"Ivanka Trump, a daughter of and aide to the man whose election drove women to mount the largest protest in American history, has published a new book. It’s about how women can best achieve personal satisfaction and professional success. This is an ill-advised endeavor, in theory. In practice, it is an even worse idea than it seems.
In the preface to the
book—titled “Women Who Work,” after an “initiative” she launched, in
2014—Ivanka emphasizes that she wrote it before Donald Trump became
President. She has since announced that she will donate the profits and
refrain from publicizing the book “through a promotional tour or media
appearances,” in the hopes of avoiding the appearance of ethical conflicts. (Instead, she has been shilling for the book on Twitter,
where she has nearly four million followers.) Nonetheless, it is
immediately obvious that circumstances have gotten entirely away from
her. When Ivanka published her first book, “The Trump Card,”
she was twenty-eight, and her air of oblivious diligence was a
reasonable fit for her position as a hardworking heiress, the favored
child of a celebrity tycoon. Now that her father is the President and
she has assumed a post in the White House, it feels downright perverse
to watch her devote breathless attention to the self-actualization
processes at work in the lives of wealthy women while studiously
ignoring the political forces that shape even those lives.
“Women
Who Work” is mostly composed of artless jargon (“All women benefit
immeasurably by architecting their lives”) and inspirational quotes you
might find by Googling “inspirational quotes.” Her exhortations feel
even emptier than usual in light of Trump’s stated policy goals. “We
must fight for ourselves, for our rights not just as workers but also as
women,” Ivanka writes, and, elsewhere, “Honor yourself by exploring the
kind of life you deserve.” The imagined audience for the book is so
rarefied that Ivanka confidently calls paying bills and buying groceries
“not enormously impactful” to one’s daily productivity. Her nannies are
mentioned twice, if you count the acknowledgments; no other household
help is alluded to at all. On the book’s second-to-last page, she
finally, briefly mentions the need for paid leave and affordable
childcare.
The notion that
Ivanka’s reticence on political issues conceals an innate goodness and a
sort of strategic genius that can only be deployed behind the scenes
has been crumbling since November. As I wrote last year in a piece about
her previous book, Ivanka possesses a type of beauty that often passes
as moral uprightness; she speaks carefully, making some portion of her
audience believe that she must act carefully, too. But “Women Who Work”
should put an end to the idea that Ivanka is particularly self-aware. In
the book’s third paragraph, she assesses her father’s Presidential run
by saying, “I have grown tremendously as a person.” Later, she laments
not “treating myself to a massage or making much time for self-care”
during the campaign. She warns the reader of the dangers of one’s inner
circle turning into an echo chamber.
What’s
more striking is that the book fails even to get its own story
straight: Which came first, Ivanka’s women’s-empowerment initiative or
her desire to sell more shoes? The initiative evolved “very
organically,” she writes. And yet throughout the book she reverts to the
tone of a pitch deck: “I designed my company around a larger mission.
Whether you’re trying on a pair of my heels or perusing my Web site for
interviewing tips, my ‘why’ is to provide you—a woman who works—with
solutions and inspiration.” A few pages later, she describes her entry
into the fashion business as a “market opportunity . . . ready to be
seized.” The book ultimately doesn’t try very hard to obscure the fact
that the Women Who Work initiative was created, as the Times recently reported,
as a way to make Ivanka products more marketable. She seems unwilling
to acknowledge—if this is something that she has even grasped in the
first place—that there could, hypothetically, be a difference between
what’s good for women and what’s good for her brand.
In
“The Trump Card,” which was published in 2009, Ivanka broadcasts her
similarity to her father. “That’s what you get from this particular
Daddy’s girl,” she writes at one point. In “Women Who Work,” she praises
Trump but positions herself as separate from him. The section dividers
in the book are pale pink and meant to be Instagrammed, with elaborately
lettered quotes from other people labelled #ITWiseWords; she recommends
graciousness, family time, and the cultivation of “brain-boosting
hobbies” such as chess and calligraphy. Nonetheless, on occasion, she
sounds quite a bit like the President. “When it comes to business,
whatever it is I’m doing, I’m incredibly dedicated to creating solutions
for modern women who are living full, multidimensional lives,” she
writes. The book is full of random advertisements for Trump companies,
like this one: “Scion Hotels offer energized social experiences and
shared work spaces designed to bring people together to exchange ideas
and create.” Sometimes Ivanka even deploys Trump’s comically obtuse
diction: “I personally love the word ‘curious.’ I identify with it quite
a bit because I am deeply curious.”
