by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched the PBS broadcast
Makers: Women in America, a segment on “Women in Business,” and while it suffered (as did the
only other episode in the series I’ve seen, “Women in Comedy”) from a bad case
of first-itis — I’ve never forgotten Katharine Hepburn’s complaint to Garson
Kanin about “the women’s liberation movement — I’m for it, of course; I just wish
they didn’t come off like they started it all!,” and the Makers series suggests that there weren’t powerful,
assertive women anywhere in the working world until the 1960’s. Not true,
though given that I’m much more interested in popular culture than the business
world I don’t have the names of powerful women pre-1960’s who were material
successes in business (aside from a handful of people like Hetty Green, who
made it into the popular culture mainly because she was famously miserly and a
biographer wrote a book called The Day They Shook the Plum Tree about how her heirs, who were anything but
miserly, ran through the fortune she had carefully and painstakingly
assembled). The story started with one of my personal heroines, advertising
executive and agency owner Mary Wells — despite the Mad Men stereotype advertising, according to this program,
was actually more women-friendly than most businesses in the 1950’s because a
large part of their task was figuring out how to sell products to women, and
the males who ran the top agencies realized that it might actually help them do
that if they had a few women in their own ranks — and runs through a bevy of
powerful women who fought hard to get themselves into the all-male club most of
the business world was then. Perhaps the most inspiring story on the show was
that of Muriel Siebert, who fought an eight-year legal battle for the right to
buy a seat on the New York Stock Exchange (and incidentally ran for the U.S.
Senate as a Republican for Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s seat, losing the GOP
primary to another woman, Assemblymember Florence Sullivan, who lost to
Moynihan in the general), though some of the people profiled were creepier:
among them were Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina, both of whom were also failed
Republican candidates for public office (and I found it astonishing that
Fiorina was here lionized as the pioneering woman CEO of Hewlett-Packard — not
mentioning that she ran the company into the ground and the current board has
tabbed Meg Whitman to be the corporate savior!) and ending with Sheryl
Sandberg, second-in-command to Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook and author of a
controversial book called Lean In: Women,Work and the Will to Lead, which has been attacked by old-line feminists
basically for saying that the corporate world is what it is and women need to
learn to be successful in it on its terms instead of trying to remake it.
