Wonder Women

Starred review from July 22, 2013
Barnard College president Spar (The Baby Business) skillfully addresses the state of feminism and suggests that, despite historic gains in education, the workforce, and equal rights, American women suffer under "an excruciating set of mutually exclusive expectations" resulting, paradoxically, from the proliferation of options that feminism made possible. Drawing on her experiences as well as extensive research, Spar lucidly traces how the movement's "expansive and revolutionary" political goals have evolved into a set of "vast and towering expectations" that trouble women at every stage of their lives. Wisely forgoing hostility or blame, Spar finds women struggling, if anything, with the fantasy of "having it all." "We're doing this to ourselves," she writes, addressing, among other topics: the explosion of toddler princesses; eating disorders and hyperachievement among adolescents; the hookup habits of young adults; the "adoration of pregnancy"; competitive mothering; and the lucrative wedding, diet, and plastic surgery industries. Her solutions call for sanity and simplicity: to kill "the myths of female perfection" and recommit to the goals of early feminism, abandoning the "individualized quest" in favor of organizational and collective change. Tactfully navigating heated debates and effectively contextualizing historical trends and contemporary problems, Spar's book will be welcomed by readers who envision a world "driven by women's skills and interests and passions as much as by men's." Photos. Agent: Will Lippincott, Lippincott Massie McQuilkin.

July 15, 2013
Barnard College president Spar (The Baby Business: How Money, Science, and Politics Drive the Commerce of Conception, 2006 etc.) uses her experiences of the feminist revolution of the 1960s as a scaffold for evaluating the situation of young women today. The author explains that despite the many benefits she obtained as a result of the sexual revolution and the second-wave struggle for the equality of women, launched by Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan and other feminist leaders, she repudiated feminism and steered clear of their political agenda. One of only a few women to become a tenured professor at Harvard Business School, she reveled in her success in a man's world. Over the ensuing years--as the mother of three, she has balanced the demands of family life with the challenges of her career, especially since becoming the head of an all-women's college--her perspective has shifted. The author explains that she "became increasingly convinced that the goals of the early feminists remain relevant for women today, even for those like me who had either ignored the struggle or disagreed with the tactics." Still, today, "only twenty-one companies on the Fortune 500 are run by female chief executives," and a similar situation exists in politics. In the upper economic strata, most working women accept the "mommy track," trading less on-the-job responsibility (as they race "between board meetings and ballet recitals") for time to devote to family. Spar addresses many issues facing working women--e.g., maintaining a fashionable appearance, sexual identity and aging in a world of shifting mores. For younger women who have accepted their entitlement to full equality with men, the conflicting demands of the roles expected of them, and their own "quest for perfection," can be devastating. A wise, worthy companion to Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In (2013).

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September 1, 2013
Spar, the president of Barnard College, delves into the eternal topic of women having it all by blending her own personal story within an overview of the past four decades. Some anecdotes will seem a bit over-the-top (tales of pumping breast milk in airport bathrooms while dashing off to a corporate meeting have become almost a clich'), but Spar's artful juxtaposition of society's conflicting promises and assertions rings through loud and clear. As she shifts from the reasoned research of academics to the grocery checkout lines with their masses of impossible celebrity weight-loss triumphs while providing the facts and figures of gender politics from the workplace to the dreaded department-store changing room, Spar's acerbic wit would do Dorothy Parker proud. Her own struggles with anorexia and fertility bring the topic down to earth, ensuring that Wonder Women is equally valuable as a reference source for college-bound daughters and as a lively read for their mothers to dissect in book clubs.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)

April 15, 2013

Barnard College president Spar once believed that women "could glide into the new era with babies, board seats, and husbands in tow," but it hasn't been that easy. Spar shows how far women have and haven't come and what is needed for them to achieve true equality.

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