On a recent weeknight in midtown Manhattan, a trickle of professional women wearing sheath dresses and smart blouses swept into a delicately lit penthouse. The space they entered was filled with women quietly working and chatting, seated on an array of curved pastel furniture, designed to fit the precise ergonomic specifications of the average woman. The women’s computers bore stickers reading “I’m With Her”, “Hermione 2020”, and “Cornell”. The colour-coded bookshelves behind them included works such as 50 Ways to Comfort a Woman in Labor, Suffragette: My Own Story, and Cunt: A Declaration of Independence.
It was a typical Wednesday night at The Wing, an exclusive club that describes itself as a “network of work and community spaces designed for women of all definitions”. For between $185 and $250 per month, US Wing members – or Winglets, as the company sometimes calls them – can use the space to work, eat, socialise, breastfeed, shower, network, exercise, nap, reapply their makeup, meditate or all of the above. In other words, The Wing is a one-stop shop for the performance of contemporary mainstream feminism, a meticulously curated space where women can blow-dry their hair or “stage a small coup”, depending on the day.
...
Because The Wing is in part a co-working space, many of its members hail from professions in which office space is a rare commodity – the creative class of writers, editors, freelancers, artists and influencers who make up the media. Handily, these are precisely the same kind of people who like to tweet, Instagram and write about the world as it looks from The Wing. This has ensured that even its minutest details, from the coffee to the furniture to the lunch offerings to the customised scented candles in the gift shop, have been deemed worthy of an article of their own. It also means that The Wing has been the subject of seemingly endless criticism – accused of being too rich, too white, too cis-gendered, too feminist, not feminist enough, too liberal and not liberal enough. One former employee described it as a “super-toxic” place, while a British member told me that upon walking into The Wing in New York, she felt that she had found her “holy grail.”
...
Progressives often talk about The Wing in the same way they talk about the Democratic party: it’s not great but maybe things will get better, maybe the politicians will figure it out, maybe the world The Wing’s founders imagined they would serve will one day emerge. One vocal supporter of The Wing is, somewhat surprisingly, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Gelman hosted a fundraiser for Ocasio-Cortez at her home in Brooklyn last summer and, a few months later, the politician told Glamour: “The Wing isn’t just a functional space, it’s a real symbol of what’s happening in our country.” She called the company “one of the most potent forces that we’ve seen emerge in politics this year.”
