Managing expression and hand holding in The Good Wife : how ‘leaning in’ demands emotional labour

The opening scene of The Good Wife (2009–2016) follows Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies), holding her husband's hand (literally and metaphorically) as he addresses the assembled press about the sexual impropriety allegations against him. While the diegetic press cameras focus on her husband Peter (Chris Noth), we slowly push in on Alicia, the titular ‘good wife’, as she maintains a blank facial expression. Júlia Havas describes this camera manoeuvre as a ‘narrative surprise’, upending gendered expectations about whose stories warrant spotlighting on television (2022: 157). By focusing on Alicia rather than Peter, The Good Wife takes a seemingly feminist approach to this well-known media narrative of the disgraced politician and his forgiving wife. This scene of a politician apologising for his actions, as his wife stands by his side, supportive but stoic, is a familiar visage in the contemporary political media landscape. As Suzanne Leonard argues, The Good Wife uses dialogue with real-life analogues to self-consciously connect Alicia with other politicians’ wives whose careers have soared after their husbands' affairs were broadcast to national audiences (Leonard, 2017: 133). The Good Wife's woman-centric depiction of political scandal and corporate America is perhaps best described as promoting neoliberal feminism, which Catherine Rottenberg describes as feminist discourses that are publicly acceptable, popular, mainstream, and ‘increasingly compatible with neoliberal and neoconservative political and economic agendas’ (2018: 11). This article argues that The Good Wife's Alicia embodies the key arguments of the neoliberal feminist tome Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by former Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg (2013).

The Good Wife has generated considerable feminist-informed commentary and analysis. TV critic Emily Nussbaum (2014) argues that while The Good Wife may seem like a ‘“lean in” fairytale’, in the end it ‘revealed itself to be a sneaky condemnation of pretty much every institution under capitalism’, and Fortune journalist Eliana Dockterman (2016) asserts that ‘The Good Wife gave us a revolutionary take on modern feminism’. Similarly, scholar Taylor Cole Miller argues that the series demonstrates a ‘multiplicity of feminisms and femininities’ and offers a site ‘where the central tenets of the postfeminist sensibility are themselves taken for granted and repudiated’ (2017: 159). The Good Wife is not about feminism as an activist movement, historical project or ideology, and protagonist Alicia does not identify as feminist. However, it circulates within a media landscape where feminist discourses and media culture are experiencing a resurgence. Rosalind Gill calls this feminism's ‘new luminosity’, whereby ‘it seems as if everything is a feminist issue’ (2016a: 614; emphasis in original), and Sarah Banet-Weiser highlights how ‘feminism is “in the water”’ (2018: 2). Today, scripted television is increasingly read by audiences, journalists and academics as ‘feminist’ (or not), evaluated through the lens of feminism and expected to speak to feminisms. Claire Perkins describes this as an ‘infoglut of commentary that foregrounds and debates the feminist credentials of a wave of new media content that centres women as both characters and creators’ (Perkins et al., 2023: 1). As a feminised medium with a primarily feminine audience, broadcast TV has a particular market interest in appearing women-centred and feminist-leaning, but its commercial, economic and institutional demands shape the kinds of feminisms that US scripted television articulates, deploys and promotes. As Lauren Rabinovitz highlights, TV ‘allows for the expression of feminist critique but represses feminism's potential for radical social change’ (1999: 146). The Good Wife's feminist politics and sentiment are largely conjured through gesture and reference, rather than explicit articulation, performing what Julie D’Acci calls a ‘feminist orientation’ whereby feminism is subtly invoked but rarely explicitly articulated or claimed (1996: 163). Cameos by real-world feminist figures, such as Democratic strategist and former Clinton campaigner Donna Brazile, second-wave feminist icon Gloria Steinem and senior advisor in the Obama White House Valerie Jarrett signal to extra-textual feminisms, thus media-literate feminist audiences can and do infer feminist politics but more conservative audiences remain unaware.

