I have been watching with some curiosity the discussion surrounding Sheryl Sandberg's book Lean In unfold in the media. I watched her last night on 60 Minutes. I wasn't much moved or particularly informed by her interview. Here is a woman that has made it "to the top" through the not so surprising path of famous connections and Ivy League education (pretty much like lots of men). So I can't understand how she can be positioned to speak to aspiring middle class women. It would be high farce if she wasn't taken so seriously. Here is Judith Shulevitz's take over at The New Republic (see here) regarding why Lean In is no blueprint for contemporary women:
The reason The Feminine Mystique caught on so fast and to such revolutionary effect was that the American housewife saw herself in it. Sandberg and most of the other women discussed in Lean In, on the other hand, are anything but average. They camp in the dormitories of Harvard, occupy offices at McKinsey and
Goldman Sachs, and wind up in Palo Alto and the Upper East Side. They
inhabit a tiny transnational bubble floating out of reach of the middle
class, which itself is slowly vanishing.
And the reach of the middle class is surely "slowly vanishing." I don't see how Sheryl Sandberg's pontificating makes any difference on this issue.
In my college classes are married and single women who try (sometimes desperately) to fit a college education into their lives while struggling to find affordable daycare and to balance their commitments at home (and they don't have nannies, personal shoppers, etc.). For the life of me, I can't understand how Sandberg speaks to them.
