In Conversation with Samhita Mukhopadhyay

Samhita Mukhopadhyay has ranged over the media landscape, infusing feminism into popular culture from the beloved blog Feministing to Mic.com to Teen Vogue. After she guided the last of these publications through layoffs, cutbacks, and advertising pressures amid the general chaos of Covid, she quit and fell into a deep depression.

She who had always been so work-driven had driven herself into the ground. Or was there something else to blame? Samhita’s new book, The Myth of Making It explores the contradictory ways that femmes look for day-to-day freedom in a capitalist world. Her still-raw story charts her changing attitudes toward work, interweaving personal reflections with economic and cultural analysis, and deep compassion for those trying to survive in a system that’s not meant for them. Samhita’s been a board member and adviser to Lux since we launched, and I called her to talk about what comes after the era of the girl boss. ––Sarah Leonard

SARAH LEONARD I went to your recent book event, where most of the audience appeared to be white-collar working women and queer folks, coming from office jobs or the freelance hustle, and they were all applauding your lines about how shitty work was and how insufficient the personal empowerment narrative is. Has something changed in the past decade that’s made for an audience so receptive to this book?

SAMHITA MUKHOPADHYAY The last couple of years we’ve seen the evolution of this conversation [on workplace feminism]. In 2014 it was all “women can do everything.” Girl power, girl boss, Beyoncé’s a feminist, etc. Meanwhile, the post-Trump era has been a reckoning for so many people. The pandemic as well, in terms of work and people’s commitment to work and becoming radicalized about the drudgery of work. I actually thought that more lefty thinkers would engage with this book and that there would be a bit of a learning curve for the average working woman. But really, the overwhelming response to the book has been women feeling that their experience is seen, across the board. There’s this readiness to ask deeper questions and an understanding that the whole girl boss mythology has failed a lot of people. They’re thinking, “Well, I’m not rich; I’m still hustling. I’m still being discriminated against in the workplace. I’m not really sure what I’m supposed to do now.”

SL The book criticizes boosterish empowerment narratives while recognizing that people do need support and need guidance on negotiating salaries or other practical things. Do you think members of that audience who were more engaged than you expected also connected with the parts of the book that are about more explicitly political things, like solidarity, or unionization? There’s disillusionment with work, and then there’s a next step which is, “Is there a way for me to confront that disillusionment that’s not so individualistic?”

SM There was a lot of head-nodding. I kind of tucked in the Barbara Ehrenreich with the Gucci bag. A question I thought about while writing this book is one I’ve been invested in answering with Teen Vogue and the work I did before: How do you make this accessible to people who may not be in our circles? How do you suss out the young women who are seduced by hustle culture but understand it’s not right, who look at the political ends and feel alienated by it? I can translate those two worlds because I am of both of them. 

SL You’ve devoted a lot of your work to feeding feminism into the mainstream. You’ve thought about that more than anyone and it really got put through the grinder with your experiences at Teen Vogue and elsewhere.

SM I’ve been thinking about how people aren’t talking about Kamala Harris’s gender, like we learned a universal lesson [from the Hillary Clinton campaign] that that did not work. The version of feminism that went mainstream ended up being more alienating than bringing people into the conversation. It’s interesting to see how mainstream certain feminist issues are right now, yet they are not talked about as feminist issues. Abortion is just considered a Democratic issue (and it took Roe v. Wade being overturned to do even that). There’s still a disconnect from any radical feminist politics. Every story that we’re going to push out about this is about a middle-class white woman who wanted to have a child. The constant re-creation of feminism as the needs of wealthy white women in the mainstream hasn’t changed. We have diverse examples of women in leadership or pop culture that are exciting but at the end of the day they’re not necessarily changing the actual conditions for working-class women.

I thought that my book would be more mainstream than it was. It made me wonder if it’s out of style right now to talk about women and ambition and work. It’s like, if women can be whatever they want to be, including the president, why are we talking about this?

SL You mentioned that you thought the left would engage more with the book—what did you imagine that would look like?

SM Part of the general criticism of the girl boss was a criticism of things that are femme and frilly. But I want to bring a material analysis to that space, to bring in young women who feel alienated by men in their workspaces since they are not speaking to their ambitions or experiences or the reality that they have had a different life because they are women. That’s been an important part of my embodied experience in the workplace—both in white-collar and working-class jobs.

I had hoped people who see themselves as serious labor critics would engage with work that is about the needs and desires of working women. It seems like when we talk about labor, we’re only talking about certain types of jobs. And while that’s important, there should be a way to bring in this young, femme perspective and get them to be recognized as fruitful targets for labor organizing. Why does this kind of consciousness raising only exist for certain jobs?

