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Ivanka Trump wants you to live your best life. She wants to empower and inspire you through empowering, inspiring inspiration. She has written a whole book with these meaningless platitudes and more. It's 217 pages long and about a millimeter deep. <\/p>\n
Much of what's wrong with this book, Women Who Work: Rewriting the Rules for Success, has been detailed elsewhere: It's ostensibly about \"women who work,\" but most women who work won't recognize themselves in a book aimed almost entirely at white-collar employees gunning for the C-suite. It rips off ideas and arguments made better elsewhere, as well as the usual clichs found in any popular \"how to succeed in business\" books. She laments her ability to make time for a massage while on the campaign trail and quotes Nelson Mandela to make a point about asking for workplace flexibility. <\/p>\n
But what this book is really about is selling the Ivanka Trump brand not just her clothes and jewelry (although those too) but the gold-plated Trump name, and her own fame. Ivanka Trump isnt just a woman or the label on a sweater, but a lifestyle. While Trump spends ample time in the book encouraging readers to find their passion, it's obvious that hers is, like her father's, little more than name recognition. Her passion for her \"brand,\" and the importance of having your own personal brand, comes up again and again throughout the book building your personal brand really means defining what youre passionate about, she writes in chapter one; what shes passionate about, she says in the same chapter, is providing empowerment through IvankaTrump.com and Women Who Work. The goal of Ivanka feminism is less gender equality and more a cosmetic feel-good feminism of women all happily cheering each other on in surprisingly comfortable pumps. <\/p>\n
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Much of the book is meaningless corporate speak, a series of evocative words (Empowerment! Authenticity!) thrown together into nonsensical arrangements. \"Cultivating authenticity is essential to creating strong bonds with coworkers,\" she writes without irony, missing the point that \"authenticity\" is, by definition, not something that can be \"cultivated\" or designed. The book is an extended ad for her fashion brand and her #WomenWhoWork campaign, and yet, by the end of the book, it's still not clear what #WomenWhoWork actually does. \"My mission is to empower and inspire women and this was a scalable way to do that,\" she writes about IvankaTrump.com. How women are \"empowered\" by a website and a hashtag is not explained, nor is what scalable empowerment looks like. <\/p>\n
What it clearly doesnt look like is anything resembling political feminism or social justice. Ivanka feminism is about supporting women, yes, but not about any sort of deep-dive into structural inequality; its enough to simply quote women about freedom and empowerment, not to put them in context or talk about the ugliness and real difficulties of so many American womens lives, and the ways in which race and class shape our realities. This is perhaps most obvious in Trump's chapter on working smarter not harder, which is flanked by a quote from Beloved, Toni Morrison's masterful novel about a freed slave. \"Bit by bit ... she had claimed herself. Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.\" It's clueless (bordering on offensive) enough to use that line to make a point about women seeking freedom from the strictures of the traditional white-dominated white-collar workplace. But then a page later, Trump crosses over into jaw-dropping absurdity when she asks her readers, \"Are you a slave to your time or the master of it?\" <\/p>\n
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So who, according to Trump, is a woman who works? She seems to be pretty much just Ivanka Trump, the book simply a vehicle to sell the idea that Trump is a figurehead for college-educated young women who work office jobs (and buy books aimed at college-educated young women who work office jobs). But she misses the mark even there, assuming that we arent able to spot an obvious lie or blatant attempt to manipulate us. One of Trump's passions, she writes, is \"disrupting\" the fashion and fine jewelry industries. \"There was an enormous disconnect,\" Trump writes, between how women live \"and the apparel and accessories that were available to us.\" To solve this clearly pressing issue, she put out a line of middle-market workwear. She's proud, she writes, \"that my collections captured a femininity and a sense of fashion that working women haven't been able to express just a decade before\" one wonders where she was in the heyday of J.Crew, The Limited, and Ann Taylor, and concludes that shes probably not ignorant of their existence, but more interested in the alternative set of facts that make her brand necessary rather than the reality that made it unimportant. And because feminism is cool again, and feminism now a part of the Ivanka brand, even hawking necklaces is reframed as a feminist act. What women want, Trump asserts, are clothes and accessories that emphasize their femininity and make them both professional and \"alluring.\" <\/p>\n
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Trump, it's been observed before, seems like a likable, poised young woman, and that comes across in the book. Criticizing her feels mean, because she seems very nice she writes about her sweet relationship with her family, and goes out of her way to not pass judgment on other women for their choices in work and life. But that doesnt make her book useful, or even benign. In many ways, Women Who Work reads like what Sheryl Sandberg critics who hadn't actually read Lean In assumed it was corporate self-help jargon that puts the onus of success on individual women and ignores not just structural inequality, but the way most women live. That wasn't actually what Lean In was; it is what this book is. <\/p>\n
I don't doubt that Trump does care about helping other women to succeed. But she doesn't seem to really understand what that means, beyond platitudes about empowerment, inspiration, and applauding every woman for choosing her own choice. Feminism, in Trump land, isn't an inherently political movement focused on the equality of women; it's a cultural zeitgeist that can be leveraged to build one's \"brand,\" a set of feel-good lady-centric slogans that tells women they too can feel empowered and inspired if they buy this chic but still practical business-casual pencil skirt that can go from day at the office to date night by swapping out a blazer for a cute blouse. <\/p>\n
Trump does laudably pay lip service to necessary policy changes, including paid parental leave, writing that these policies are important steps to forging more equal workplaces. But she doesnt address the fact that its the Republican Party, now led by her father, that has blocked these very policies from becoming reality. And here she is, in a position to advocate for the same policies she deems crucial to the success of women who work, and there's been no movement at all on this supposed marquee issue. Women who work, it seems, are valued in the Trump universe primarily insofar as they can buy Trump's book. <\/p>\n
Jill Filipovic is the author of The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness. <\/p>\n
Follow Jill on Twitter. <\/p>\n
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