As a CBS series, The Good Wife needs to appeal to contemporary women without alienating their core older conservative audience. CBS is one of the oldest US broadcast networks, which is largely known for crime procedurals and conservative programming that attracts an older (over 50) racially homogenous (white) demographic (Hod, 2015). Therefore, The Good Wife is at once belated and timely, looking to the past in terms of form, genre and casting, while also explicitly engaging with its contemporary moment through ‘ripped from the headlines’ stories. Margulies and Noth both starred in iconic 1990s TV programmes, Margulies in ER (NBC 1994–2009) and Noth in Law and Order (NBC 1990–2010) and Sex and the City (HBO 1998–2004). Margulies starred as Dr Doug Ross' (George Clooney) love interest and fan favourite Nurse Carol Hathaway on ER. Noth was highly visible on US TV screens throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, representing a recognisable brand of white American masculinity that is constant and dependable. Although Noth's character Peter is not always physically present, he casts a long shadow thanks to Noth's resonant brand of masculinity. The Good Wife echoes ER and Law and Order's blending of procedural structure, ‘ripped from the headlines’ stories and serialised characters, bringing together older generic forms with prescient topics and politics as part of the programme's feminist address. ¹ The ‘ripped from the headlines’ narrative strategy draws connections between the characters and real-world political and social issues to assert relevance and timeliness, which is particularly evident in interpolations of news stories about campus rape, abuse in the military and violence against women.

This article examines how the contradictions of neoliberal feminism are animated in The Good Wife's depiction of Alicia's re-entry into the paid workforce. After her politician husband's public fall from grace, Alicia restarts her career as a lawyer after a thirteen-year absence. She is not simply a passive victim of her husband's infidelity or a naïve participant in corporate or political life; rather, she is an active participant in crafting her public political persona, capitalising on her newfound notoriety and political connections. As Leonard emphasises, The Good Wife endorses the notion that ‘wronged women are (or can become) shrewd political operators in their own right’ (2017: 135). In the aftermath of Peter's sex scandal, she is known as ‘Saint Alicia’ by the fictional media, implying that she has put aside her own suffering and resentment for the betterment of her family and Peter's political ambitions. In the eyes of the diegetic media, Alicia stands dutifully next to her husband as he is prosecuted for using government funds to pay sex workers, and her ‘saintly’ profile is essential to Peter's capacity to relaunch his political career. At the series’ commencement, Alicia is subject to and at the mercy of her husband's political, economic and institutional power, but over seven seasons she transforms into a powerful player in Chicago's political and legal landscape. In the later seasons, she increasingly uses her marriage (and its baggage) for her own gain, embracing and mobilising both her own and her husband's political power. In a rather telling fight with Peter, Alicia triumphantly declares: ‘Yes, I may need you, Peter, but you sure as hell need me too’ (Season 6, Episode 5: ‘Shiny Objects’). This illustrates the interdependence of their political ambitions and power, insofar as Alicia's access to institutional power is dependent on Peter's connections and Peter's media profile relies on Alicia's compliance with their public charade of wedded happiness.

While The Good Wife predates the publication of Lean In, Alicia is a proto-Sandberg who, according to Shani Orgad, ‘is shown as increasingly capable of “leaning in:” she seeks and speaks her truth (as Sandberg's Lean In cajoles women to do), daring to voice her opinion even if it angers her superiors and colleagues’ (2017: 171–172). Alicia does not identify as a feminist, nor does she appear to be aware of neoliberal feminism, but she epitomises the idea that ‘workplace success is central to contemporary discourses of feminist empowerment’ (Fegitz, 2023: 2–3). There are clear thematic and narrative resonances between Alicia and Sandberg, as both operate in the same upper middle-class milieu and around similar corporate logics. The Good Wife exposes the contradiction at the heart of Sandberg's feminism, which encourages women to invest in corporate systems of power that are designed to disenfranchise them and exploit their labour. I unpack how the emotion work underpins Sandberg's book, and highlight how The Good Wife depicts Alicia's corporate success as tied to her capacity and willingness to perform two different kinds of emotional labour: managing expression and hand holding.

