How Mary Kay Cosmetics Sells Women on “Having It All”

By Virginia Sole-Smith


Feminists have long been blamed for making women want to “have it all”: the supportive spouse, the beloved children, the high-powered career. When Anne-Marie Slaughter published her treatise in The Atlantic last month on why even the highest-powered of women don’t yet have all of it, this mindset prevailed again. “I’d been the woman congratulating herself on her unswerving commitment to the feminist cause,” she wrote. “I’d been the one telling young women at my lectures that you can have it all and do it all, regardless of what field you are in. . . . Which means I’d been part, albeit unwittingly, of making millions of women feel that they are to blame if they cannot manage to rise up the ladder as fast as men and also have a family and an active home life (and be thin and beautiful to boot).” In fighting for equal pay and seats at the boardroom table, Slaughter seemed to be suggesting, feminists had failed women. We should have been fighting to break down corporate hierarchies and change the relationship between work and family life.

As I recount in “The Pink Pyramid Scheme,” a conservative Christian entrepreneur named Mary Kay Ash claimed to be doing just these things in 1963—long before the power-suited conception of feminism with which Slaughter came of age—by signing up Texas housewives to sell Beauty by Mary Kay using the tagline “Enriching Women’s Lives.” “I wasn’t interested in the dollars-and-cents part of any business,” Ash wrote in her 1995 self-help book, called—of course—You Can Have It All: Lifetime Wisdom from America’s Foremost Woman Entrepreneur. “My interest in 1963 was in offering women opportunities that didn’t exist anywhere else.”

Ash knew from experience that traditional jobs weren’t working for women. As a divorced mother of three, she had built a career in the direct-sales industry, but she’d watched promotions go to male colleagues while she was told to “stop thinking like a woman.” So she wanted her company to be different. From the beginning, Mary Kay ladies could, in theory at least, set their hours around their children’s school days and form business connections among friends and neighbors instead of trying to crack old-boy networks.

To read Ash’s writings on the dilemmas women faced fifty years ago is to realize how little things have changed, despite the fact that far more women now work than stay home.11. Almost 71 percent of mothers with children under age 18 were working or looking for work last year. But despite her grasp of workplace inequality, Ash was no feminist. Beauty By Mary Kay launched the same year The Feminine Mystique was published, and Ash was the anti-Friedan, reassuring housewives that they could earn pocket money without threatening their breadwinner husbands. “Although my late husband, Mel, was very supportive of my career,” Ash wrote, “he let me know that beginning at seven each evening, I was to be Mrs. Mel Ash—period. Starting then, it was his time.”

more
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2012/07/hbc-90008718