Yep

On the soullessness of careerist from Barbara Bush in 1990.

These seemingly anodyne, Hallmark-y words, when taken seriously, are the most subversive words that could be uttered, then or now, on a college campus—a place where subversive words are supposed to be prized and protected but often aren’t. Mrs. Bush’s subversion wasn’t a matter of left or right, or even of feminism or traditionalism. She cut much deeper, into an American faith that transcends political categories. 

This is the faith of careerism. For generations, career had been the guiding light of the bourgeois American male. Work came before family, even if work was done in service of family, as many men told themselves it was. The result was that fathers and mothers of the broad middle class lived separate lives: men at work, women at home to attend to domestic matters, kids above all. Mrs. Bush understood that this division of labor, enforced through countless social customs and economic arrangements, was manifestly unfair to women who wanted something different, and no decent person could object to dismantling the barriers that stood in the way of their ambitions. But in this otherwise admirable goal, Mrs. Bush suggested, the advocates of women’s equality overshot. They went beyond making materialism an option to making it an expectation, perhaps even mandatory. 

They fell for the great lie at the heart of American business and professional life as men had lived it: that a single-minded pursuit of professional success was the surest source of personal fulfillment. The lie was well known to be a lie. 

By 1990, we had already accumulated a vast literature about the soullessness of the modern corporation, the emotional poverty of “the organization man,” the terrible spiritual price paid for capitalist conformity. The best of the 1960s rebellion briefly understood this. But then came Reaganism, the valorization of the all-conquering market, the glorification of material advancement. When Mrs. Bush spoke to Wellesley’s class of 1990, many self-declared feminists had fallen hard for the unforgiving materialism of a liberal society and the market economy. Feminism itself got tangled up in a wan and desiccated view of what life is for. 

Well, that was then. It was always a “First World problem” anyway, as we call them nowadays. The debate is long behind us. The materialists won. We’re all careerists now, men and women alike. 

The enormous success of Sheryl Sandberg’s chilling Lean In is proof of that. For Sandberg, the worthiest goal in a well-lived life will be found in the steady march through the cubicles of corporate America straight into the CEO’s corner office, or as near to it as you can get. Power is the object—power as successful businessmen have always defined it: lots of money to spend, lots of subordinates to boss around, nice houses, nice vacations, work, work, work . . .