As
was true of her previous book, there’s very little advice in “Women Who
Work” that is specific to women. A reading list at the back contains
fifty-three books and TED Talk recommendations—thirty-nine of which were authored by men. There’s no shortage of woman-targeted branding throughout
the book—“You are a woman who works,” Ivanka writes, over and over
again—but the first actual mention of a gendered situation occurs on
page ninety-four, when she notes that women, more than men, can face
negative repercussions when they try to negotiate a raise. Her counsel,
though, is entirely general: do your research; prove your worth. On page
one hundred and four, she finally lays out a woman-specific suggestion:
we should be more like men and apply for jobs for which we’re not
completely qualified. Given the circumstances, it’s almost funny. In a
later section on work/life balance—a “myth,” according to Ivanka, who
nonetheless advocates finding a “work/life rhythm that’s optimal for
you”—there’s quite a bit of advice about working through and around
pregnancy and motherhood, mostly in the form of quotes from Rosie Pope,
an entrepreneur who briefly had her own Bravo show called “Pregnant in
Heels.”
The other quoted
experts—and there are hundreds—are all over the map. There’s Stephen
Covey, the business consultant and teacher who wrote “7 Habits of Highly
Effective People.” There’s Socrates. There’s Toni Morrison, who is
quoted as saying, “Bit by bit, she had claimed herself. Freeing yourself
was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”
(Ivanka does not note that those lines are from the novel “Beloved” and
refer to freedom from actual slavery; in this context, they are used as
the chapter divider before a section on time management, in which she
asks women, “Are you a slave to your time or the master of it?”) There’s
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the feminist author and activist who once
wrote, Ivanka has learned, “Life is a verb, not a noun.” There’s a woman
with a food blog “dedicated to turning veggies and fruit into
spiralized noodles” who appears to offer advice on resilience.
Amid
this chorus, Ivanka avoids going into detail about her fashion
business, which, as is clear from other reporting, is not the alluring
retail juggernaut she sketches here. Sales are uneven: her clothing has
been dropped by retailers and relabelled by the factory. Marissa
Kraxberger, one of the Ivanka Trump employees who helped create Women
Who Work, has said that she “fought long and hard” to get Ivanka to
agree to give her eight weeks’ paid maternity leave; Kraxberger was part of an initial team of five senior executives, four of whom have since left the brand.
Like
“The Trump Card,” “Women Who Work” is written for an audience whose
greatest obstacles are internal, and Ivanka’s advice is, once again,
Ivanka-specific. Where, as a twentysomething, she advised women to go
into the office on Sundays, she now counsels women to ask for flextime
and commit to sending e-mails at night. By the end of the book, she’s
basically speaking to no one. Wealthy upper managers with families don’t
need to be reminded of the importance of setting goals, and Ivanka’s
directives are utterly irrelevant to anyone struggling to pay for
childcare and housing at the same time. Women outside the corporate
world and creative class do not figure into her vision of endless upward
mobility at all. In one chapter, she writes, with a sense of courage
that is jaw-droppingly misplaced, “If I can help celebrate the fact that
I’m a superengaged mom and unabashedly ambitious entrepreneur, that
yes, I’m on a construction site in the morning and at the dinner table
with my kids in the evening, I’m going to do that.” And why wouldn’t
she? Who wouldn’t celebrate that level of ability and
accomplishment—except, maybe, the type of man who would say that putting your wife to work is a dangerous thing?
The fundamental dishonesty of Ivanka Trump’s book is clearest in the
fact that she never acknowledges the difficulty of knowing, or being
governed by, anyone like that."
No comments:
Post a Comment