Book Review: Work Wife Marries Female Friendships with Business Bottom Lines

Lots of my female professional friends have used the term “work wife” to refer to a female colleague with whom they are close and who, in most cases, has supported their efforts to advance professionally. Clearly, when we do so we mean that this person is as critical to our professional success and happiness as a spouse is in our personal lives. While today, the term “work wife” has an overwhelmingly positive connotation, its origins are not so empowering. As the new book Work Wife: The Power of Female Friends to Drive Business Success by Erica Cerulo and Claire Mazur, the founders of Of a Kind (a curated online lifestyle store ultimately sold to Bed, Bath & Beyond) explains, businessmen of the early twentieth century said “work wife” to refer to an exceptionally high-functioning secretary. In other words, the term “work wife” initially meant the woman who took care of male needs at work as a wife did in the home.

By beginning their book with the sexist origins of this term, the authors of Work Wife made clear their intention to reclaim it for female professionals and entrepreneurs today, and to illustrate in full color that the contemporary notion of the work wife may be changing business itself. The book Work Wife is a partially autobiographical sketch of a several female work partnerships that demonstrates, across industries and settings, the possibility of female friendships. It defines the essential elements of a female business partnership and the ways in which these partnerships might excel or struggle in navigating business issues such as money, conflict, time management, claiming the role of boss, and family issues (yes, there is a whole chapter about having babies). Throughout the book, Claire and Erica weave their own story of friendship, business creation, and business success with that of several other female partnerships from industries ranging from athletes, to law, to film and podcast production.

Overall, I found the experience of reading Work Wife to be refreshing, satisfying, and enjoyable. It was refreshing because, perhaps acknowledging that writers and thinkers have already laid the foundation in other works, the authors of Work Wife appear to assume—rather than argue overtly—that women offer unique skills (if not superpowers) in the business arena. There are citations to studies sprinkled throughout the text, but those seem to be added as exclamation points to the declarations made by the stories and examples themselves. The heavy lifting of proving the book’s central thesis is done by the stories of the female business partners who explained in each chapter how they went from acquaintances to friends to partners and how, at each step, they worked together to preserve their relationships and turn a profit. This made the book not only easy to read, engaging and full of heart, but also persuasive because the conclusions were borne largely from lived experiences.

To me, though, the starting point of the book, rather than its conclusion, was the thing that excited me most. As the title promises, Work Wife begins from the proposition that females have critical skills, inclinations, and tendencies that businesses, small or large, need. Whether through socialization, genetics, or a combination of the two, the authors explain that women overall are innate relationship-builders and tend to be comfortable responding to and expressing emotion. While historically, these attributes have been viewed as impediments to the success of women professionals, Cerulo and Mazur use interviews and personal storytelling to demonstrate that the opposite is true. Work Wife shows that, in several ways, female professionals may have advantages in business, including personnel management to money to dealing with family changes. There are a lot of books about women and work that tell women “you can do it!” and many are very good, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that it was pretty satisfying to read a book with the alternative message: “yeah, we kind of did.” And, in a market flooded with so many plans, programs, and strategies aimed at “fixing” women professionals, it was good to hear someone say we aren’t broken at all. 

Since I am not an entrepreneur, however, one drawback of Work Wife is that it’s ideas may not apply universally. While the authors discuss traditional professions, including law, much of the text relates to female entrepreneurial partnerships in artistic and lifestyle industries. That is not to say that those from larger, corporate backgrounds could not benefit from pondering the dynamics discussed in Work Wife, but the lessons learned in an intimate startup business may not always translate to larger or more established firms. Perhaps this isn’t a criticism, though, as much as it is a hope that some other fabulous duo or trio or quartet might write a book about how their female friendship helped them climb the ladder of a Fortune 500 company or a law or accounting firm or to the ranks of high political office.  Having personally experienced the power of female friendship to advance my own legal career, I anticipate that we’ll be seeing that book sooner rather than later.