Ambition in Black + White by Melinda Marshall

Author:Melinda Marshall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Published: 2016-05-11T01:42:03+00:00

PART THREE:

WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE

All women want five things: the ability to flourish, to excel, to reach for meaning and purpose, to be empowered and empower others, and to earn well. Ambition manifests in myriad and marvelous ways, however: success is as individually defined as the women who have achieved it. In this section, we showcase women who have harnessed power in ways both inspiring and instructive.

5

Flourishing

In the 1980s, as a new member of the esteemed Council on Foreign Relations, Sylvia Ann Hewlett recalls being taken aside by CFR’s only female board director for a bit of sisterly advice. The board member, an officer of the General Motors Corporation and its chief economist, congratulated Hewlett on being one of only three women to be elected to CFR that year. She was an admirer of Hewlett’s scholarly work on emerging markets and had championed Hewlett’s candidacy, but she had a word of warning. “I see some of your recent work centers on the male-female wage gap,” this board member counseled her. “As a woman economist, you must take care not to dilute your reputation by getting involved in these soft women’s issues. They will contaminate you.” Patting Hewlett on the arm, she added, “Better to focus on growth models.”

Hewlett recoiled. Though she knew this female leader meant well, nothing about women’s issues struck her as soft. While teaching at Barnard early in her career, Hewlett had taken a short break to deal with a difficult pregnancy and a dangerously premature child; when she returned to work a mere eight months later, she found that she hadn’t won tenure and was out of a job. As Hewlett saw it, women in the US were worse off than women elsewhere in the advanced industrial world. In countries such as France, Italy, Sweden, and even the UK, working mothers had access to a rich array of maternity and childcare benefits; as a result, the wage gap in these countries was much narrower than in the US. Ignoring the board member’s advice, Hewlett penned A Lesser Life: The Myth of Women’s Liberation in America, an indictment of feminists for failing to improve women’s economic lot—the first salvo in a series of analyses that quantified the costs borne by women, but also by society, when working parents are denied material support.

For Hewlett, the fight for women’s rights was acutely personal. Born in a small Welsh coal-mining town, Hewlett was the second of six daughters to working-class parents who openly expressed their disappointment that none of their children were sons. With the local coal-mining industry in sharp decline, opportunities for men were already limited; opportunities for women were all but nonexistent. Even as a child, Hewlett understood the second-class status accorded to women, whose lives were confined in the home and dominated by domestic chores. Her own mother reared six kids in a house with no heating other than a coal fire, no refrigerator, no washing machine, and no help. One of Hewlett’s vivid memories is of

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