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From Slate:

On Saturday, former first lady Michelle Obama took to a sold-out stage at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center to promote Becoming, her new memoir. According to CNBC, the book is already the best-selling title of the year, with over 2 million copies sold within the first two weeks of the official release. In front of a rapt audience, Obama spoke about everything from the white flight that changed her neighborhood in the South Side of Chicago to the high school guidance counselor who told her that she wasn’t Princeton material. When the conversation turned to work-life balance, Obama didn’t mince words. “Marriage still ain’t equal, y’all. It ain’t equal. I tell women, that whole ‘you can have it all’—mmm, nope, not at the same time, that’s a lie,” she said. “It’s not always enough to lean in because that shit doesn’t work.”

The audience of 19,000 immediately went wild at the sound of Obama letting loose a curse word, and while she quickly apologized for the slip of tongue, she doubled down on her criticism of the philosophy popularized by Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg in 2013. “I thought we were at home, y’all,” Obama said, according to Glamour. “I was getting real comfortable up in here. All right, I’m back now. Sometimes that stuff doesn’t work.” For the uninitiated, the “lean in” corporatized version of feminism suggests that women can have it all if they just act like men and assert themselves more aggressively in the workplace. It immediately drew criticism for seeming to blame women for male-dominated workplaces, and as of 2017, even Sandberg admits that women haven’t progressed much since she popularized the slogan.

But let’s return to Obama. When she stepped onto the national stage with her husband over a decade ago, she was touted as the titular modern woman. From her many career accomplishments to her beautiful family to her effortless style, Obama seemed to embody the idea that women could indeed have it all. As Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote for the Atlantic in 2012, Obama “started out with the same résumé as her husband, but has repeatedly made career decisions designed to let her do work she cared about and also be the kind of parent she wanted to be.” Even though the former first lady said her priority in the White House was to be “mom-in-chief” and shepherd her two daughters through the trials of growing up in front of the country, it was abundantly clear that, as Slaughter put it, “we should see her as a full-time career woman, but one who is taking a very visible investment interval.”

To women everywhere but specifically to black women like me, Obama’s public persona was a physical manifestation of the idea that no matter who didn’t believe in us, we could be smart, accomplished, ­and have the American dream of two kids and a dog to go along with it. But the reality she sketched out in both her remarks on Saturday and in her memoir speak to something much more important: that to be a thoroughly modern woman in America is to sacrifice.

It’s not uncommon in my circle of young black twenty-somethings to hold up Michelle and Barack’s marriage and their life together as a pinnacle of everything black love and ambition can accomplish. But Michelle’s frankness about the fact that her marriage is and never has been equal, that even she couldn’t excel in both her family life and her career at the same time, is a bracing bit of honesty about the very real limitations that women continue to face. And to some, that candor might scrub away the glamorous veneer of Obama’s life, exposing the realities of what it takes to juggle a career while sustaining a family with a man “whose intellectual growth and career would always take top priority,” as Christina Cauterucci wrote for Slate. To me, though, her candor only makes her all the more worthy of admiration.

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Sandberg’s definition of feminism begins and ends with the notion that it’s all about gender equality within the existing social system. From this perspective, the structures of imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy need not be challenged. And she makes it seem that privileged white men will eagerly choose to extend the benefits of corporate capitalism to white women who have the courage to ‘lean in.’ It almost seems as if Sandberg sees women’s lack of perseverance as more the problem than systemic inequality. Sandberg effectively uses her race and class power and privilege to promote a narrow definition of feminism that obscures and undermines visionary feminist concerns.

Contrast her definition of feminism with the one I offered more than twenty years ago in Feminist Theory From Margin To Center and then again in Feminism Is For Everybody. Offering a broader definition of feminism, one that does not conjure up a battle between the sexes (i.e. women against men), I state: “Simply put, feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.” No matter their standpoint, anyone who advocates feminist politics needs to understand the work does not end with the fight for equality of opportunity within the existing patriarchal structure. We must understand that challenging and dismantling patriarchy is at the core of contemporary feminist struggle – this is essential and necessary if women and men are to be truly liberated from outmoded sexist thinking and actions.

Ironically, Sandberg’s work would not have captured the attention of progressives, particularly men, if she had not packaged the message of “lets go forward and work as equals within white male corporate elites” in the wrapping paper of feminism. In the “one hundred most influential people in the world” issue of Time Magazine, the forty-three-year old Facebook COO was dubbed by the doyen of women’s liberation movement Gloria Steinem in her short commentary with the heading “feminism’s new boss.” That same magazine carried a full page ad for the book Lean In: Women, Work, and The Will to Lead that carried the heading “Inspire the graduate in your Life” with a graduating picture of two white females and one white male. The ad included this quote from Sandberg’s commencement speech at Barnard College in 2011: “I hope that you have the ambition to lean in to your career and run the world. Because the world needs you to change it.” One can only speculate whether running the world is a call to support and perpetuate first world imperialism. This is precisely the type of feel good declaration Sandberg makes that in no way clarifies the embedded agenda she supports.
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Yet Sandberg spins her seductive fantasy of female solidarity as though comradely support between women will magically occur in patriarchal work environments. Since patriarchy has no gender, women “leaning in” will not automatically think in terms of gender equality and solidarity. Like the issue of money, patriarchy is another subject that receives little attention in Sandberg’s book and in her many talks. This is ironic, since the vision of gender quality she espouses is most radically expressed when she is delineating what men need to do to work for change. It is precisely her avoidance of the difficult questions (like how will patriarchal thinking change) that empowers her optimism and the overall enthusiastic spirit she exudes. Her optimism is so affably intense, it encourages readers to bypass the difficulties involved in challenging and changing patriarchy so that a just moral and ethical foundation for gender equality would become the norm.
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At times Sandberg reminds readers of the old stereotypes about used car salesmen. She pushes her product and she pushes it well. Her shpiel is so good, so full of stuff that is obviously true, that one is inclined to overlook all that goes unspoken, unexplained. For example, she titles a chapter “you can’t have it all,” warning women that this idea is one of the most dangerous concepts from the early feminist movement. But the real deal is that Sandberg has it all, and in a zillion little ways she flaunts it. Even though she epitomizes the ‘have it all kinda girl’ – white, rich, and married to a wonderful husband (like the television evangelist Joyce Meyer, Sandberg is constantly letting readers know how wonderful her husband is lest we forget) – she claims women can’t have it all. She even dedicated the book to her husband “for making everything possible” – what doesn’t she have? Sandberg confesses that she has a loving family and children, more helpers in daily life than one can count. Add this to the already abundant list, she is deemed by the larger conservative media to be one of “the most influential,” most powerful women in the world. If this is not another version of the old game show “queen for a day,” what is? Remember that the women on the show are puppets and white men behind the scenes are pulling the strings.
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I have heard that term, 'lean in', lately and had wondered (but not enough to go research) what it meant. Reading this helps a lot.