WOMEN’S WORST FOE: OTHER WOMEN?

After nearly 15 years in the corporate trenches, Tara Roth Madden decided to write a book.

But not one of those “dress-for-success” manuals. Not another “Managerial Woman,” or a cheerleading feminist tract about how to make it to the top of the corporate ladder.

No, Madden had a different ax to grind, one she said everyone saw but no one talked about, another case of the emperor’s new clothes. It is Madden’s belief--which she bolstered through interviews and an informal survey--that women are their own worst enemies in the corporate world, that the old cat-fighting, eye-scratching stereotype is true.

Madden’s book is called, appropriately enough, “Women Vs. Women: The Uncivil Business War.” It was published in September, and it says things like:

“Why do women work to defeat their own cause? Trained from infancy to view other women as rivals, they’d rather give up everything than take the chance of allowing other women to better them.”

“Men fight to win more power and higher salaries; women fight for the option to quit the game and go home.”

“A good number of women are committed to their personal goals first, their men second, and see work as a distant third.”

Believability Is Debated

Controversial, yes. Believable? Well, that is being debated.

“I would hope that anyone who elects to read it will read it with some degree of scrutiny,” said Beth Wray, national president for Business and Professional Women/USA. “I think it’s unfortunate when something like this comes out. Clearly some degree of this goes on--just as it does with men. But men aren’t accused of cat fighting. . . . It’s unfortunate that we get the bad press about it.”

“Women Vs. Women” appears at a time when business books, self-help manuals and women’s literature are grist for the best-seller list. And while it’s still too early to tell, Madden could reap the benefits of such consumer attention.

Sales, so far, are going “pretty well,” said Ron Mallis, director of corporate product development for the American Management Assn., whose publishing arm issued the book. “The book has been selling real well in certain areas like the West Coast and certain parts of the East Coast. Certain of the stores have been reordering, mostly on the West Coast.”

And “Women Vs. Women” has been reviewed by a host of major publications, which is no mean feat in itself.

It has been heralded as “a battle manual for an entire social class of women,” and it has been written off as “silliness.”

The New York Times, Fortune and Nation’s Business panned the book, which Madden calls “a social history, not a statistical study.” New Woman magazine, the Los Angeles Times and Penthouse loved it.

Burning Question Raised

But the burning question raised by this inflammatory tome is not so much whether women will believe the premise and go on to follow the advice given in “Part Four: Cease-Fire.” The real question is: Who is Tara Roth Madden and why is she saying these things?

If the details of Madden’s life are rather fuzzy, it is in part because she is loathe to speak in specifics and in part because she has spent most of her life juggling multiple jobs and interests.

“I’ve been the homemaker,” said Madden, 55. “I’ve been the mother. I’ve done the corporate, and I’ve always been a student. It’s the way I live.”

Her place of residence is a Newport Beach condominium with “three inches of ocean view” that she shares with husband, Ned. She describes herself as a feminist but says that politically she is “more conservative than liberal.”

Co-workers during Madden’s 14-year foray through middle management characterize the mother of one as nurturing and fair, achievement-oriented and careerist, a feminist and a dedicated, caring boss.

Sally Domm, communications manager for a high-tech firm based in Akron, Ohio, worked with Madden about a decade ago, when both women were managers in the communications department of Ohio Edison Electric Co. The two still are close friends.

“I thought she was fair and clear in what she was asking (underlings),” Domm said. “I think she gave people the benefit of the doubt and clear directions as to what she expected. . . . I think Tara was a mature manager.”

Although Domm does not agree with many of the major points Madden makes in “Women Vs. Women,” she said she usually enjoys arguing them with Madden. The most memorable Domm-Madden debate occurred in the women’s restroom of a trendy Newport Beach restaurant, where the line stretched long and the argument grew heated.

“I was telling her, with great agitation, why she’s wrong and how she’s wrong, when everyone in the ladies’ room turned on me,” Domm recounted. “They told me I didn’t know what I was talking about. It was funny. I’m convinced that she’s wrong, and then I think about those women.”

Stan Goodrich, manager of external communications for McDonnell Douglas, not only agrees with Madden’s book but says he sees women undermining themselves and each other in the workplace every day.

Goodrich worked with Madden at Microdata Computer Corp. of Newport Beach, a subsidiary of McDonnell Douglas that since has been merged into the parent.

Microdata was Madden’s most recent managerial assignment before she left the corporate world in 1986--with a $25,000 advance from the American Management Assn.--to write her book.

In nearly four years spent working side-by-side, Goodrich said, he always found Madden to be a “careerist,” a woman who liked the challenge and achievement of work.

