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Having Trouble Having It All? Ivanka Alone Can Fix It

In “Women Who Work,” Ivanka Trump offers advice to inspire you and “your team.”

www.nytimes.com|Jennifer Senior

Self-actualization is the all-consuming preoccupation of “Women Who Work.” In this way, the book is not really offensive so much as witlessly derivative, endlessly recapitulating the wisdom of other, canonical self-help and business books — by Stephen Covey, Simon Sinek, Shawn Achor, Adam Grant. (Profiting handsomely off the hard work of others appears to be a signature Trumpian trait.) For a while, it reads like the best valedictorian speech ever. Pursue your passion! Make sure you, and not others, define success! Architect a life you love in order to fully realize your multidimensional self!

And because Ivanka alone can fix our problems, she opens her book with a pasture full of straw men, including the argument that our culture isn’t having nuanced conversations about working mothers. “The time to change the narrative around women and work once and for all is long overdue,” Trump writes. This will come as a shock to Sheryl Sandberg and Anne-Marie Slaughter — both of whom Trump later quotes at length.

Eventually, though, a pair of related existential questions emerge. Namely: For whom is Ivanka Trump writing? And what did she write “Women Who Work” for? As Sinek likes to ask, what is the why of this book?

Just looking at “Women Who Work” gives you a clue. It’s a strawberry milkshake of inspirational quotes.

But a class bias at some point begins to reveal itself, and it’s not just in the business leaders she profiles — who, like Trump, are often the daughters of New York City’s elite. 

... when she identifies grocery shopping as neither urgent nor important. (Do the groceries just magically appear in her fridge? Oh, wait. They probably do.)

It’s in her confession that “honestly, I wasn’t treating myself to a massage or making much time for self-care” during the 2016 campaign. (Too busy.)

Better yet, these personal-best and attagirl bromides offer the advantage of being apolitical, and Trump is nothing if not practiced in the art of generic, apolitical speech — a fact that John Oliver has shrewdly observed.