Lean Back: Lessons from Woolf

Abstract

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 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 be polite but mostly conceal my embarrass- ment 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 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 cer - tain 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 kind of like Woolf 's feminism—at least a point. As I probably should have realized off the bat, both Woolf 's and Sand - berg's feminisms are constrained by in complex and sometimes problematic ways, and for this and related reasons each writer been charged with elitism. Queenie Leavis's scathing review of Woolf 's other feminist classic, Three Guineas , exemplary in this regard. Woolf, Leavis observed, is quite insulated by class and, by her own account, has per- sonally received considerably more in the way of economic ease than she 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 women fortunate enough have choices