(Where do you want to be in five years? What’s one way you plan to help another woman this year? Who’s your favorite female perfor - Oh wait, duh, Beyoncé.) There were times we’d gather in smaller, informal settings as needed: if one of us had a crisis, an upcoming job interview, an article due, an impending mental breakdown, or looming unemployment - which nearly every one of us had faced at one point or another.īut usually we simply hung out, ate snacks, shot the shit, and talked about work. Sometimes she’d hand out note cards containing handwritten questions. Our meetings had a moderator, of sorts - our host. It was like trying to dodge that stench that lurks on a New York City street on a hot summer night: there you were, minding your own business, and BAM. The gender war, we thought, was a relic of our mother’s generation - a battle won long ago.Īnd yet each of us, in every field, in every role, was stumbling into gender land mines at seemingly every turn - and often ones we didn’t even know existed. We had grown up in an era of Girl Power - Spice Girls, you know it - when it wasn’t simply an encouragement but an expectation that girls could be and do whatever they wanted. We were smart, ambitious women striving to “make it” in New York, a city that eats the soft alive. The fact that the club was kept a secret basically justified its need.
Which meant that once you were in, you were in: engulfed in bosom-like support, embraced and respected, encouraged with finger snaps and fist bumps and cat videos, but no cattiness. That is, membership was not based on merit but vagina. Members were never to speak the group’s name. In those early days, the rules of the fight club were simple: What was said in the group stayed in the group. We’d pile our plates high and sink into the cushioned couches in her living room to talk - or, bitch, rather - about our jobs. She’d provide the pasta, salad, or pasta salad, and we’d bring the wine (and seltzer.for some reason we all really liked seltzer). Every month or so, a dozen of us - women in our twenties and thirties, struggling writers and creative types, most of us with second jobs - would gather at a friend’s apartment (actually, her parents’ apartment: none of us had an apartment big enough to fit that many people). It was a fight club - except without the fighting and without the men. Shirley Chisholm, the first African American woman elected to the U.S.
Women in this country must become revolutionaries.”
This is an excerpt from Feminist Fight Club – An Office Survival Manual for a Sexist Workplace Reinventing the American Dream by Jessica Bennett. Feminist Fight Club – An Office Survival Manual for a Sexist Workplace Reinventing the American Dream
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