The Dark Side of Feminism - Why Women Don't Like Powerful Women

Article here. Excerpt:

'It would have been better if she had dark circles under her eyes. Maybe a little bit of flab around the middle. At the very least a stain on her blouse – anything. Instead, in her first public appearance since the birth of her son, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer was as slim and blonde as ever, beaming at the cameras.

"The baby's been easy," she said – no problem at all. How shocking!

Women all over America and the world followed Mayer’s appointment as head of the Internet giant Yahoo, and then early this fall the birth of her first child. Remembering their own tough first few months with a new baby, many young mothers wondered how she would manage. Very well, thank you, as it turns out. And that did not go down well at all.

In fact Mayer’s first post-natal interview sent storm waves crashing through the Internet. Couldn’t she just have kept her mouth shut, feminists, mothers, even childless-by-choice women, asked. Little seems to polarize other women so much as successful women. Or women who have lives very different from the ones they have more or less chosen for themselves.
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American author and journalism professor Katie Roiphe, who wrote an essay entitled Elect Sister Frigidaire about the strange antipathy so many women feel for Hillary Clinton, suggests that we may like to imagine strong women but that we don’t actually like them. As much as women complain about the differences in salaries, support quotas, pay lip service to breaking the glass ceiling – when a woman actually makes it big, for many the reaction is not joy – far from it in fact – many women are downright miffed.

Instead of being inspired and motivated by the success of other women, it seems to be perceived as a direct attack on their own life and to provoke comments that cut the successful woman down to size.'