“I thought Tara was extremely understanding as a manager, now that I look back, extremely understanding to the people under her,” Goodrich said. “She had several women under her. She would always take them in hand and work with them.”

Although “Women Vs. Women” could easily share shelf space with the recent flurry of “women’s-movement-is-dead” literature, Madden said she thinks of herself as a feminist at heart.

“I consider myself to be a feminist in my ‘own group,’ ” Madden said. “But if there’s a wider feminist group that exists, I’m not in it. I’ve never been in a march. And I think they (feminists today) are doing it all wrong.”

Demonstrations Called ‘Waste’

She said the demonstrations and hunger strikes women staged to protest Pope John Paul II’s American visit, to cite one recent example, were a “phenomenal waste of time” and did nothing to help the nation’s businesswomen.

“I don’t think women now have time to leave their jobs and go to Washington or quit eating in protest,” Madden insists.

What they do have time for is work. But when they’re on the job, she said, women damage their cause for equality even more than the feminist movement has. Madden supports that claim by citing her own experiences in management--from the Cuyahoga Falls City Schools in Ohio to Microdata in Southern California.

“I think women, through fear of failure, are undermining other women and keeping one another from the highest corporate success or senior management,” Madden said in an interview. “I have seen that from my first job to my last.”

Madden got her first management job (“because I couldn’t type”) as a communications specialist for the Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, school district.

It was 1970, and Madden was a recent graduate from Kent State University with a bachelor’s degree in journalism.

Part of the job was to relay news of activities planned at campuses throughout the district. The place to hear those plans was the weekly meeting between her boss, a man who was the superintendent of schools, and the district’s principals, all men.

For two years, Madden said in her book, she was barred from those meetings. She spent Friday afternoons watching the closed door of the conference room and later spent hours quizzing the individual principals about their schools.

She finally asked if she could break with tradition and attend, but the superintendent balked at the idea. He eased the tension at meeting’s end with an off-color joke, he explained, “usually of the men’s variety.”

When she offered to leave before the joke, she was allowed entrance. But what occurred after she crashed that inner sanctum, she said, was a shock.

The male establishment in her office seemed to know that Madden’s female co-workers wouldn’t approve of her special treatment, she said in the book. “Women who were invited to the conclave only to give special reports made their displeasure known in acts of subtle retaliation. My small success isolated me from my sisters. I wore the ‘S’ for ‘showoff’ on my head.”

Although her scarlet letter has long since faded, Madden said that a string of similar woman-caused difficulties ensued--at the Ohio Edison Electric Co. and the American Red Cross, at Pertec Computer Corp. and Microdata.

One particularly enlightening incident occurred when--at a company she refuses to name--her communications job was transferred from the firm’s marketing department to its support division. At the time of the transfer, Madden said, she had been overseeing a nearly $1-million annual operation with the help of just a clerk and a secretary.

Her new boss--a woman--took away her staff and told her, “You have to prove to me that you can do this.”

“I felt like Rumpelstiltskin every day,” Madden said, “put into a roomful of straw and told to spin it into gold. I realized I was in a no-win situation, that I wasn’t getting the job done right.”

She quit and was soon replaced by a man, she said, who hired 14 people in the next three weeks to run her department right, “and I have the new organizational charts to prove it.” Her boss, Madden said, had some insecurities, wouldn’t support another woman’s judgment--didn’t trust her own sex.

It was a pattern, Madden said, that she witnessed unfolding--with a new twist added at each new job.

And when she finally reached Microdata in the early 1980s, Madden said, three things were clear to her: (1) she would never make CEO--of any company; (2) her female colleagues were a large part of the problem, and (3) she had to write a book about it.

So, with the help of a psychologist, she created a questionnaire and distributed it to mid-level management women she met at the computer conferences she attended for Microdata.

The questionnaire, answered by women throughout the country, was based more on open-ended essay questions than simple true-or-false queries, so the results, she said, could not easily be tabulated into a statistical summary.

But the casual survey confirmed Madden’s own experiences, supplied her with a wealth of anecdotal information and gave “Women Vs. Women” a cast of characters straight out of the pages of pulp fiction:

There is voluptuous “Jill the temp,” who comes to work late, ignores the female manager, caters to the male manager and sells frilly dresses from the office; Kathy B., the college grad, who slam dunks her female boss in an effort to vault from clerk work into management, and ambitious Alicia, a young secretary who weasels her way into her boss’s heart--and bedroom.

