Excerpt
The Myth of Making It
1 You Can’t Have It All I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own. —Audre Lorde
The year 2015 was poised to be a great year for ambitious women: We were nearing the end of the Obama years and steadily coming out of the economic upheaval that had plagued a generation’s job prospects. Sexism was being called out in Hollywood. We weren’t yet at the reckoning that would come in 2018, but it was the year that many of the women who accused Bill Cosby of sexual assault came forward, with an unforgettable image on the cover of
New York magazine—thirty-five of his accusers in black and white, looking straight at the camera, ready for justice.
The show
Younger had just hit TV screens, starring Sutton Foster as a fortysomething stay-at-home mother named Liza Miller who, recently divorced, is preparing to get back into her career. She assumes (probably rightly) that she’s aged out of entry-level jobs in the publishing industry, so she pretends to be a twentysomething to be taken seriously, and hijinks ensue. With friends’ help, she gives herself a fashion-of-the-moment makeover: She dons perfectly frayed skinny jeans, ankle booties, and mixed prints, or cropped floral dresses and moto jackets. The perfect girlboss attire: casual but put together, high-low combinations, the nineties throwback but formfitting (these Laura Ashley–type dresses had
waists).
Her work wife, Kelsey Peters—played by Hilary Duff, an actual twentysomething millennial—captured the spirit of the mid twenty-teens, embracing feminine chic tousled blond hair with an edge, skinny jeans paired with sensible blazers, and a chunky heel. She had a conventionally attractive boyfriend
and a great career, but she could also and regularly would do shots. Miller learns quickly that this generation believes they can have it all and have it all in pink: enjoy the wins of corporate feminism and chic city life while espousing a type of traditional femininity.
The year before
Younger premiered, Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie published
We Should All Be Feminists, a book-length essay based on a talk she had given, and Beyoncé—who had sampled Adichie’s talk for her single “***Flawless”—performed at the 2014 MTV Video Music Awards, her unmistakable silhouette appearing under a white blaze of letters spelling it out: feminist. An indelible image, and it seemed like, in public and in private, more and more women were embracing the identity. Meanwhile, big tech, acting on the deep inequality rife in their companies, had started to broaden their parental leave policies. Women-owned and -led businesses were being invested in, and women entrepreneurs were encouraged to take the leap. In 2015, Elizabeth Holmes was named by
Forbes as the youngest self-made woman billionaire. In politics, Hillary Clinton was poised to be the front-runner in the next presidential election, and Elizabeth Warren was gearing up to be her most serious opposition. (Donald Trump? He’d announced his run, but it seemed like a long shot.)
We christened 2014 a certifiable year of women (
Time magazine called it the best year for women “since the dawn of time”), and we were only going up from there. Adichie’s
We Should All Be Feminists joined Sophia Amoruso’s
#Girlboss on the shelves—one of many books advising women on how they might take their feminist principles to work. In a pithy review for
The New York Times, Erin Gloria Ryan observed, “Being anti-establishment is the old cool. The new cool is playing by your own rules and still winning by their standards.”
Sexism was
out; women’s ambition was
in.
At the time, I was working at the National Women’s Business Council—a federal advisory council to the Obama administration that ensured that federal money was being directed to women-owned businesses. The stats were exciting: As of 2014, 9.1 million women were running their own businesses, and that number was getting bigger every day. While women struggled to earn as much investment as their male counterparts, the “she-conomy” was growing, and lady-led, “girl power”–vibed enterprises were coming into being. The girlboss era was upon us, and we were swallowing it hook, line, and sinker.
When I think about this era, what I remember is a heady and very sincere optimism about what the future held. Even I, an often-cynical Gen Xer about the same age as Sutton Foster’s character in
Younger, was giddy about it. It felt like a time when my fellow women, femmes, and I might do anything and have anything. And if there were things we didn’t have, well, that’s because we’d chosen not to have them.
No partner? That’s my choice! No baby? Chose that, too. In this period the stuffy idea of acting like a man to win in a man’s world registered as blaringly outdated—in offices around the country, women were embracing a new aesthetic of femininity, born out of the belief that women would and should be recognized in the workplace. Hustling was no longer just for men in finance but also for women who worked in corporate jobs and hit that hot-yoga class in the morning—
every morning. We were standing on the shoulders of the women who came before us, but the pantsuit was out, and frilly dresses paired with blazers were in. We were ready to work all day and all night. We had smartphones and social media and Uber and time-management software . . . and Zappos. We were literally
unstoppable.
The Sexy Gal Who Can Have It All It was hardly the first year, first decade, or even the first generation of women who believed that they could have it all and have it all while wearing pink. “Having it all”—these three words have had an outsized impact on how we have talked about women, work, family, and everything else for decades. The phrase itself was popularized—if not coined—by proto-girlboss Helen Gurley Brown in her 1982 book,
Having It All: Love, Success, Sex, Money—Even If You’re Starting With Nothing. At the time the book came out, Brown was sixty and famous for her long reign as editor of
Cosmopolitan magazine (which under her tenure had been revamped into a type of work-and-play bible for young working women) and for her book
Sex and the Single Girl, which had launched her to fame in 1962.
A slight, waiflike woman with dark hair and eyes, she often described herself as “an ugly duckling.” And she aimed
Having It All at women she termed
mouseburgers: regular—or what she called unexceptional—women who didn’t believe they could have the things that beautiful, talented women with rich husbands had. (It was a decidedly groundbreaking message at the time.)
Gurley Brown certainly had her own rags-to-riches story. She was born in 1922 in Green Forest, Arkansas, where her father was involved in local politics. He moved the family to Little Rock before dying tragically when she was ten years old. He left her mother behind to parent two children with no solid income. Devastated by the loss, her mother moved the family to Los Angeles, California. The move changed the young girl’s life. As journalist Suzi Parker writes in
The Washington Post, “Brown knew she didn’t have looks on her side . . . but she had brains.” In 1939, Brown graduated as valedictorian of her Los Angeles high school.
Bright and unstoppable, Brown—still Gurley at that point—skipped college but worked her way up the corporate ladder, first in secretarial jobs and then as an advertising copywriter. By early 1960, she was the highest-paid female copywriter in California. As one of her biographers, Brooke Hauser, detailed, Brown had a slew of love affairs and was unapologetic about sometimes having sex with colleagues or even the boss, if needed. One of her married bosses paid her rent for a stint, which helped her support herself, struggling, widowed mother, and her sister, who had been paralyzed by polio.
The weaponization of her sexuality, as she saw it, was core to her self-expression and identity. As she often wrote about herself, she was not considered particularly attractive—an opinion that’s repeated ad nauseam in anything written about her or her life.
Eventually, a movie producer and former managing editor of
Cosmopolitan named David Brown, who was twice divorced and known to date starlets, ended up on her radar. After a career as a journalist, he had been hired in the early 1950s at Twentieth Century Fox to head up the story department. After Gurley asked a friend for a setup, they dated and eventually married in 1959, when she was thirty-seven. David encouraged her to pursue her passion for writing and consider publishing an advice book, so she wrote and published
Sex and the Single Girl—her first book, twenty years prior to
Having It All—despite not being single or really a “girl.”
