Lean Back: Lessons from Woolf

A while back, a colleague and I were rehashing the anticipatory buzz and backlash inspired by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s then forthcoming Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. My colleague, knowing that I work on Virginia Woolf’s writing, speculated, “It’s kind of like A Room of One’s Own, right?” In part to be polite but mostly to conceal my embarrassment at having no clue what she meant, I more or less agreed: “Yeah, that’s really interesting.”

What exactly she had in mind, I am still not sure. But the notion that Woolf’s manifesto for women’s creative freedom could have anything in common with what I imagined to be Sandberg’s postfeminist information age success manual stuck with me, so much so that I preordered Lean In despite my anxiety about supporting a cause with which I was pretty certain I would not be on board. Having now read it, I cannot help but think that my co-worker was onto something. Sandberg’s feminism is kind of like Woolf’s feminism—at least to a point.

As I probably should have realized off the bat, both Woolf’s and Sandberg’s feminisms are constrained by class in complex and sometimes problematic ways, and for this and related reasons each writer has been charged with elitism. Queenie Leavis’s scathing review of Woolf’s other feminist classic, Three Guineas, is exemplary in this regard. Woolf, Leavis observed, “is quite insulated by class” and, by her own account, “has personally received considerably more in the way of economic ease than she is humanly entitled to” (1938, 203–4). Sandberg similarly acknowledges her own economic ease, admitting that it somewhat limits her scope: “Parts of this book will be most relevant to women fortunate enough to have choices about how much and when and where to work” (10). Ultimately, however, Sandberg downplays and even disavows the role of class in dividing her interests from those of other women. In the context of the book, this disavowal is supposed to be justified by her faith that having more women in positions of power will bring about the institutional changes necessary to gender equality: “If we can succeed in adding more female voices at the highest levels, we will expand opportunities and extend fairer treatment to all” (10). How such institutional change would work is not Sandberg’s focus and she is straightforward about this. She focuses instead on the “internal obstacles” that hold women back (9). By encouraging women to “lean in”—sit at the table; make your partner a real partner; don’t leave before you leave—Sandberg aims to close what she sees as an ambition gap between men and women: “I continue to be alarmed not just at how we as women fail to put ourselves forward, but also at how we fail to notice and correct for this gap” (36). It is because Sandberg’s foremost concern is with the ways in which women have internalized gender biases and thus undercut their own potential that she is taken by some to be blaming the victim.

For the record, I actually do not think Sandberg is guilty of blaming the victim—though it bears underscoring that the biggest “victims” with whom she deals are working moms who fail to climb all the way to the tops of their professions. Truth be told, most working women and mothers are simply not on the scene here. As Sandberg herself notes, hopeful and heartfelt invocations of a general female “we” notwithstanding, “the vast majority of women” are neither in nor on their way up to her position, but “are struggling to make ends meet and take care of their families” (10).

What intrigues me is how Sandberg, in outlining various internal obstacles that hinder women’s advancement, in effect joins Woolf in giving priority to the individual over the collective. The Marxist cultural critic Raymond Williams argued that Woolf, along with her fellow members of...