This chapter examines Ivanka Trump’s Women Who Work in conjunction with Megyn Kelly’s memoir Settle for More and Ann-Marie Slaughter’s Unfinished Business. It first demonstrates how Women Who Work should be read as a neoliberal feminist manifesto. Trump’s how-to-succeed guide encourages the conversion of “aspirational” women into generic human capital by reworking motherhood in managerial terms, whereby women are exhorted to carefully manage the time they spend with their children. Yet, the notion of a happy work-family balance continues to serve as the book’s ideal, rendering it part of the neoliberal feminist turn. The chapter then provides a comparative analysis of all three “how-to” books, revealing how an identical market rationality undergirds all three—despite being authored by women who identify with opposing political camps. It thus highlights how neoliberal rationality’s colonization of more domains of our lives has undone conceptual and political boundaries constitutive of liberalism and liberal thought.
Ruth Milkman and Eileen Appelbaum, Unfinished Business: Paid Family Leave in California and the Future of U.S. Work-Family Policy