Lean Out.
Repeater. 2015
This slim book is a response to Sheryl Sandborg’s book Lean In. I had already seen Jennifer Dziura’s acid comment on Lean In:
Lean In is an absolutely joyless tutorial on how to give your entire life to a corporation while also having a husband and kids that are a lot of work. If you’re working that hard, there should at least be something rewarding about it.which gave me a fair idea of its message. Dawn Foster’s response is political, taking apart the underlying assumptions and context.
That context is patriarchal capitalism, where most women are poor and exploited, and simply don’t have the opportunities to Lean In even if they wanted to. Just because a few women can manage to break through the glass ceiling and become rich and successful, doesn’t mean all women can, although it does provide a useful distraction. Any resulting “trickle-dowm feminism” is just as ineffective as “trickle-down economics”; highly successful women are more likely to stick with others of their class than of their gender. And, of course, those rich successful women are relying on the labour of poorer women to allow them to run their lives, by providing cleaning, child care, and so on.
Dawn Foster’s solution is to point to those who Lean Out: women who organise and lobby for decent wages and working conditions from the bottom up. And there are many examples.
A refreshing polemic.
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