Leaning into neoliberal feminism

Sandberg's Lean In is part ‘how-to guide’ for professional women and part personal stories of her corporate successes and failures. According to Sandberg, it is ‘not a memoir’, ‘not a self-help book’ and ‘not a book on career management’ (2013: 9), but it does widely circulate as a contemporary neoliberal feminist manifesto. ² According to Rottenberg, ‘Lean In is a site in which we can very clearly discern the processes by and through which liberal feminism has been disarticulated and the neoliberal feminist subject is born’ (2018: 59). Lean In is part of a wave of contemporary ‘feminisms of privilege’, which ‘operate in complex ways as feints to reinforce and repurpose class and race hegemonies’ (Lagerwey et al., 2016: np). As such, both the content and address of Lean In are classed and raced, assuming white, heterosexual upper middle-class women as the ideal feminist subject. Lean In is one of many part-memoir, part-self-help books on the market that bring together personal anecdotes and social science research to present a palatable and digestible form of feminism aimed generically at ‘women’, but coded to address primarily cis, white, heterosexual professional women. Popular successors include Sophia Amoruso's (2014) #GirlBoss, Joan C. Williams and Rachel Dempsey's (2014) What Works for Women at Work: Four Patterns Working Women Need to Know, Katty Kay and Claire Shipman's (2014) The Confidence Code: The Science and Art of Self-Assurance and Ivanka Trump's (2017) Women Who Work: Rewriting the Rules for Success. Sandberg's Lean In is the peak of the cycle: a global bestseller that has been taken up as a guidebook in many corporate spaces and is often used as shorthand for the limitations of neoliberal feminisms. Sara Farris and Catherine Rottenberg contend that, along with Anne-Marie Slaughter's (2012) ‘Why Women Still Can’t Have It All’, Lean In ‘initiated the trend of high-power women publicly “coming out” as feminists’ and in doing so ‘reenergis[ing] feminist debates in the Anglo-American world’ (2017: 5). Slaughter's article, alongside Lean In and the memoirs mentioned above, upholds the notion that women's ‘success’ in the workplace and home is tied to the ‘success’ of feminism more broadly. Gill cites Lean In as a key text in ‘feminism's new cultural life’ and part of the ‘new luminosity’ that feminism has achieved in popular culture (2016b: 1). While its ‘feminism’ is debatable, Lean In circulates as a feminist text and has been taken up by audiences and critics as an example of contemporary media feminist ideology. Sandberg's book exemplifies key trends in twenty-first-century neoliberal corporate feminisms and distils its heuristic logics into pithy examples, lessons and instructions.

While Lean In has been widely taken up, it has also been critiqued for encouraging individual women to take responsibility for overcoming systemic gender inequality (hooks, 2013; Faludi, 2013). Linda Burnham (2013) emphasises how Lean In ‘requires that those experiencing the impact of inequality and discrimination do some psychological fine-tuning’. For Diane Negra, Lean In ‘takes as a given an ongoing commitment to the marketisation of the female self’ and ‘traffics in a corporate conservatism that has a few feminist flourishes’ (2014: 281–282). Negra highlights how Sandberg presents ‘her own case as a blueprint for other women to follow’, which effectively ‘encourages women to double down on a system marked by ever greater contingency and precarity’ (2014: 283). Lean In is part of a larger resilience discourse, which ‘normalizes the sexist, racist damage traditional white supremacist patriarchy inflicts on white women and people of color as the ultimately innocuous damage that they are individually responsible for overcoming’ (James, 2015: 7). To succeed in corporate America, Lean In proposes that women need to do more and take on more responsibility in the workplace, reinforcing Gill and Orgad's finding that ‘middle-class women are addressed as ideal subjects of resilience’ (2018: 480; emphasis in original). Sandberg's book promotes resilience culture insofar are it resists systemic analysis in favour of internalising white patriarchal notions of success and value.

Lean In essentialises and invests in women's capacity for what Arlie Russell Hochschild calls ‘emotional labour’, which describes how workers manage their own or others’ feelings and expressions to ensure their employers’ profit ([1983] 2012: 7). Emotional labour in the workplace is not exclusively performed by women, however it is often key to women's success in male-dominated workplaces. As Jacqueline Arcy writes, while ‘many jobs require the management of one's emotions, this skill has been disproportionately tasked to women’ (2016: 366). While Lean In does not directly address ‘emotional labour’ in either positive or negative terms, the work of managing your own emotions, cultivating relationships and negotiating is framed as central to corporate success. As Ella Fegitz highlights in her examination of intergenerational feminisms on contemporary US TV, ‘the past decade has seen a shift in the cultural understanding of female workplace success: from its celebration as a symbol of gender equality in postfeminist culture to its celebration as feminist achievement in an unequal society in neoliberal feminism’ (2023: 7). Sandberg contends that ‘gender-specific expectations remain self-fulfilling’ (2013: 114) and as such, Lean In assumes that women can and should take on emotional, mental and psychic labour in the workplace. Rottenberg highlights how ‘Lean In focuses on changing women's attitudes about work and self’, rather than changing the conditions under which women work (2018: 42; emphasis in original). For instance, instead of addressing or exploring the root cause of the guilt she feels as a working mother, Sandberg suggests dwelling ‘less on the conflicts and compromises, and more on being fully engaged with the task at hand’ (2013: 138). Sandberg's philosophy encourages readers to perform the often-invisible work that Hochschild calls ‘transmutation of emotional systems’ whereby the management of feeling, which is often done unconsciously in private spaces, is now also deployed to benefit employers, organisations and profit ([1983] 2012: 19). Lean In urges readers to invest in women's ‘natural’ capacity to do emotional labour, echoing Hochschild's assertion that women ‘are thought to manage expression and feeling not only better but more often than men do’ ([1983] 2012: 112; emphasis in original). This essentialist approach reifies women as natural caregivers and conflates their value in the workplace with their value in the home.

