.

  Yet while parking lot reforms bring about needed equality among corporate workers, corporate workers, especially in Silicon Valley, bring about massive wealth inequality for the country and the world. The conditions of the employee lot at Google HQ have zero ramifications on the vast majority of people who come into contact with Google. Google, after all, primarily exists not as an office complex in Mountain View, but as a data-hungry behemoth trawling the questions, personal correspondence, and business communications of its two billion users to assemble psychological profiles it can sell to advertisers. Thanks to this Big Tech business model Sandberg brought from Google to Facebook when she became chief operating officer of the social network in 2008, she is now a billionaire. Sandberg may draw a paycheck from Facebook, but, whether we realize it or not, we all generate revenue for Sheryl Sandberg.

  Sandberg’s status as a self-made feminist billionaire makes palpable that white feminism doesn’t just embrace the rising wealth inequality of the twenty-first century—it’s part of engineering it. The existence of feminist billionaires throws the contradictions of optimizing feminism into high relief, for feminism ceases to have any meaning at all when explosive, extractive wealth becomes its measure. Yet even white feminism’s most vehement detractors find it difficult to avoid the optimizing trap. The demand that we devote ourselves to continual work and continual success has been laid for us not only by corporate feminists but by the penetration of capitalism into nearly every area of our lives.

  A few weeks after Donald Trump’s election to the presidency of the United States in November 2016, New York bartender Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and two friends drove west. They joined the more than one thousand water protectors blocking the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline at the Standing Rock Lakota Sioux reservation.5 The pipeline would tear through Lakota Sioux burial and prayer sites at a spot three hundred miles north of where Zitkala-Ša grew up in Yankton Sioux territory 135 years prior, endangering the water supply of the entire region. In response, members of more than three hundred tribes gathered in Standing Rock to prevent its construction. Zitkala-Ša had created the first pan-Indian movement of Native tribes working together in coalition; Ocasio-Cortez was now an ally of its most recent iteration.

  She was stunned by what she saw: “A corporation had literally militarized itself against the American people,” attacking the Indigenous-led protest camp with rubber bullets, mace, teargas, and pepper spray. The need for dramatic, systemic change led by the most vulnerable themselves became palpable to her. She hoped to play a role in the struggle. “Lord, just do with me what you will,” she prayed at Standing Rock. “Allow me to be a vessel.” As she drove off the reservation, she received a phone call from an unknown number asking her to run for Congress—her brother had signed her up—and she said yes.6

  A year and a half later, Ocasio-Cortez defeated the fourth-most powerful Democrat in the House of Representatives, Joe Crowley, to win the Democratic primary nomination for New York’s Fourteenth Congressional District. Her extraordinarily unlikely win and her social media acumen soon propelled her to visibility rivaling that of the most famous American women in politics, even before she secured the House seat in the general election in November 2018. Increasingly disgusted by the belief that “we can capitalism our way out of poverty,” she ran as a Democratic Socialist. Yet she also advanced a broad critique of power that pushed fierce critics of capitalism—many of whom tend to focus on economics alone—to reckon with racial, gender, and social injustice. “I’m not running ‘from the left.’ I’m running from the bottom,” Ocasio-Cortez declared on Twitter, a medium she commands. The multiracial, largely working-class Fourteenth District she represents, which encompasses parts of Queens, the Bronx, and the notorious prison Rikers Island, is “like the epicenter for an intersectional argument for economic and social dignity,” she later explained. “There is no such thing as talking about class without there being implications of the racial history of the United States. You just can’t do it.”7

  America had an intersectional feminist politician, now beloved on the Left and notorious on the Right as AOC. Intersectional feminism teaches us that the best way to confront the uneven distribution of life and death is to examine the lives and conditions of those pinned to the very bottom and to work together in coalition, across positions and identities, to dismantle it. Ocasio-Cortez’s alliance with three other progressive women of color elected to the House of Representatives at the same time—Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar—whom AOC affectionately dubbed the Squad, works to bring coalitional feminist politics’ view-from-below into the highest ranks of government.

