Sex & Power. - Review - book review

Washington Monthly, Dec, 2000 by Suzannah Lessard

Under review ...

SEX & POWER

by Susan Estrich

Riverhead Books, $24.95

SUSAN ESTRICH'S MESSAGE IS THAT the advance of women toward equality has leveled off well below true fairness, but that the gains achieved so far give us the power we need to "finish the job" if we will only use it. The numbers she amasses do indeed depict a stalled movement. Though women have been gaining entry to professional schools in numbers nearing equality for over a generation, those numbers are not reflected at the top, where they should be showing up by now. There are only three women who are CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, for example. There is only one woman among the 200 best paid CEOs in America. Only 15.7 percent of the partners in the 250 top law firms in the country are women, though that is a lot better than the 6.5 percent of medical school chairmen who are women, or the 6.8 percent of Hollywood movies that have a female director.

As Estrich points out, these gross discrepancies can no longer be attributed to delays as women come through "the pipeline," therefore rectifying them is going to require action. Much of that action, she convincingly argues, will have to come from women themselves. "This is also about us," she writes. "We don't want it, or we don't want it enough to pay the price, push up the mountain, do what it takes." It's not that it's all our fault, but that the situation is more complex than a matter of men refusing to share power. That Estrich does not fear that she will undermine the cause by being honest about those complexities is what makes this book a timely, original, and truly useful contribution.

One of her major points is that we have to stop deploring ambition in women--the phenomenon in which progressive women recoil from Hillary, for example, because they feel she has made life decisions around career advancement. Estrich has made it to the top: She was the first female editor of the Harvard Law Review and the first female tenured professor of law at Harvard, a position she left because her husband needed to be in Los Angeles in order to pursue his career. She does not regret the decision, though there is some ruefulness in her treatment of it. Her career has hardly been obscure since then--which doesn't mean that she doesn't support women who decide differently.

One of the really complex cases that she discusses to illustrate this centers on a young Californian woman, Gina Occan, who came from a poor family, won a full scholarship to Harvard, and earned a 3.5 grade point average in her first year. Then she returned home for the summer and got pregnant by Tomasso, the handsome, motorcycle-riding son of rich local restaurateurs. She had the baby and planned to live with him and Tomasso in Cambridge. But the couple had a falling out. Tomasso sued successfully for custody of the boy on the grounds that the baby would be better off with him and his parents, who pledged to take care of him, than with Gina in Cambridge, where the baby would be spending long hours in daycare. So Gina went back to California, where she went on welfare and spent her time doing legal research to mount an appeal of the decision. During this time, she was featured several times on Susan Estrich's radio show, becoming something of a heroine and a martyr to female listeners.

Then some additional information surfaced--the University of Southern California had also offered Gina a full scholarship. When listeners learned that she could be going to USC, making it possible for her child to be near both parents, instead of struggling to get back to Harvard, they lost sympathy for her. In other words, in the minds of female listeners, Gina should have been willing to settle for something less than the very best for the sake of her family--that her insistence on going to Harvard somehow put her beyond the pale. Estrich asks, "Why shouldn't she strive for the very best even though she has a child?" She doesn't mean that we should all do that. She just means that we should support those of us who are ambitious in that way, rather than turning against them.

I found myself going through exactly the same reaction as the radio audience: My first take was essentially that of course Gina should have gone to USC, a response that had a lot of judgment attached, including the idea that the snobbish appeal of Harvard was what was prevailing here. Would I have felt the same if the protagonist were a man? Probably not. I think I would have been far more inclined to think it was natural for a man to want to go to Harvard so fervently. This hidden compliance on women's part, with the notion that ambition in women is a negative trait, is one of Estrich's principal targets and the Gina Occam case had me in the cross hairs.

On the other hand, Estrich is thorough in exposing the ways in which the system is rigged against women, especially in a competitive culture in which time out for family leaves women irrevocably behind. A grasp of the human dimensions at play brings a rich realism to the text: the middle-aged woman whose interviewer, a young man, asked her how she would feel about a company outing to Disney World, for example. (Her answer, that she would feel fine about it for she had taken her kids there several times, was the wrong one.) Nobody wants to hire their mother, is how Estrich puts it, but how many super-intelligent real-estate agents can we use? It just doesn't make sense for a society to bypass half its population when selecting its leaders. The manner in which she raises these questions without attempting to solve them is at first confusing, but cumulatively it adds to the humanistic roundness of the book.