How Corporate Feminism Went from “Love Me” to “Buy Me”

In retrospect, the book feels like an artifact of a fleetingly optimistic moment, and of a time when the mainstreaming of feminism—recall Beyoncé performing in front of a screen flashing the word “FEMINIST” at the 2014 MTV Video Music Awards—not only diluted the concept but also pressed it into service on behalf of the free market. As Susan Faludi observed, in 2013, “Lean In” belongs to a tradition going back to at least 1920, when mass merchandisers co-opted the idioms of emancipation in a bid for women’s money. Sandberg, who described her book as only “sort of a feminist manifesto,” refreshed the old aspirational consumerism by transferring it to work. It wasn’t so much that she promoted material accumulation, though she did, but that her financial resources, which enabled her “to afford any help I need,” were a silent precondition for much of her advice. (Note the ticklishness of her allusion to the costs of child care: a wary elision of offspring is a trademark of pop-feminist self-help.) The program she espoused for less privileged women was one of emulation—a kind of “fake it till you make it” regime in which everyone behaves as if she were Sheryl Sandberg. It was a canny move of self-branding—relatability braced by an element of seduction, by jokes and encouragement delivered in Sandberg’s warm, vulnerable, and confiding voice.

But if “Lean In” ’s prescriptions rang hollow even at the time, both Sandberg and the women’s movement ended up having bigger problems. Sandberg’s company, we learned, was damaging the mental health of teen-age girls, insufficiently safeguarding users’ personal information, and, arguably, destroying democracy. (As the Georgetown Law professor Rosa Brooks told the Times, “Not everything should be leaned into.”) Sandberg stepped down from Facebook in 2022, amid headlines underscoring her “mixed legacy.” Feminism, meanwhile, saw Hillary Clinton’s defeat, in 2016, by a man accused of sexual assault; the repeal of Roe v. Wade; the #MeToo backlash; and Kamala Harris’s loss, in 2024, to the same man. Although Sandberg’s key ideas now seem dated, her approach to self-commodification is everywhere. We’ve taken a scorched-earth approach to workplace feminism: burning away the last vestiges of institutional support and structure until only the brand remains.

“All the Cool Girls Get Fired: How to Let Go of Being Let Go and Come Back on Top,” by Laura Brown and Kristina O’Neill, is one of several feminist-scented offerings to rise from the ashes. It feels like a direct riposte and a sign of the times: exit company woman, enter entrepreneur. Both Brown and O’Neill worked in fashion journalism, Brown as the editor of InStyle and O’Neill as the editor of WSJ Magazine, and both, as they write, “got big-time, super-publicly fired; two ducks decanted unceremoniously out of the water.” The book combines friendly encouragement—“Well, welcome to the party, baby!” the authors crow to the newly canned—with practical advice for life after a layoff. Chapters on finding employment lawyers, securing health care, minimizing expenses, and locating hole-patching income sources alternate with stories of high-profile women who lost their jobs, including Lisa Kudrow, Katie Couric, and Oprah. “The corner office is not all there is,” Brown and O’Neill write, their tone lively and irreverent. “Real power comes from individualism. And guess what helps you come to that realization? Being fired.”

Brown and O’Neill devote a chapter to managing the public narrative of a job loss: strive to leave with poise and dignity; craft an “I got laid off” announcement; solicit introductions and take as many meetings as possible to furnish “proof of life.” Another chapter recommends being direct when explaining your departure: “Keep it high and tight. Nobody needs War and Peace.” In Brown and O’Neill’s construction, the savvy, freshly unemployed woman is a memoirist, as adept at omission as she is at the arrangement of detail. And, like a memoirist, she’s often trying to expunge shame, a word that appears thirty-one times in the book. “The truth is not shameful,” they write. “It’s freeing! There’s real power in being able to say, ‘Yeah, I got fired.’ When you own it, you strip away the stigma.”