...the book is not really offensive so much as witlessly derivative, endlessly recapitulating the wisdom of other, canonical self-help and business books ... And because Ivanka alone can fix our problems, she opens her book with a pasture full of straw men, including the argument that our culture isn’t having nuanced conversations about working mothers ... The book is manifestly the descendant of many TED talks and lifestyle websites. It’s perfect for a generation weaned on Pinterest and goop.com ... This is the sort of feminism that drives some women bananas, having less to do with structural change than individual fulfillment and accessorizing properly; perhaps it can even be achieved by wearing her fine jewelry or apparel, which she repeatedly mentions throughout the book (as well as her family’s tremendous hotels). There’s certainly a market for it. There’s also family precedent for it. Her father nearly annihilated his millions, and went on to write many successful business books. Why not Ivanka?
It’s a sign of how perilous and debased American life has become that people are putting faith in Ivanka Trump, creator of a line of mediocre synthetic workwear, to head off fascism ... Ivanka makes [Sheryl] Sandberg look like Rosa Luxemburg ... As vapid as Women Who Work is—and it is really vapid—there is a subtle political current running through it, one that helps explains how the socially liberal Ivanka can work for her misogynist ogre of a father. Beneath the inspirational quotes from Oprah and the Dalai Lama and the you-go-girl cheerleading, the message of Women Who Work is that people get what they deserve ... Her refusal to acknowledge any contradiction between her feminism, however superficial it is, and her father’s reactionary politics almost feels like gaslighting.
Women Who Work is a sea of blandities, an extension of that 2014 commercial seeded with ideas lifted from various well-known self-help authors. Reading it feels like eating scented cotton balls ... a long simper of a book, full of advice so anodyne, you could almost scramble the sentences and come out with something just as coherent ... Over and over again, Trump's message is: Take whatever you can get, and then print your name on it.
Women Who Work is trite and tedious. So focused on exhorting readers to define success on their own terms, it manages to be both humorless and comically removed from the realities of life for the broad swath of women who work 9 to 5 or who struggle along with minimum-wage jobs ... Can a book be poised? If so, this book is an exemplar of poise. It is also more than 200 pages of nonspecific reassurance that everything will be great ... The book’s language is weighed down by business buzzwords, all of which have the effect of draining a sense of humanity from the pages. At times, the book reads like a transcript from The Apprentice ... This book is earnest. But that doesn’t make it particularly thoughtful or impactful. The same might ultimately be said of its author.
This is an ill-advised endeavor, in theory. In practice, it is an even worse idea than it seems ... Women Who Work is mostly composed of artless jargon and inspirational quotes you might find by Googling 'inspirational quotes.' Her exhortations feel even emptier than usual in light of Trump’s stated policy goals ... The book ultimately doesn’t try very hard to obscure the fact that the Women Who Work initiative was created, as the Times recently reported, as a way to make Ivanka products more marketable ... Women Who Work is written for an audience whose greatest obstacles are internal, and Ivanka’s advice is, once again, Ivanka-specific.
Ivanka includes inspirational quotes and advice from every famous person who ever lived. Socrates and Mindy Kaling. The Dalai Lama and Lauren Bush Lauren. Stephen Covey, Oprah, and the head of fashion partnerships at Instagram. John Quincy Adams and the founder of Spanx ... Ivanka’s life seems pretty smooth, but in her book she reveals struggles, like the time Anna Wintour heard that she was about to graduate from college and called out of the blue with a job offer, a challenge familiar to many aspiring writers. The problem was that Ivanka had already accepted a job with Forest City Ratner, a development firm, and she had to tell Anna no!
...one could have figured most of this out from any number of motivational speeches or career coaches. Often, the melange of quotes and how-to lists give the book more the aesthetic of a Pinterest board than a career guide ... Trump's book ends with a list of recommended books, websites and TED Talks (Trump appears to be a TED aficionado, listing at least two per chapter), pointing readers to places where they could presumably find more depth on any of the topics she touched upon.
Insofar as she has one, Trump’s signature move is to find a name that signifies cosmopolitan prestige — that tells readers that she is educated and polished and thoughtful — and then sand away any undesirable thoughts or attitudes that might accompany those names ... To the extent that Trump’s ideology translates to policy, it appears to be a policy designed to help those who don’t need all that much help. It’s for those who have already succeeded, because, after all, they chose to win. But little of that policy appears in the book. Mostly, Women Who Work stays committed to its aesthetic of pleasant vagueness.
Her book comes off as if she’s trying to portray herself as an Everywoman. She thinks she can pass herself off as just another one of our girlfriends struggling to succeed at work and at home ...to buy into her advice is to believe that all working women were ever missing in life was an inspirational quote to serve as a mission statement ... Syrupy quotes are plentiful in the 243-page self-help book ...Ivanka's biggest fumbles is using quotes out of context, co-opting their original intent and molding them anew to fit her own purposes ... Ivanka writes the book as if she's trying to use her platform of privilege in a way that will empower the rest of us... Because a book that begins with her preaching from a mountaintop as she hikes in Patagonia makes her disconnected to the Everywoman. She is not someone who has made it through the day-to-day challenges so many of us face.
Ivanka Trump’s Women Who Work is an incredibly and almost profoundly boring book. Mercifully, for those of us who have jobs to do, it’s also a pretty quick read ... Ivanka’s 'manual for architecting the life you want to live,' written with the intention of changing the 'narrative' around working women ... Because work is amorphous, Trump’s advice on how to be a working woman — and particularly a working mother — is both specific to her understanding of labor and also wildly broad ... Generally, though, Trump spends much of Women Who Work offering up cliche after cliche... She feels more like a living press release for her brand than an actual human being.
Much of what's wrong with this book, Women Who Work: Rewriting the Rules for Success, has been detailed elsewhere: It's ostensibly about 'women who work,' but most women who work won't recognize themselves in a book aimed almost entirely at white-collar employees gunning for the C-suite ... While Trump spends ample time in the book encouraging readers to find their passion, it's obvious that hers is, like her father's, little more than name recognition ...goal of Ivanka feminism is less gender equality and more a cosmetic feel-good feminism of women all happily cheering each other on in surprisingly comfortable pumps ...meaningless corporate speak, a series of evocative words (Empowerment! Authenticity!) thrown together into nonsensical arrangements ... In many ways, Women Who Work reads like what Sheryl Sandberg critics who hadn't actually read Lean In assumed it was.
