Beyond The Double Bind: Women and Leadership

Abstract

I can remember, says lawyer Flo Kennedy, “going to court in pants and the judge remarking that I wasn’t properly dressed, that the next time I came to court I should be dressed like a lawyer.” It was a moment painfully familiar to countless women: a demand that she conform to a stereotype of feminine dress and behavior—which would also mark her as an intruder, rising above her assigned station (as the saying goes, she dared to “wear the pants” in the courtroom). Kennedy took one look at the judge’s robe—essentially “a long black dress gathered at the yoke”—and said, “Judge, if you won’t talk about what I’m wearing, I won’t talk about what you’re wearing.” In Beyond the Double Bind, Kathleen Hall Jamieson takes her cue from Kennedy’s comeback to argue that the catch-22 that often blocks women from success can be overcome. Sparking her narrative with potent accounts of the many ways women have beaten the double bind that would seem to damn them no matter what they choose to do, Jamieson provides a rousing and emphatic denouncement of victim feminism and the acceptance of inevitable failure. As she explores society’s interlaced traps and restrictions, she draws on hundreds of interviews with women from all walks of life to show the ways they cut through them. Kennedy, for example, faced the bind that insists that women cannot be both feminine and competent—and then demands that they be feminine first; she undermined that trap with wry wit. Ruth Bader Ginsberg attacked the same q…