Ivanka Trump at an American Technology Council roundtable with corporate and education leaders at the White House in June 2017. Photo: PA Images. All rights reserved.The media backlash to Ivanka Trump’s recently published book, Women Who Work, was immediate. A New York Times review put it this way: ‘Ivanka Trump Wrote A Painfully Oblivious Book for Basically No One’. Of course, it was an easy target for criticism.
The book opens with Trump’s memory of soul-searching during an adventure holiday in Patagonia and includes laments about having been too busy to have massages during her father’s Presidential campaign. It’s hard to forget that the author is the highly-privileged First Daughter of one of the more cartoonishly sexist political figures of recent years.
Trump’s book is, however, not so unique in the context of American “self-help culture” which encourages individuals to define themselves on the basis of ‘core values’ like entrepreneurship, self-reliance, the right to happiness. Women Who Work is but one contribution to an ever-expanding US self-help industry, worth an estimated $11 billion.