  In the 2020s, it is not Sheryl Sandberg but AOC and the Squad who for many embody the future of feminist leadership. Their distinct theories of social change have correspondingly opposing relationships to power: leaning in to the center or aligning yourself with those on the margins. They also have distinct momentum: one version of feminism is stumbling, the other surging as more and more people reckon with the racial and economic violence that built the United States and call for radical transformation. Lean In–style feminism promotes privatized, top-down solutions to structural problems that depend
on siphoning capital upward, such as corporations that provide their high-level employees with generous maternity leave and lavish healthcare including egg-freezing, but subcontract low-level employees to poverty wages. The Squad instead endorses a revamped notion of the public sphere in which resources are broadly spread downward. “In a modern, moral and wealthy society, no person in America should be too poor to live,” AOC makes plain.8

  Yet the very popularity of AOC and the Squad’s appeals for structural change activates the demands of optimizing feminism. AOC’s preternatural mastery of her job is key to her appeal: her Twitter clapbacks, beguiling videos, and eloquent, unscripted speeches from the campaign stage or House floor, even twirling on her haters in front of her congressional office door and applying makeup while insisting “femininity has power,” are all delivered with fiery passion and captivating millennial glamour.9 She is a seemingly tireless social media presence. Cooking black bean soup in the evenings or catching the train back to the Bronx on the weekends, Ocasio-Cortez turns to Instagram Live (a Facebook property) to break down barriers between government and the people. Even when exhausted, she manages to parse complex policy bills with startling clarity and charisma. Yet this sheer effort and skill pose a risk. A largely unstated but pervasive expectation thrust on her by supporters exceeds the capacities of any human, however remarkable, to meet: that Ocasio-Cortez be perfect at everything she does.

  Can AOC—or more to the point, the legions of her fans—resist the lure of optimizing feminism, of the fantasy that she can excel at her job 24/7, save the planet, and look great while doing it all? While feminist billionaires may be less popular, the phenomenon of likability, mastery, and incessant work broadly expected of feminist women today remains. In the widespread enthusiasm for the talent and brilliance of AOC and the Squad, we hazard being so dazzled by their ability to break down traditional barriers between politician and the public and articulate an intersectional feminist position from Capitol Hill that their skill becomes a cage of expectation. While Ocasio-Cortez is one of capitalism’s sharpest public critics, she is still forced to navigate the optimizing trap that demands unceasing work and unremitting excellence.

  In March 2008 at the Facebook Palo Alto headquarters, CEO Mark Zuckerberg made an important new introduction at the weekly all hands staff meeting. Since first encountering Sheryl Sandberg at a Christmas party three months prior, he had been trying to poach her from Google in a recruiting process her husband and many journalists have likened to dating. Multiple times a week, Zuckerberg and Sandberg convened at a Michelin-starred New American restaurant around the corner from her mansion to discuss his vision for Facebook: a social network that connected the entire world.10 Though Sandberg easily could have assumed a CEO position in Silicon Valley, she believed in this mission and quickly grasped its explosive profit potential. She was now coming to Facebook as chief operating officer, in charge of earning Facebook’s first dollar—the company was swimming in venture capital money but had yet to create its own revenue stream—and of everything not related to engineering. Zuckerberg, while retaining the title of CEO, would devote his energy to product development and new acquisitions, as well as winning the Valley’s heated competition for technical sophistication.

  “Sheryl and I met at a party and we immediately hit it off,” Zuckerberg told his seven hundred employees, speaking with more animation and warmth than was characteristic for the twenty-four-year-old. “I was really impressed by how smart she is,” he divulged as Sheryl stood by his side and beamed at her new staff.

  “When I met Sheryl the first thing I said was that she had really good skin. And she does,” Mark affirmed, turning toward the executive fifteen years his senior.

  Sandberg’s smile didn’t budge.

