When there could only be one

Women against women - the anti-sisterhood

Barbara Walters considered Diane Sawyer a threat. The narrative at the time was that there could only be one female television journalist on a show, and Walters wanted it to be her, not Sawyer. They competed fiercely, with Walters even going so far as to go around ABC President Roone Arledge to try to steal a White House interview with then President Clinton from Sawyer.

I heard this in a recent episode of Fresh Air hosted by Tonya Mosely featuring Susan Page, the author of a biography of Walters called  The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters. Walters, who died in 2022 at the age of 93, was a trailblazing journalist, and worked into her eighties. But she was part of that generation where white women competed with other white women for positions and power, buying into the narrative that there could only be one.

Page, in the interview, talks about this competition as old news, an artifact of that time, clearly supplanted in our day by a sisterhood where women support one another. Really?

I do think there is a generational divide.  Women who began their careers in the seventies do seem programed to compete with other women who are peers. I’ve seen it, and it’s ugly. I went to grad school when I was in my forties, and a few of my older professors were in this generation. It was a graduate program designed for people who were working, but many of my fellow students were younger, and working in non-profits. I was working in management at an ad agency. I wanted to get out of advertising, I wanted to do something more intentional, more in line with my values. I considered becoming a spiritual director, which is like an executive coach only dealing with spiritual issues.

I remember this professor, who was herself a spiritual director, looking at me when I told her this. She got a look of revulsion on her face. “You couldn’t be a spiritual director,” she said.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Well, I mean….” Vague hand wave. This women had a very clear idea of who could help others, and I wasn’t it. Apparently I was too direct, too smart, not self-effacing enough. She was so dismissive, so sure of her judgement, that I was crushed. I believed her. A few years later I became an executive coach, which I’ve been doing for years. She was wrong, I can help people, and I have. But I lost a few years believing her.

During that same time of career searching, I interviewed an older woman, of that same era, who did fund raising for a private university. I told her I was interested in changing careers, and since I had done business development for decades, and knew how to sell, I was interested in moving to fund raising. She had that same look of disgust on her face. The temerity! She told me I couldn’t possibly understand the nuances of fundraising. She explained some of the nuances to me, which primarily sounded like I would be doing business at cocktail parties rather than in board rooms. I figured if I could get ten million dollars out of a client for advertising, I could get a couple of million out of a donor for a university. She disagreed. She acted like I was a used car salesman, still grimy from the lot.

I don’t think this dynamic has evaporated now that these women have retired. Many of us were taught by, mentored by or raised by women with this scarcity mindset who told us we were all in competition. We may be more aware of supporting other women, we may continue to enjoy mentoring those with less power or experience, especially when gratitude and genuflecting is involved. But I’m not confident we don’t still see other women as a threat sometimes.

Women are taught to compete with other women from the time they are young. For attention, for boys or men, for popularity and now, with social media, for the ephemera of the ersatz accolades of that digital cesspool. Women are taught to judge other women from childhood. Who is pretty, who is smart, who is fat, who runs fastest, who is weird. Am I pretty, smart, fat, weird? I know young teens with the pristine complexions of dewy youth who have been convinced they need a ten-step skin care routine to forestall the effects of aging, before they are old enough to drive.

Because competition is lucrative and strategic. If we’re struggling to be the prettiest, the most youthful looking, we’ll spend billions on skin care regimens, diet and fitness, makeup, and clothing. If we’re fighting over who gets the job, the attention, the accolades, who is torn down and who is built up, we’re less likely to link arms and stop the men in power from taking away more of our rights to equal pay, parental leave, healthcare and bodily autonomy. We’re too powerful if we cooperate. A house divided and all that.

What can we do? Don’t judge, don’t compete. Recognize where you have a scarcity mindset. Do your own grief work. One of the reasons I think older white women – and I am one myself – fall into “Karen” behavior is that we haven’t done our own grief work. We’re carrying around this toxic brew of anger and grief and regret for the ways in which we were discounted or treated badly in our careers and instead of metabolizing that in a healthy way, which would be uncomfortable and painful, we can project it outwards.

I paid my student loan debt, why shouldn’t they? I didn’t even have kids because I focused on my career, why should these women get maternity leave? I worked hard to get where I am now, why should these women be coddled because they want to take care of their mental health? Why should I use different pronouns, I don’t understand that whole thing.

Because of this unresolved grief, we can show a rigidity, a need to control every aspect of our environment. We make assumptions about who is allowed to be where and why, often influenced by racial prejudice. I wish we could do the hard of work of grieving what was lost, what could have been, and understand that we’re not in charge. I wish we could accept that the people coming up behind us may know more, they may be better equipped to run things than we are.

Women competing and denigrating other women isn’t something in the past. It might be more subtle, but it still exists. It’s up to all of us to see it, name it, and address it, starting in ourselves, so we can do better.