SL My feeling about Lean In, by Nell Scovell and Sheryl Sandberg, for example, was that a lot of leftists (including me) used the incredible publicity juggernaut behind this book as a hook to hang leftist ideas onto, to try to give people a different definition of feminism, a different vision of how to organize at work. In a way, if that book had been marketed as a short guide to how to advance in a white-collar workplace, I wouldn’t have had such an issue with it. Because we were arguing with the premise of the book— which is that this corporate workplace feminism represents all feminism— it seemed specifically like this book is the devil. When really, it’s mediocre, but it’s not the devil. 

It seems like there is different information that you need as a woman navigating the specific sexist dynamics of different workplaces. There are different strategies.

SM How does solidarity exist? That’s an unanswered question in the book, but one I’m fascinated by. If the advice for white-collar workers is to “get ahead at all costs, no matter whose neck you step on”, that is incongruous with any type of solidarity-based labor movement. In the day-to-day you need to advocate for yourself, speak up at a table full of all men and whatever those microaggressions may be. But they’re not going to change without solidarity with other workers. Whereas the Sheryl Sandbergs of the world and mainstream feminists pour an unbelievable amount of time, energy, and resources into organizations teaching you to just ask for more money. How is there an entire body of work about, like, how to raise your hand in a meeting? How do you radicalize that worker? That is not the end-all-be-all of a workplace feminism.

SL Labor organizing is just a battle with a boss and when that boss is a woman, gender ceases to be the most important thing. Women not running businesses is a symptom of patriarchy, but women running businesses doesn’t have that much effect on how those businesses are run. You give a lot of examples of that, and also a couple counterexamples. I was curious what your takeaway at the end of that was.

SM There are examples of ways of being and thinking about the girl boss that are a little bit more aligned with being pro-worker — especially the example of Chani Nicholas and Sonya Passi [who run the tech company, Chani.inc, and the namesake astrology app]. It’s a small, independent business; they don’t take any venture capital. They are focused on providing worker-centric benefits packages attuned to various needs. To me, Chani.Inc is to entrepreneurship what the Girl Boss was to patriarchy. It’s a Band-Aid at the moment but how sustainable is it? I’m curious to see, a few years later, how things are going. They are trying to build a business that is in opposition to what’s incentivized in the startup space. I’m with you in that the inherent structure of work is always going to produce these conditions. 

SL I wanted to ask about DEI, because you have some amazing material about it in the book and because it’s become such a political football. There’s a real political problem that comes out of people being lectured on diversity by their bosses who they know don’t care about it or them. Do you see the way it’s been picked up in national politics as having anything to do with the experience that people are actually having with it?

SM There’s a lot to criticize about the way DEI currently exists in the workplace. Largely, it’s ineffective. There’s a cottage industry that’s grown out of this idea of racism in the workplace, microaggressions, how to overcome unconscious bias. Companies make tons of money giving curricula and trainings that largely don’t work. An actually effective DEI policy would be a radical rethinking of racial structure in the workplace. A sociologist that I reference in my book, Victor Ray, has come up with a racialized theory of the workplace that maps out how organizational structure looks really similar to slave plantations, racially. These dynamics are baked in. Can a woman-of-color leader change everything? Because there are so few of them, there’s not enough evidence for us to know how this impacts especially larger workplaces that are deeply segregated. The left is having a conversation about the best way to diversify the workplace and on the right there’s still debate about whether we should even be in the workplace. And there’s overlap because there’s a general frustration with DEI, with it not working, with it being mandatory, with being called a racist. All of the sloppy ways it gets implemented in the workplace aggravates those frustrations. That’s why we don’t want to play up the fact that like Kamala is a woman of color because that’s just going to stoke this anxiety across the political spectrum, that we focus too much on people’s identity. 

SL It does feel like we’re dealing with these problems that are just going to be blown up in some way by the coming fascist implosion of our politics. I saw SUFFS last night, the Hillary Clinton-produced musical about the suffragettes (don’t ask). The audience was super into it. Lots of applause, lots of enthusiasm. It seemed to belong to an era where we could celebrate feminist gains, be happy about how far we’ve come, and treat symptoms of the patriarchy today as light-hearted jokes. But, in fact, it feels like we’re in an era of intense crisis. There’s something about that sort of liberal feminist politics now that seems like it has blinders on to things that are coming that it just doesn’t have tools for. 

SM The disconnect between the culture and the reality of what’s happening around us is frustrating also because we play it up constantly. The ‘Never Trump’ feminist set is not wrong but we’re so far down in a bad place that just not voting for Trump is so far from what the solution is going to be. There is this deep disconnect, and we seem very focused on superficial things when the ground game is not matching the crisis at hand.