For Sandberg, women's emotional capacity is simultaneously a powerful tool that can be leveraged for capitalist gain and a handicap that women need to overcome. On one hand, Sandberg essentialises women's alleged aptitude for emotional labour, asserting that ‘women can negotiate as well as others or even more successfully than men when negotiating for others’ (2013: 45). Sandberg herself deploys emotive language to engage the reader and propel them to action and ‘persuade people to share their honest views’ (2013: 85; emphasis mine) and insists that the solution to gender inequality in the workplace lies in women being ‘brave enough to tell the truth’ (2013: 78; emphasis mine). Other the other hand, women's emotions (and their willingness to express them) are depicted as a liability in the wrong context. For instance, Sandberg contends that the desire to be liked and to be seen as nice is a ‘huge stumbling block for women’ (2013: 43) and ‘why women hold themselves back’ (2013: 40). Using positive and encouraging language, Lean In urges readers to ‘not underestimate themselves’ (2013: 29), to ‘speak their truth’ (2013: 78) and to ‘own their success’ (2013: 44). Furthermore, in a call to emotion management, Sandberg proclaims that ‘everyone needs to get more comfortable with female leaders – including female leaders themselves’ (2013: 50; emphasis mine). Here she urges readers to look internally to consider what barriers they need to dismantle from within, and therefore appears to be endorsing emotional labour and work on the self. Yet, she is also quick to demonise emotions and emotionality, claiming that ‘[w]hen I get emotional, it's very hard for me to treat a problem lightly’ (Sandberg, 2013: 87), adding that ‘it is not a good idea to cry at work’ (Sandberg, 2013: 88). Following this logic, not only are women better suited for emotion work but they also need to manage their feelings to succeed in the corporate environment.

Sandberg gestures towards the need for collectivism and creating communities of women who can support one another, encouraging readers to ‘internalize the revolution’ (2013: 11) and take the ethos of the book out into the world, by joining the ‘Lean In Community’ and forming ‘Lean In Circles’ where women support and mentor each other in overcoming their internal barriers (2013: 173). In the final chapter, Sandberg stages a kind of ‘call to arms’ where she outlines various examples of women and feminists working against each other, arguing that women need to ‘stick up’ for each other because when one woman's accomplishments are diminished, all women's accomplishments are diminished (2013: 162). Lean In, however, speaks to a narrow section of women and much of the advice relies on perpetuating existing class and race hierarchies, particularly in terms of offloading domestic labour to paid employees who are likely to be precarious and/or underemployed women of colour. As such, the forms of neoliberal empowerment offered by Lean In are only available to educated, professional moneyed women, not working-class or working poor women who are more likely to perform paid care work, domestic labour and/or reproductive labour. Under neoliberal feminism, this kind of feminised emotional labour is rendered invisible, as are the concerns and needs of lower-class women. This is compounded by Lean In's foregrounding of individual success and solutions and its explicit appeal to women to change how they think, feel and act in the pursuit of corporate success.

The key contradiction of Lean In's neoliberal feminism is its characterisation of emotion as both labour and liability. According to Sandberg, women's minds and emotions are a primary barrier to their corporate success, but she also repeatedly encourages readers to manage their own and others’ emotions to ensure corporate success. The Good Wife animates this contradiction through its depiction of Alicia's capacity and willingness to move between ‘managing expression’ and ‘hand holding’. The Good Wife renders Alicia's capacity and willingness to perform emotional labour as vital to her corporate success, and as such it is central to her empowerment during the series’ seven seasons. In doing so, The Good Wife highlights how emotional labour is fundamental to neoliberal feminist empowerment but that this empowerment is only available to white, middle-class corporate women.

