Ivanka Trump's new book: I'm a working mom who can't always get a massage
President’s daughter and adviser wants to ‘debunk the superwoman myth’ – by saying she didn’t even have time to meditate during the election
Ivanka Trump, President Donald Trump’s daughter and adviser, laments that when the election campaign was at its busiest she had to go into “survival mode” and didn’t have enough time to meditate or treat herself to a massage, according to her new book, released on Tuesday.
“Women who work are real,” she writes, in Women Who Work, Rewriting the Rules for Success, her second book.
Trump, 35, who was appointed as a White House adviser in late March, writes: “Becoming comfortable authentically expressing myself as a female executive with kids was a bit of a journey for me.”
Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, 36, who had already been appointed in January as a senior adviser to the president and given the task of delivering Middle East peace, have three children and, before the election, no experience in government.
The couple reportedly disclosed in financial declarations in March that they personally own at least $240m in assets and are the beneficiaries of a larger business empire to the tune of $741m. Ivanka Trump still owns her fashion business, via a trust, and a top ethics expert has advised her to shut it down in order to avoid conflicts of interest.
Most of her new book was written before her father was voted in as president last November.
She writes: “During extremely high-capacity times, like during the campaign, I went into survival mode: I worked and I was with my family; I didn’t do much else. Honestly, I wasn’t treating myself to a massage or making much time for self-care. I wish I could have awoken early to meditate for twenty minutes …”
She supplies many anecdotes about her privilege and also confesses her worries about not being taken seriously as a tough negotiator and executive if she expressed the realities of being a young working mother.
But then she realized this was not fair to other working mothers, she wrote.
“I began to wonder whether I had been doing women who work a disservice by not owning the reality that, because I’ve got an infant, I’m in my bathrobe at 7am and there’s pureed avocado all over me,” she writes, according to an advance extract in Fortune.
“I realized that it might be helpful in changing the narrative – even in a small way – to, for example, debunk the superwoman myth by posting a photo that my husband candidly snapped of me digging in the garden with the kids in our backyard, my hair in a messy ponytail, dirt on my cheek.”
Before joining the administration formally, Trump also ran her own fashion brand. She has stepped away from the management of that company, and left her real estate development job with the family-owned Trump Organization.
Some senior staff who worked for her fashion brand and later left reportedly did not have a happy experience working for her, the Guardian revealed on Monday, amid concerns about the direction of the brand and reports of an autocratic office culture.
In Women Who Work, Trump said that at her real estate and fashion offices: “I start making the rounds at 5:30[pm] to check in and announce that I’m going home as I leave. My team knows that I trust them to make the right decisions about how they allocate their time, and they would never abuse the privilege. They also know to expect e-mails from me at 11pm – and that I don’t expect an answer at that hour, unless they, like me, leave early!”
