In light of Sheryl Sandberg's campus initiative to promote her best-seller, Lean In, bell hooks, in a piece at the Feminist Wire, is critical of Sandberg's "simplistic description of the feminist movement." Sandberg's brand of feminism, she argues, flies in the face of the work that so many scholars have done to clarify and strengthen the equality for women movement.
Although Sandberg revised her perspective on feminism, she did not turn towards primary sources (the work of feminist theorists) to broaden her understanding. In her book, she offers a simplistic description of the feminist movement based on women gaining equal rights with men. This construction of simple categories (women and men) was long ago challenged by visionary feminist thinkers, particularly individual black women/women of color. These thinkers insisted that everyone acknowledge and understand the myriad ways race, class, sexuality, and many other aspects of identity and difference made explicit that there was never and is no simple homogenous gendered identity that we could call "women" struggling to be equal with men. In fact, the reality was and is that privileged white women often experience a greater sense of solidarity with men of their same class than with poor white women or women of color. …
Ironically, Sandberg’s work would not have captured the attention of progressives, particularly men, if she had not packaged the message of "lets go forward and work as equals within white male corporate elites" in the wrapping paper of feminism. In the "one hundred most influential people in the world" issue of Time Magazine, the forty-three-year old Facebook COO was dubbed by the doyen of women’s liberation movement Gloria Steinem in her short commentary with the heading "feminism’s new boss." That same magazine carried a full page ad for the book Lean In: Women, Work, and The Will to Lead that carried the heading "Inspire the graduate in your Life" with a graduating picture of two white females and one white male. The ad included this quote from Sandberg’s commencement speech at Barnard College in 2011: "I hope that you have the ambition to lean in to your career and run the world. Because the world needs you to change it." One can only speculate whether running the world is a call to support and perpetuate first world imperialism. This is precisely the type of feel good declaration Sandberg makes that in no way clarifies the embedded agenda she supports.
Read bell hooks' entire piece at the Feminist Wire.
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