Alicia leans in: hand holding and managing expression

In the Introduction to their Television and New Media special issue on The Good Wife, Taylor Nygaard and Jorie Lagerwey contend that the programme has a ‘feminist commitment’ to interrogating ‘postfeminism's easy ideological dominance’ (2017: 111). Unlike its predecessor Ally McBeal (1997–2002), an earlier iconic broadcast depiction of a white female lawyer navigating corporate America that engages with popular media discourses on womanhood, The Good Wife is not a postfeminist text but rather is about postfeminism. For Miller, it offers a site ‘where the central tenets of the postfeminist sensibility are themselves taken for granted and repudiated’ (2017: 159). As such, The Good Wife has been widely examined by both journalists and scholars alike as invoking feminism through its redressing of postfeminist media culture and investment in women-centred storytelling. ³ In this article, I examine how its neoliberal feminism encourages individual solutions that require emotion management, highlighting the centrality of emotional labour to these discourses and corporate success. The Good Wife allows us to see the rhetoric of Lean In in action, as Alicia operates as a proto-Sandberg, embodying and animating lean-in feminism in a fictional world. Owing to its production context, as a CBS show produced during the so-called ‘golden age’ of US television, The Good Wife sits at the intersection of broadcast television traditions and cable's ‘quality’ tendencies. As a result, it is not as self-serious as other workplace dramas like Halt & Catch Fire (2014–2017), Billions (2016–2023) or Succession (2018–2023), and it is less progressive or self-aware than recent ‘women in corporate America’ series like The Bold Type (2017–2021), Younger (2015–2021) or The Good Fight (2017–2022). The Good Wife is a productive site to examine how regressive neoliberal feminist ideas, such as those presented by Sandberg, operate.

Historically, women have been considered ‘too emotional’ or ‘too irrational’ for serious corporate spaces. In Alicia's cold, unmoving face, The Good Wife offers a counterpoint to this cultural narrative. Whether in front of the media at press conferences, with clients or negotiating with colleagues, Alicia keeps her face relatively blank and affectless. Alicia is at times a cold, knotty and difficult character who is seemingly always performing for an audience. In foregrounding performance, The Good Wife also prioritises the emotional labour of that performance. Alicia's lack of facial expression is an iconic aspect of the character; as Lagerwey, Julia Leyda and Negra highlight, Margulies’ lack of facial affect ‘invite[s] our awareness of [her] need to manage and in some cases, repress “traditional” female emotionality’ (2016: np). Nussbaum (2016) describes Alicia as ‘a protagonist who never pulled off the mask she wore but hardened it into a shield’, while The New Yorker's Joshua Rothman (2014) characterises her as ‘troubled and unknowable’. Havas goes further, arguing that Margulies’ ‘opaque, sphinx-like’ (2022: 149) performance enables The Good Wife's ‘excessive refusal of emotive performance’ and resistance to any gestures towards melodrama (2022: 163). Alicia is the ideal vehicle for an argument about the centrality of feelings work to neoliberal feminism because she is not an expressive, melodramatic or overtly emotional figure who can be easily dismissed. Rather, Margulies’ stony portrayal acts as a calm, rational canvas through which the contradictions of neoliberal feminisms play out, rendering emotional labour as essential to corporate success.

