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The Magic Of Affirmation Power

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Michele Blood

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“Most of the bankers also felt that women are more emotional, leas stable than men. Not true! I think by nature a woman is more stable. Life gives her so many different things to cope with, and she learns almost from infancy to cope and not to let it show. A woman who has married and brought up children has had a thousand emergencies — illnesses, broken plumbing, appliances refusing to operate,the children’s naughtiness, her husband’s moods, the bills — and has trained herself to take them all astride.”

“No working relationship can be based on the premise, 'Me — woman; you — man!' It’s 'we two' trying to make a job better. When I’m working on a picture, if a scene goes wrong in rehearsal I say, 'There’s something wrong with this — it goes wrong right here.' It happened not long ago, and Robert Gist, the director, said, 'I know, I feel it every time when you get to that one line.' 'Let’s try it again,' I said, “and let me try it as it comes to me that the character, Marion, would do it.' […] Where the tact came in was in my referring to the character, and what the script earlier SHE would do. I didn’t say 'This is what a woman would do,' or, 'This is what I, Joan Crawford, think should be done.”

“People ask me if I turn up at board meetings wearing tailored costumes in muted colors. Oh no, I say. I wear hot and shocking pink and lovely hats. I don’t think any man ever did a poor job because he had an attractively dressed woman to look at. In fact, the sight probably challenges him to be his most brilliant self. But when it comes to the routine of the meeting I do exactly what the men do.”

“Nora wasn't asking him to make her over into someone else; all she wanted was to borrow a few books. Was he such an effete intellectual as to think that an exposure to literature could work some kind of marvelous transformation in her? And what if it could? What if she awoke beside him one morning, having devoured Pride and Prejudice the night before, and was miraculously transfigured into an erudite, civilized woman? Would he still even want her at all?”

“In an office, being feminine doesn’t mean being seductive. […] Even a flirtation, when it wears off, causes some bad feeling, and somebody is going to be moved into another department — or out of the company. Quite likely you! There are no hard-and- fast rules for fending off an outright pass, especially if it comes from the boss. Every intelligent woman has her own method of turning it off without wounding a sensitive male ego. An even cleverer woman knows how to prevent the pass in the first place. She’s charming, friendly, capable — and not seductive. If you can’t control your cleavage, your perfume, your walk, and your eyelashes — you’d better stay out of business.”

“The women I interviewed seemingly “opted out” of what Rachel, whom I cited earlier, called “the enormous experiment of engaging in capitalism.” Their choice to leave the workplace can be seen, as some of them suggested, as a resistance to neoliberal capitalism—to its exclusive valorization of the sphere of commodity production and the toxic competitive work cultures on which it depends. Their embrace of full-time motherhood can be understood as an attempt to shift priorities and to put care before competition. It is seemingly removed from the demands of advanced capitalism and the public sphere of work that they left, but which their government promotes and their husbands—mostly in high-powered, high-income jobs—occupy. Yet, as a consequence of heading home—a choice that was in part imposed by the pressures of advanced capitalism—women have become heads of their home who run their families as small enterprises, and endorse “intensive mothering”72 as a means of trying to ensure the invincible middle-class future and security of their children. In rechanneling their professional skills and competitive spirit through their children, and taking on the role of family CEO, these women may be reproducing what many found so brutal in the workplace. They have reproduced neoliberalism in the sense that their children have become human capital—investing in them is a way of increasing good returns in the future.73 In the words of Sara, the former senior financial director, “And the competition lives on, it’s just in a totally different guise.”" (from "Heading Home: Motherhood, Work, and the Failed Promise of Equality" by Shani Orgad)”