Anna Wintour

Newsweek has a piece on their website right now entitled, "How To Get A Raise: Stop Being Good" by Jessica Bennett. In it Bennett reviews a new book, Rachel Simmons' The Curse of the Good Girl which is about how raising girls to be "good" can actually be, well, bad when it comes to their careers. The book sounds pretty great, though not necessarily surprising. (Guess what? Women are socialized to be too nice to be taken seriously in the workplace!) Still, it's nice that Newsweek is addressing these issues for the not-necessarily-feminist set.

However, a lot was missing from the article, and a lot was there that frankly shouldn't have been. For example, as a photo essay accompaniment to the piece, Newsweek gives us "11 Powerful Women That Make Men (and Other Women) Squirm". While writing about the problems of the "psychological glass ceiling" that keeps many women from feeling confident in the workplace, isn't Newsweek perpetuating that same shit by basically calling women like Hilary Clinton, Martha Stewart, and Anna Wintour (and yes, they are all white women except for Yoko Ono) terrifying?

In 1998, editor-in-chief Anna Wintour made the "gentle suggestion" to Oprah Winfrey that she lose 20 pounds in order to be on the cover of Vogue. According to Wintour, Oprah agreed and went on a "stringent diet", resulting in one of Vogue's "most successful covers ever". Oprah was the first black celebrity to be featured on the cover. Read more gentleness from Anna Wintour after the jump.