At the start of The Good Wife, Alicia is a junior associate at her former classmate Will Gardner's (Josh Charles) corporate law firm Lockhart Gardner. Alicia's belated entry into the workforce means that she is perpetually on the back foot compared with her younger, more eager and flexible colleagues. The series’ first season depicts a yearlong competition between Alicia and Cary Agos (Matt Czuchry) for one associate position. Cary has recently graduated from college and often makes snide remarks about Alicia's age and inability to keep up with him. He regularly reminds Alicia that her job at Lockhart Gardner is contingent on her existing friendship with Will. Alicia is indebted to Will and thus she embodies Hochschild's assertion that one way to repay debt ‘is to do extra emotion work – especially emotion work that affirms, enhances, and celebrates the well-being and status of others’ ([1983] 2012: 112; emphasis in original). In emphasising Alicia's ‘debt’ to Will, Cary reinforces and naturalises the requirement that Alicia perform feelings work. At the end of season one when Alicia is awarded the associate position over Cary, he is furious and claims: ‘I had to work. I had to sweat. I had to make money for this firm’ (Season 1, Episode 22: ‘Hybristophilia’). Supporting bereaved clients, convincing clients to take large monetary settlements instead of going to court and thirteen years as a political wife and mother is not categorised as ‘work’ by Cary. Alicia does not have as many billable hours as Cary; therefore, he argues that she is less entitled to the associate position than he is. Yet, unlike Cary, Alicia does a considerable amount of unpaid, unbillable care work for the firm. This confrontation exemplifies how providing emotional support is ignored and obscured under patriarchal capitalism. Caregiving and relationship building is expected of Alicia in ways that it is not expected of Cary, but it is also an essential element of her success. Alicia's relationships (courtesy of her years as a political wife) are leveraged throughout the series into new clients, expert witnesses, financial backing and government roles, which precipitates high-profile opportunities that encourage and reward further emotional labour.

Alicia occupies a neoliberal feminist position: heeding Sandberg's call to overcome ‘internal barriers’ to success, such as a lack of self-confidence, an unwillingness to speak up and most importantly ‘pulling back when we should be leaning in’ (2013: 6). Alicia's need to manage her expression extends beyond her marriage and into her work as a lawyer, as she endures everyday misogyny and sexism. For instance, in a passing comment, a judge refers to Alicia as ‘young lady’ (Season 4, Episode 8: ‘Here Comes the Judge’), and she is expected, even required, to ignore these belittling comments to further her career. Here Alicia obeys what Hochschild calls ‘feelings rules’, whereby individuals sense the gap between the ideal feeling and the actual feeling that will be tolerated and alter their feelings and expression accordingly ([1983] 2012: 61). Much of the advice given to Lean In readers (presumed middle and upper class) hinges on adhering to often unspoken feelings rules around what kinds of emotions and expressions are permissible in the workplace. Examples of Alicia experiencing everyday sexism litter the diegesis and highlight how Alicia adheres to the ‘feelings rules’ of corporate America, modulating her emotions and expressions to attain professional success. When a reporter (played by Kristen Chenoweth) accuses Alicia of ‘dragging women back to the 1950s’ by remaining married to Peter (Season 4, Episode 1: ‘I Fought the Law’), she calmly and politely explains her decision as a matter of individual choice and asserts that she does not represent all women, just herself. In doing so, Alicia firmly positions herself as a neoliberal feminist; as Rottenberg writes, ‘the neoliberal feminist subject is thus mobilized to convert continued gender inequality from a structural problem into an individual affair’ (2018: 55). Alicia has internalised the logic of white patriarchy and its feelings rules, and in doing so she has become not just a loyal foot solider but also an advocate.

Not only does Alicia embody what Lagerwey, Leyda and Negra (2016) call a ‘thematics of resilience’ but she also encourages others to do so. When Alicia assists military lawyer Captain Laura Hellinger (Amanda Peet) to sue the military contractor who employed her attempted rapist, she encourages Captain Hellinger to accept the limitations of the military justice system. After losing the case, Captain Hellinger asks Alicia, ‘What do you do when it's all over?’ and Alicia replies, ‘You start up again’ (Season 4, Episode 6: ‘The Art of War’). The resilience and emotional labour required to ‘lean in’ to inequitable systems is naturalised as Alicia explains that to be successful, women need to absorb the emotional and physical blows of patriarchy, repress their feelings and continue without justice or retribution. Alicia's willingness to lean in is underlined when she is contrasted against characters who refuse, such as Caitlin (Anna Camp) who leaves corporate law to be a full-time mother (Season 3, Episode 17: ‘Long Way Home’). Caitlin embodies the postfeminist ethos that Elspeth Probyn calls ‘choiceoisie’, whereby women are encouraged to think of feminist empowerment in terms of personal choice (1993: 282). In her hostile response to Caitlin, Alicia personifies Sandberg's assertion that we ‘move closer to the larger goal of true equality with each woman who leans in’ (2013: 11). Despite Sandberg's positive and seemingly inspiring rhetoric, the forms of empowerment offered by Lean In ultimately encourage women to change how they think and speak rather than challenge the systems that oppress and marginalise them.