Before distributing the survey, however, Madden wrote a painstaking 130-page proposal for her book and found herself an agent. The agent invited Madden to the 1986 American Book Assn. convention in New Orleans, where she was introduced to Mallis, the American Management Assn. representative. She told Mallis about her book and gave him the only copy of her proposal.

“I read it the night I got it and thought it was a dynamite piece of work she had done, that it would be enormously controversial and painful,” Mallis said. He made an offer on the spot, and Madden accepted.

“I know she has been accused of going against her own sex, but it’s exactly the opposite,” Mallis said. “I thought it was kind of imperative that the book be published. I just thought that fundamentally here was an issue that needed to be raised.”

Criticizes Premise

But Deborah Meyer, associate director for 9-to-5, the National Assn. of Working Women, called Madden’s premise “propaganda” of the sort that “helps keep women from getting ahead.”

Although Meyer had not read “Women Vs. Women,” she said its premise is “just an old cliche that people use to keep women in their place.”

Still Madden has fared surprisingly well in the nearly 100 radio and television talk shows she has done since the book was published. She said she has found that callers and hosts alike have been at least receptive, and some gushingly supportive.

Said one woman who called in to a recent Southern California television talk show: ‘I’ve been out of the workplace for 25 years. I’m the kind of person who shouldn’t have been there in the first place. . . . Everyone made a slave out of me, the other women did.”

Actually, Madden said, this lack of opposition is a problem, rather than a relief.

“I thought it would be more controversial,” Madden said. “I wanted to make this be a real strong issue. . . . I feel kind of evangelical about the message.”

Madden’s message is not merely that women consciously and unconsciously sabotage each others’ journeys through the corporate world. In the book’s closing chapters, Madden also gives suggestions for a female “cease-fire.”

“Trial distances,” not unlike the separations used to cool off bad marriages, are one way for warring women to de-escalate office combat. Women should search for--and reward--successful female role models in the corporate world in an effort to buoy their own spirits.

And women who “have decided not to adhere to the career path must matter of factly take their place in the back seat, out of the running” for corporate success, she suggests.

“Their part-time mentality should be brought to the forefront as they enter and leave the white-collar world,” Madden writes. “This would allow them to present themselves as a back-up resource that functions completely separately from the financial negotiations of the more dedicated, full-time female work force.”

What Tara Roth Madden says in her book:

“When women occasionally appear at a high level of competition, men need only stand back and bide their time. Women relieve men of the burden of doing anything much about them: Because of their unique approaches to ‘success,’ women consistently function as their own worst enemies. Men serve primarily as the catalyst--or the prize--of women’s battles among themselves.”

“If women do want to gain corporate leadership--and there is evidence of ambivalence in that matter--they like to do it in an environment controlled by men.”

“Women will generally accept the male mandates, no matter how irrational, before they will believe the most logical argument of another woman.”

“Women have chosen to put their faith in catering to their professed enemy: men. And to fight, in every way possible, their professed friends: women. That may be the call of nature.”

“Every time a woman has been burned at the stake, at war or at work, other women have been near enough to hand over the torch and whisper words of encouragement to the executioner. At every point in history, women, fearful of a perceived inability to provide for themselves--emotionally as well as materially--have used every availble weapon to keep the competition at bay.”

WHAT OTHERS SAY ABOUT “WOMEN VS. WOMEN” “Tara Roth Madden blows the whistle on her gender--but we’ll excuse her since her provocative thesis deserves a hearing.”

--New Woman, November, 1987

“Unlike the movers and shakers of the early ‘70s, who blamed the male-dominated corporate structure for women’s lack of advancement, Madden is convinced that white-collar women are sabotaging themselves in the business world--and she partially blames the feminist movement. . . . While her book is clearly a bugle call for women to stop fighting each other in the business world, her not-so-obvious message is that men add to the problem by turning their backs.”

--Penthouse, October, 1987

“Page briskly through the hypnotic litanies of central slogans; wolf down the pseudo-paragraphs (seldom longer than two sentences). Grab the basic good sense of this book even when it seems wacky and overstated. . . . We get no “Me” generation self-absorption here; Madden has instead written a battle manual for an entire social class of women in business and management.”

--Book Review, Los Angeles Times, Sept. 6, 1987

” . . . its author evidences more familiarity with pop psychology than with executive life.”

--Fortune, Oct. 26, 1987

“The best that can be said for this book is that it’s controversial.”

--Nation’s Business, November, 1987

“If inequality is indeed merely an attitude problem, Ms. Madden has a simple way to solve it: women must stop fighting and flirting and become rational, tolerant and informed about office politics. Readers who find all this offensive may take comfort in its silliness.”

--Book Review, New York Times, Oct. 25, 1987