This time it isn't Freud asking the question, it's women themselves.
An entire bushel full of books dealing with how women view work and money are coming to market this fall, and all are trying to address the question that the good doctor asked a century ago -- albeit in a different context.
So, what do women want?
Not this, they all agree.
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Using herself as the primary example, Elizabeth Perle McKenna sketches the overview to the problem in "When Work Doesn't Work Anymore: Women, Work, and Identity". McKenna, a former publishing executive, outlines in painful detail the problem she, and her peers, had while working: They felt unfulfilled, demoralized, exhausted and of sync with the rest of their lives. They felt they were one person on the job and another at home.Her conclusion?
There is nothing wrong with today's working woman. The problem is the workplace itself. Talking about the baby boomers, such as herself, who joined the workforce in the late 1960s and into the 1970s, McKenna writes:
"This curious thing happened on the way to the office. Rather than changing the culture we entered, we seem, instead to have accommodated it. Or we just resigned ourselves to it. And this separates us from ourselves."McKenna, who intriguingly has dropped out of the corporate world to write, concludes that the women's revolution in the workplace stopped too soon. Instead of aiming for parity with men, women should have made their goal better working conditions for all. She holds out hope that women -- and men -- will realize that the structure of the workplace that was created by their fathers and grandfathers needs to be altered. However, she concedes that is not going to happen overnight.
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Well, if the workplace isn't going to change any time soon, what's a woman to do?The answer according to Donna Brooks and Lynn Brooks is to take full advantage of the system as it is. Their book, "Seven Secrets of Successful Women: Success Strategies of the Women Who Have Made It -- and How You Can Follow Their Lead" lives up to its title. Donna is the U.S. executive vice president of the European Women's Management Development Network; Lynn is responsible for marketing strategy in Latin American and Asia for the Institute for Scientific Information in Philadelphia. These twin sisters identify the seven key traits as:
Their message: Exploit the existing workplace to the fullest.
- Finding a mentor
- Increasing your visibility
- Developing an effective professional network
- Communicating effectively
- Knowing when to take smart risks
- Understanding the politics of your organization
- Balancing home and family life
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"Prince Charming Isn't Coming: How Women Get Smart About Money" by Barbara Stanny takes a different approach to the subject of women taking control of their lives in the workaday world. Stanny focuses on money. Not by talking about stocks and bonds. Rather hers is a psychological financial primer whose sole purpose is to help women mentally prepare to take control of their (economic) lives.It is self-reliance Stanny has learned the hard way. Stanny, the daughter of the "R" in H&R Block, spent the first part of her adult life hamstrung by trusts her father set up and letting her first husband control her finances with what she describes as disastrous results. She explains how she went about learning to think about money, and outlines a strategy that will prepare others similarly situated to be able to start making some basic decisions about their financial futures.
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One of the biggest things that comes across in the preceding books is that none of the women are/were having a particularly good time at work or in handling their money. That isn't a problem for Julie Buick. Her book -- "All I Really Need to Know in Business I Learned at Microsoft: Insider Strategies to Help You Succeed" -- is basically a how-to-survive-within-the-organization primer geared toward Gen Xers. Through her reprinting of e-mails from fellow Microsofties (what she says Microsoft employees call one another) and stories about who is going to be stuck with a particularly obnoxious large vegetable until a dreaded task is done, she makes it clear that if you try to make work enjoyable, you are bound to have a better time.
So why, you wonder, did it take publishers and editors -- who, as we just noted are very frequently women -- so long to target this market?
I blame the ghost of Maxwell Perkins.
Perkins, as you'll recall, was the legendary editor of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and just about all the great names back when you could use "writers" and "great names" in the same sentence. As the stories go, Perkins sweated over every comma and spent endless hours polishing the raw work of his writers until it shined.
Today editors, as they readily concede, spend more time in marketing meetings and wooing writers than they do working on prose. Instead of spinning in his grave, Perkins, I believe, has decided to curse his successors by making them miss the obvious. That's why it has taken them so long to getting around to "discovering" women.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.
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