The handbook that teaches women to win
If you want a rush of glee, do as I did and rewatch the Trudeau cabinet reach gender parity in the morning and then read Kirstine Stewart’s new memoir, Our Turn, in the afternoon. Stewart once answered a job ad in the Toronto Star for a “Girl Friday.” In the jagged pattern of big careers, she moved up, sideways, and further up, ran the CBC’s English language operations and now heads North American media partnerships at Twitter, the company that has either ruined my life or perfected it, I don’t know which.
Stewart’s a trailblazer but she’s also normal, and her handbook for ambitious women is invaluable. Thanks to Justin Trudeau, time races ahead to catch up with women’s rights. It was unsettling to see commentators, overwhelmingly male in number, deploring a cabinet that had bypassed them in modernity. It’s our turn.
Stewart writes plain and tall. She speaks honestly about awkward subjects: how her first husband could not cope with her larger paycheque, the “glass cliff” that puts women in charge of only companies headed for catastrophe, the way female co-workers mistreat each other, how well-dressed women are demeaned for being overtly feminine, how phone mobility has freed female workers with children, and my favourite, the fact that women make 80 per cent of all purchasing decisions and should always have been the Holy Grail.
She writes about women judging each other about parental leave, breastfeeding, clothing and ambition, the way women fear speaking up in meetings until they do but the crucial moment has already passed, refers to the “passion trap” that says you should only do work you love, the myth of the Supergirl, the scarifying first experience of job-endangering sexual harassment, what to do when your company gets a Harper cut, meaning 10 per cent as the CBC did in 2011 (she eventually left).
She writes about managing people, how you have to respond to staff and remember small courtesies and how in an insecure world where tech is shaking industries like a can of paint — “media, music, publishing, retail, travel, finance, banking, health care” — women are well-placed because they’re the sex that will be candid about uncertainty, will always ask for directions.
Stewart also discusses feminism’s larger problem which is, to use electoral language, its constituency. A recent review of Our Turn frowned on Stewart: she has an English degree, was once offered a publishing internship, had a supportive female boss, and can now afford a nanny, so what did her “misguided personal anecdotes” have to offer women without those advantages?
I do take the reviewer’s point that other people’s lives look deliciously easy and generally offer no sensation of empowerment to the struggling. But when has this not been true, I gently suggest. Should powerful women like Stewart just shut up?
This is what I mean by “constituency.” In 2010 there were 17.2 million women (and 17 million men) in Canada, although without a 2011 census, who knows. Maybe they left. But womankind is not a unit. When a woman speaks, she does not speak for everyone. Stewart has an English degree, as do I, as does Justin Trudeau, and there are few qualifications more derided than that. She has worked as a cashier and a file clerk, spent three summers churning butter at a farming museum, and turned down the internship. She is entirely self-made.
But she is a woman and her life must match the life of Everywoman.
And here I turn to Germaine Greer, feminism’s often wrong-headed theoretician, who got in trouble recently for suggesting, re Caitlyn Jenner, that one doesn’t become a woman by means of surgery alone. Transgender activists wanted her not to be allowed to speak at a university, also to have her throat slit.
“We don’t really know what women are,” Greer told the Guardian calmly. “A lot of women are female impersonators, because our notion of who we are is not authentic, and so I am not surprised men are better at impersonating women than women are.”
We’ve so rarely seen publicly successful women in human history, so no wonder they may seem false. Who is Stewart impersonating? No one. She is herself. For so long women were locked into social stereotypes, she writes, “virgins, vamps, mother hens, gossips, dumb blondes, shrews, bitches and so on” but maybe this can end. Stewart’s is a remarkable voice and I shall give the book to my daughters.