A feminist view from the penthouse

Gina Barreca

Monday, March 25, 2013 | 2:01 a.m.

A new book suggests that ambitious women should “lean in” to achieve success.

What do we mean by “an ambitious woman”? What defines “achieving success”? Most important, what is “a new book”?

OK, I know the answer to that one: A new book is where we hope to find the map, the keys or at least the GPS coordinates to our deeply cherished dreams.

Sheryl Sandberg’s invitingly slim volume, “Lean In,” seems to be offering a Google Earth picture of where women want to be: a place where men share parenting and homemaking responsibilities equally with their female partners, where gender-balanced workplaces are unremarkable, and where, by age 43, you’re worth hundreds of millions of dollars and running a couple of Fortune 500 companies. It sounds lovely, if distant: a place where Glinda the Good Witch not only wears Prada but is COO of Prada and hires her green sister to work in human resources because women have to learn to work together.

I’m not saying I don’t like “Lean In”; I agree with a lot, if not all, of what Sandberg has to say. I’ve written, in “They Used to Call Me Snow White But I Drifted” and elsewhere, about the invisible yet exorbitant price tags on women’s success. And I sure do appreciate that Sandberg uses the “f” word — feminist — to describe her work and her perspective; feminist is still the most intimidating “f” word in America.

It’s just that, at certain moments, Sandberg sounds as if she doesn’t understand how nickeled-and-dimed women really live and work. She sounds a little like an ace pilot giving a pep talk to baggage handlers. If you’ve never been on a plane, it’s a little hard to feel the wind under your wings — especially when you’re handling valuable goods ultimately going to other people.

When Sandberg talks about “forcing” herself to leave the office at 5:30 so she could go home and have dinner with her kids, for example — because otherwise her new job would prove “unsustainable” — I’m thinking about what those friends of mine who work as sous-chefs, taxi dispatchers and sales associates. What if they told their bosses their work-life balance would become “unsustainable” if they didn’t leave earlier than everybody else?

I doubt their employers would have employed the language of Mark Zuckerberg. Sandberg’s boss cheers his colleague for having “an extremely high IQ and EQ” thus praising both her brains and her emotional acumen.

When I asked the taxi dispatcher whether her EQ came into play at work, her reply was as follows: “If I even said the phrase ‘EQ’ to one of these guys, their immediate response would be, ‘Yeah? Well, EQ too.’”

What did she think about “Lean In”? “At my job, if I lean in, guys just look down my blouse.”

Let’s be honest. Some readers are bringing to Sandberg’s book the kind of morbid interest we bring to the lives of those who are more visible than we will ever be: movie stars, celebrities, the woman who murdered her Mormon boyfriend and then, horribly, let her hair return to its natural color.

For women in particular, reading books about legitimately high-profile women is a form of masochism. It’s like tearing off your cuticles. We turn pages and wonder, “Why can’t I be like her?”

If only we’d been more focused as teenagers. (That would have been possible). And if only we’d done our senior thesis at Harvard with Larry Summers, who’d have coached us to get our MBA at Harvard and then hired us, at 29, to become chief of staff at the Treasury Department. (Maybe slightly less possible). And if only we’d married a guy, after our bad first marriage, who would not only follow us to our new jobs but then become head of SurveyMonkey, currently valued at $1.35 billion. (Yeah, right.)

My alternative “Lead On?” Informed by the lives of Mary Queen of Scots, Lucrezia Borgia and characters played by Katey Sagal in both “Married With Children” and “The Sons of Anarchy,” it will guide women toward truly effective curse laying (e.g. “May your children be orthodontically impaired”) and other methods of intimidation. It will define “new book.”

Gina Barreca is an English professor at the University of Connecticut, a feminist scholar who has written eight books and a columnist for the Hartford Courant.