  Accustomed to making imperious commands, Zuckerberg issued an edict to the company: “Everyone should have a crush on Sheryl.” Former Facebook employee Katherine Losse, whose memoir recounts this cringe-inducing scene, reports that many engineers responded dutifully, quickly testifying to their crushes in a department-wide email chain.11

  Perhaps Sandberg instinctively knew what she would broadcast in Lean In five years later: research shows that success is a contradiction for women. The more women advance professionally, the less people like them. Our sexist culture, Lean In underscores, doesn’t trust successful women. Both men and women, Sandberg cites, found the entrepreneur profiled in a Harvard Business School case study to be “appealing” and collegial in one article, but “selfish and not ‘the type of person you want to hire or work for’” in the another. Yet only one aspect of the article was changed across the two versions: the name “Howard” was swapped out with “Heidi.” To be successful in business negotiations, she advises, women thus need to work hard to make themselves appealing: “women must come across as being nice, concerned about others, and ‘appropriately’ female.”12 Women, in other words, ought to master the feminine performance of making everyone else comfortable while subordinating their own needs to those of the company at large. Smiling your way through outlandish sexism plays the long game—by not rocking the boat, the boat can become yours.

  Sandberg launched Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead in 2013, exactly fifty years after Betty Friedan released The Feminine Mystique. Sandberg donned the mantel of white feminism’s new leader, come to “speak her truth” as Friedan had spoken hers. Friedan had diagnosed a feminine ideal that debilitates middle-class women and society at large by restricting them to the home; she prescribed professional careers as the antidote to women’s wasted potential and atrophied lives. Sandberg, half a century later, insists that while progress has been made, “our revolution has stalled.” Though women had flooded the workforce, they had yet to achieve parity in the executive class or as wage earners: 479 of the Fortune 500 CEOs were men; 82 percent of congressional representatives were men; and for every dollar men earned, women on average took home only seventy-seven cents. “A truly equal world,” the book proclaims, “would be one where women ran half our countries and companies and men ran half our homes.” White feminism had a new goal: install women presidents and CEOs and equality would trickle down. Atlantic writer Amanda Mull aptly observed that Lean In and the #GirlBoss phenomenon that surfaced in its wake rebranded corporate women’s “pursuit of power… as a righteous quest for equality.” The book dominated the New York Times bestseller list for over a year; more than two hundred corporations signed on as supporters of the Lean In platform.13

  Lean In has been widely critiqued for focusing narrowly on the concerns of heterosexual, married corporate women. But the fundamental problem with Lean In is not its failure to be inclusive. Inclusivity within capitalism is a fool’s errand. Its core problem is that it presents capitalism as the deliverer of equality, when capitalism is actually a chief engine of social harm. Friedan had argued middle-class women should join those chosen to thrive, outsourcing their household work and joining the professions. Fifty years later, Lean In takes feminist biopolitics to its logical conclusion: women should optimize their capacities by taking the reins of corporate America’s profit extraction machine. Working-class women similarly fall out of Sandberg’s view, as they had in Friedan’s, but their behind-the-scenes work cleaning, cooking, and providing childcare frees up the feminist boss to devote herself to maximizing her self, her career, and her mentees.

  Lean In, in the form of the book and the tens of thousands of “lean in circles” linked to Sandberg’s nonprofit (and presumably tax sheltering) Leanin.org, envisions an empowered woman who does it all. This includes maintaining a self-starter attitude that makes her easy to mentor; understanding gender is socially constructed and that women internalize sexism and so has weaponized the self to root it out; developing an inclusive vision that allegedly supports all women; watching Leanin.org videos to learn how to comport her body and voice in a way that exudes authority; securing a husband with whom she balances fifty-fifty the work of maintaining a house and raising childre
n; and dissolving boundaries between her private needs and the demands of the workplace, making it possible to bring her “whole sel[f] to work.”14 Work becomes the privileged site of self-development, and everything is reframed as work.

  Sandberg’s turn to the corporate workplace as the site of feminist self-realization is fully in keeping with neoliberalism, the stage of capitalism we’ve been immersed in since the mid-1970s. At core, neoliberalism is propelled by the harmful fantasy that the marketplace is the best place to solve social problems. The neoliberal agenda aims to remove all regulations on corporate power so that the richest can accumulate the greatest wealth, and do so most rapidly, in part through eroding the public sector and the taxes that pay for schools, healthcare, and infrastructure like roads, bridges, and utilities. These policies have produced the worst wealth inequality in US history.15 Sandberg, as the chief of staff to Larry Summers when he was treasury secretary during the Clinton administration, played a role in bringing about some of neoliberal capitalism’s most disastrous policies: deregulating Wall Street, which led to the 2008 global recession, and divesting federal moneys from public infrastructure and the social safety net.