After successfully restarting her career, Alicia is offered an equity partnership at Lockhart Gardner. This is a promotion of sorts, but it also requires her to ‘buy into’ the firm through an equity partner payment. While Alicia initially understood this partnership offer as a merit-based promotion, it is quickly revealed that she is the solution to the firm's financial trouble. At first Alicia is affronted and outraged, but her boss and name partner Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski) admonishes her for being ungrateful and disrespectful, saying, ‘You’re pouting, it's unbecoming … when the door that you’ve been knocking at finally swings open, you don’t ask why, you run through’ (Season 4, Episode 13: ‘The Seven Day Rule’). Alicia wants to believe that this promotion is solely the result of her ‘hard work’ and not a way for the firm to resolve debt. Despite identifying with second-wave feminism, Diane urges her to ‘lean in’ to opportunities irrespective of when and why they are presented. ⁴ Diane has absorbed and internalised the logics of corporate America, telling Alicia: ‘Put on your best gracious voice, find a way to wear a smile and then come into the conference room ready to thank the equity partners for giving you this opportunity’ (Season 4, Episode 13: ‘The Seven Day Rule’). The camera pushes slowly in on Alicia's face, as she swallows her feelings and prepares to greet the partners. When Alicia's emotions (or management of her emotions) are mobilised for the profit and benefit of others she is praised, but when she expresses emotions that are considered unproductive for others she is criticised. Ultimately, Alicia follows the feelings rules laid out for her by Diane: to be successful, women must take opportunities without question, not disrupt the status quo and manage their own feelings for the benefit and comfort of others. Managing expression, however, is only one element of the emotional labour required of neoliberal feminists, as it is equally important that women learn to manage others’ feelings as well as their own.

Both Lean In and The Good Wife use the term ‘hand holding’ to describe relational support but they deploy the term differently to describe distinct forms of work. For Sandberg ‘hand holding’ refers to mentoring, whereby mentees use a mentor's time to validate their feelings rather than addressing problems (2013: 71). Sandberg views this as wasting a highly skilled, busy mentor's time, and she advises mentees to ‘avoid complaining excessively’ (2013: 71). For Sandberg, ‘hand holding’ is an unnecessary, indulgent service provided to young women who are seeking a therapeutic relationship, not professional mentorship. The Good Wife, however, highlights the centrality of ‘hand holding’, whether in the form of mentorship, care work or building networks, to ‘leaning in’ to corporate success. Alicia is often required to persuade or manipulate others to think or act differently and this is a key element of her professional and political success. For instance, Peter's political advisor Eli (Alan Cumming) often uses Alicia to persuade Peter to make certain decisions or to comfort or cajole important donors and colleagues. In Alicia, we see both the economic and political benefits of ‘leaning in’ and the personal cost of doing invisible and undervalued emotional labour. Alicia's media persona is stoic, but behind closed doors the audience sees the toll this takes. Both Alicia and Peter are successful because of Alicia's willingness to manage her expression, which is articulated by Alicia's mother-in-law: ‘We women stay in the shadows, we smile, we comfort, we nurse, but we’re always there. You are a good woman, Alicia’ (Season 1, Episode 22: ‘Hybristophilia’). While this comment is perceived by Alicia as an out-dated misreading of her role in Peter's public redemption story, it reveals how she operates within the long tradition of political wives wielding ‘soft power’. While different in form and function, both The Good Wife and Lean In locate emotion management or ‘hand holding’ squarely as ‘women's work’ that is rationalised and commercialised to neoliberal ends.

Cultivating relationships is a key element of Sandberg's philosophy of corporate success. Throughout Lean In, she attributes her success to her willingness to build and maintain relationships. She discusses interviewing for the position of Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, writing, ‘I knew the most important determinant of my success would be my relationship with [Facebook founder] Mark [Zuckerberg]’ (Sandberg, 2013: 84). The Good Wife puts into action Sandberg's ideology, portraying Alicia's capacity to build relationships, manipulate people and ‘hand hold’ as essential to her success. Alicia undertakes large amounts of emotion management for the economic and political gain of others, including managing clients’ feelings, emotionally manipulating colleagues and clients and persuading jury members and witnesses. In season three, investigator Kalinda (Archie Panjabi) explains that Alicia's power lies in her ability to manipulate people, saying, ‘She's only a third-year associate, but she matters. She can persuade people. If you want to persuade Will, you persuade Alicia’ (Season 3, Episode 4: ‘Feeding the Rat’). Alicia's value to the firm is her aptitude for and willingness to undertake this kind of work, but it is rarely Alicia that directly benefits; instead, it is her employers or her husband's political career that reap the rewards. This resonates with Hochschild's ([1983] 2012: 19) argument that those who perform emotion work rarely benefit economically from it, and is an example of the transmutation of emotional systems in the pursuit of corporate success. Only in the later seasons do we see Alicia employ these skills towards her own political career and financial gain, which results in further isolation from her colleagues and family. In a moment of admonishment, Diane tells Alicia, ‘Respectfully Alicia, our interests have not been aligned since you used our office as a staging ground for your political career’ (Season 6, Episode 17: ‘Undisclosed Recipients’). When she performs emotional labour in service of her husband, family and workplace, as neoliberal feminism encourages women to do, she is rewarded, but when she mobilises these skills to benefit herself she is considered ambitious and manipulative. ⁵

