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Fifty years after the Equal Pay Act, why are women still living in a man's world?
Debora L. Spar never thought of herself as a feminist. Raised after the tumult of the 1960s, she presumed the gender war was over. As one of the youngest female professors to be tenured at Harvard Business School and a mother of three, she swore to young women that they could have it all. "We thought we could just glide into the new era of equality, with babies, board seats, and husbands in tow," she writes. "We were wrong."
Now she is the president of Barnard College, arguably the most important all-women's college in the United States. And in Wonder Women: Sex, Power, and the Quest for Perfection-a fresh, wise, original book- she asks why, a half century after the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, do women still feel stuck.
In this groundbreaking and compulsively readable book, Spar explores how American women's lives have-and have not-changed over the past fifty years. Armed with reams of new research, she details how women struggled for power and instead got stuck in an endless quest for perfection. The challenges confronting women are more complex than ever, and they are challenges that come inherently and inevitably from being female. Spar is acutely aware that it's time to change course.
Both deeply personal and statistically rich, Wonder Women is Spar's story and the story of our culture. It is cultural history at its best, and a road map for the future.
Debora L. Spar never thought of herself as a feminist. Raised after the tumult of the 1960s, she presumed the gender war was over. As one of the youngest female professors to be tenured at Harvard Business School and a mother of three, she swore to young women that they could have it all. "We thought we could just glide into the new era of equality, with babies, board seats, and husbands in tow," she writes. "We were wrong."
Now she is the president of Barnard College, arguably the most important all-women's college in the United States. And in Wonder Women: Sex, Power, and the Quest for Perfection-a fresh, wise, original book- she asks why, a half century after the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, do women still feel stuck.
In this groundbreaking and compulsively readable book, Spar explores how American women's lives have-and have not-changed over the past fifty years. Armed with reams of new research, she details how women struggled for power and instead got stuck in an endless quest for perfection. The challenges confronting women are more complex than ever, and they are challenges that come inherently and inevitably from being female. Spar is acutely aware that it's time to change course.
Both deeply personal and statistically rich, Wonder Women is Spar's story and the story of our culture. It is cultural history at its best, and a road map for the future.
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Reviews
"Spar uses her experiences of the feminist revolution of the 1960s as a scaffold for evaluating the situation of young women today . . . Spar addresses many issues facing working women--e.g., maintaining a fashionable appearance, sexual identity and aging in a world of shifting mores. For younger women who have accepted their entitlement to full equality with men, the conflicting demands of the roles expected of them, and their own 'quest for perfection,' can be devastating. A wise, worthy companion to Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In."
Kirkus Reviews
"Debora L. Spar tackles--and dispels--the myth of perfection with intelligence and humor. Wonder Women is a terrific read."
Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook and author of the bestselling Lean In