Ambition is not a Dirty Word

SAME OLD STORY: CLINTON'S CAMPAIGN PROVES THAT THE SCARLET LETTER FOR 21ST CENTURY WOMAN STANDS FOR AMBITION

I'm traveling through the Little Rock, Arkansas airport hours after meeting in New York with a group of women to talk Hillary and women and ambition. Exiting security, the first thing I see, through the airport bookstore's window, is a large black and white poster of a photograph of Hillary, Bill, and Chelsea walking up onto a podium. The caption reads:

"Get Ready to Pary Like It's 1992".

Don't put on your party shoes just yet. There's still a hill to climb. And not just over substantive differences between candidates. Hillary's up against the same old story: it's tough being a working woman--and her campaign proves it, say female execs. They may or may not back her, but successful city women say  Clinton's travails show what they're up against.

Tory Johnson, CEO, Women For Hire, workplace contribitor on "Good Morning America" and anchor of "Home Work" on ABC News Now called a breakfast meeting to talk about what successful working women are saying about Hillary Clinton. Tory's resulting article was originally published in the New York Post, February 25, 2008 and is reprinted with permission below.

SISTER ACT: Tory Johnson (center) talking Hillary and careers with (from left to right) career coach and business psychologist Debra Condren, Working Mother Media CEO Carol Evans, attorney Sara Newman and Hyperion Books publisher Ellen Archer.

Guest post by Tory Johnson, CEO, Women For Hire.

LOVE her or hate her, win or lose, successful working women are talking about Hillary Clinton.

But it's not her politics that have them fired up. What getting under their skin is a laundry list of gender-nuanced issues brought to the fore by  Clinton's run for the ultimate corner office.

Neither Too Nice Nor Bitchy––Ambitious With Integrity: Working Women's New Big Thing

NO MORE NICE GIRLS
by Jo Keroes

Cross-posted from Mommy Track'd:
The Working Mother's Guide to Managed Chaos.

One of the hottest books around right now is Debra Condren’s provocatively titled amBITCHous.

It’s been reviewed in the Style section of the Sunday New York Times and Condren has just begun an advice column/blog on Huffington Post, one of the site’s Fearless Voices. Not just another gimmick, amBITCHous issues a serious call to working women: instead of seeing ambition as something to be ashamed of or to conceal, we should claim it as a virtue, cultivate it and use it to our advantage. She wants us to recognize that our careers are as important as our children, our intimate partnerships and our friends, and that for a woman to shortchange her ambition is every bit as damaging to her as shortchanging her commitment to her family would be.

But she’s not advocating bitchiness at all. Sitting prominently in the middle of a bright red cover, the title is deliberately provocative, designed to sell books, for Debra quite rightly practices what she preaches, which is that we have a right to go after what we want and to get the recognition we deserve. But she also preaches how to go about it with integrity and without disabling guilt. Her tone is tough – among the amBITCHous rules that form the center of the book are “Make ‘em pay” and “Disable Detractors” – and that may alienate some, but this is a book worth sticking with, for the author also understands what it means to try to “live daily with the dialectical tension of loving your work every bit as much as your children and family.

Nineteen seventies feminist assertiveness training taught women to “go for it,” that we had a right to compete with men – that we could practice law, perform surgery, run big businesses. Condren looks around and sees that the “women can have it all” mantra has worked against us, for it’s asked that we define what “it” is. “Now,” she says, “it’s not the killer job and the great home life; it’s balancing the two, which, practically speaking, means less of each: women should be just thrilled to have a not-ideal job and a not-ideal life as long as they feel the two are balanced.” Instead of balance - “balance is bunk,” she pronounces - Condren argues for harmony, for integrating our ambition into the rest of our lives, making it just as important, not less, than the rest of our priorities. Her 21st century version of assertiveness training offers a host of examples from real women in various professions along with an array of very practical, concrete scenarios and strategies for “unabashedly going after your dreams” without sacrificing your family or your friends. She shows how not to let others take credit for your work; how not to be shy about asking to be paid what you’re worth; how to prevent someone from sabotaging your success; how to lead a team that likes and respects you; why to seek professional advice and be willing to pay for it. In an excellent final chapter, she offers a plan for sustaining our ambitions in the face of a complicated life. Life is long, she reminds us, and since what works for us now might not work next year, each of us has to keep working out our comfort zones from one phase of our life to the next. If balance isn’t normal – “imbalance is,” says Condren - then we need to expect that, accept it and live accordingly, without ever apologizing for the ambition that makes us who we are.

Jo Keroes, a Professor of English at San Francisco State University for more than 25 years, is the author of Tales Out of School, Images of Teachers in Film and Fiction, and the mother of 2 daughters including Amy Keroes, Founder & CEO of MommyTrack'd.com.
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