In her marriage to Peter, the ‘hand holding’ expected of Alicia is literal: she is expected to hold his hand as he talks to the press and voters. Both the programme's first and last episodes feature a close-up tracking shot of Alicia and Peter holding hands as they walk towards the podium so he can address the press in the wake of a scandal. These two shots mirror each other and compound the notion that Alicia holds the family's political future in her hands. There are, however, two key differences between these scenes. In the first episode Peter's hand is at the front and he is leading Alicia, but in the final episode Alicia's hand is grasping Peter's and she is leading him to the press. Furthermore, when Peter finishes his speech in the first episode he reaches for Alicia's hand and it is available to him, but in the series’ final episode when he reaches for her hand it is not there. Alicia's value to her family, to their political dynasty and to her political backers is her literal and metaphorical hand holding. Yet over the course of The Good Wife's seven seasons Alicia has become a shrewd political operator, leaning into her ability to manipulate, cajole and hand hold to benefit her own career. The Good Wife offers a complex and contradictory picture of female corporate success in Alicia. She, at once, must negotiate the vestiges of postfeminist culture, while also willingly undertaking invisible, undervalued emotional labour.

Emotion as labour and liability

From The Good Wife's opening scene, Alicia has two primary skills: managing expression and providing relational emotional support or ‘hand holding’. While The Good Wife offers a ‘behind the scenes’ look at political wifehood and femininity, it also invests in a ‘traditional’ white-centric upper middle-class performance of emotion work, universalising it as normative. While this labour is largely invisible in the home, Alicia's corporate success is directly tied to her defence of her husband's actions in the media, her capacity to emotionally manipulate colleagues and clients, her influence over jury members and witnesses and the suppression of her own feelings for the benefit of her employers, clients and family. The Good Wife exemplifies how neoliberal feminism essentialises traditional feminine ‘soft’ skills like care work, emotion management, negotiation, relationship building and persuasion, but only when deployed for corporate, political or economic success. Alicia's capacity for and willingness to assume paid emotional labour is specifically upper middle class and white, as it relies on the invisible underpaid and unpaid domestic and care work often undertaken by poor women of colour. Emotional labour and care work in the domestic space remain invisible in the world of The Good Wife, because they cannot be effectively monetised or rationalised in service of the neoliberal subject. Alicia's relationship to and deployment of emotion work echoes lean in feminism, thus exposing its inherent contradictions and inadequacies.

Labour and work are at the core of feminist media discourses, both historically and today. Women's entry into the paid workforce in the USA was partly precipitated by second-wave feminism; since then, struggles for maternity leave and equal pay have dominated feminist discourse. US scripted TV has been central to these debates, with Mary Tyler Moore emblematic of working women in the 1970s and Ally McBeal representative of the failures of feminism in the 1990s. The neoliberal feminism of The Good Wife both redresses postfeminist culture around sex, femininity and empowerment, as argued elsewhere, and invests in individualist neoliberal feminisms that rely on feelings work. The Good Wife makes apparent how emotional labour is framed under neoliberal feminism as ‘women's work’ and thus reinscribes gender essentialisms. Contemporary neoliberal feminist discourses, such as those offered by Sandberg in Lean In, naturalise both women's ability to do emotional labour and the requirement of this labour for success in white heteropatriarchal corporate spaces. Through Alicia, The Good Wife exemplifies the feelings work demanded of women in Sandberg's world, ultimately rendering emotions (for women) as both labour and liability.