The club where business meets gender politics

I’m on a nondescript block of New York’s Flatiron District, searching for a glimpse into the resistance against Donald Trump — or at least one version of it.

At the top of the elevator in a bland, 12-storey office building, concrete gives way to a rose-tinted penthouse filled with pastel rugs and hanging plants. Women type on laptops, sipping lime-infused water as sunlight cascades through industrial windows with striking views of the Empire State building.

The space is drenched in varying shades of dusty rose — the palette dubbed “millennial pink”. It is defiantly feminine. Posters of Hillary Clinton, captioned “Hillz Yaaas”, line mint green walls. There’s a feminist library organised by colour and a “freak out” room that doubles as a breastfeeding centre. On a taupe couch, Tavi Gevinson, the 21-year-old editor and blogger who Lady Gaga declared “the future of journalism”, is hunched over a MacBook.

I am in The Wing.

In January the then recently opened women’s club hosted some of the organisers of what would be the largest protest in recent US history — the women’s march that followed the inauguration of President Trump. It was also here that the firebrand Democratic senator Kirsten Gillibrand recently spoke about the future of women in America and “how to resist” in 2017.

But The Wing was founded with a decidedly less existential vision. Tired of changing clothes in Starbucks bathrooms in between meetings across New York, Audrey Gelman, a public relations consultant and former press aide to Clinton, dreamt up a place where women could work, network and hang out — without men. With co-founder Lauren Kassan, she raised $2.4m to create a place that “wasn’t just the Costco of co-working”, with aspirations to resurrect the atmosphere of the women’s clubs of the late 19th and early 20th century suffrage movement. Amy Woodside, a website founder from New Zealand and club member, explains the appeal. “There are other places in New York that have more of a dude vibe. Coming here, there’s a sense of comfort, you can fully relax. It’s hard to articulate without demonising men — which is obviously a stigma attached to feminism — but it is very true and, for me, preferable.”

The Wing opened its doors last October, a few weeks before the US presidential election, when Clinton still seemed the most likely winner. At the time, says Gelman, she expected it would be a “nice-to-have” as the first woman president entered the White House.

Things have turned out differently. On election night, what had been a planned victory party at The Wing turned into a funeral. “It felt like everyone took bad drugs,” Gelman says. In the months that followed, under a male president who has bragged on tape about assaulting women, the space has become a “need-to-have” for many women. A waiting list of 8,000 is willing to pay $2,250 a year for a spot at the club. Its 700 members range from robot engineers and police officers to the first female secretary to the governor of New York. Flower-arranging tutorials and Beyoncé dance lessons have been supplemented by sessions with a psychologist to deal with “Trump hangovers” and parties to write letters to senators.

Gelman herself admits, “I didn’t necessarily think that we would be using this space weekly for political purposes. But the thing that we see from our members is that they’re so interested right now in activism and getting involved.” Trump’s election “uncorked a lot of ugliness”, she adds, “And I think any woman who has a professional life feels it”.

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In the wake of an election that morphed into a battle of the sexes, the popularity of a club like The Wing should not come as a surprise. The January women’s march spanned all seven continents. Since election day, more than 4,000 women have told Democratic groups they want to run for office — four times higher than in the prior 22 months combined.

Theda Skocpol, a Harvard professor who spent the past four decades writing books on political uprisings ranging from the Tea Party to the Russian Revolution, is now studying post-Trump activism in swing states. She calls me less than a minute after I email her: “I can tell you so far, the evidence is just overwhelming. Women are leading these so-called resist groups and networks. In pockets across the country, there’s movement happening everywhere, and women are overwhelmingly in the lead.”

For many — or at least many of the 54 per cent of women who voted for her — Clinton’s loss eviscerated certain notions of women’s progress. Mainstream feminism during Barack Obama’s presidency was often associated with a careerist mantra of empowerment, typified by the Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg. Ivanka Trump’s own attempt to market herself as a bastion of the working woman is an offshoot of this feminism. But it’s a message that depends on structures that were taken for granted under Obama, and on policies, such as abortion rights guaranteed by the Supreme Court, that Trump senior threatens to tear apart.

As the administration pushes legislation that could allow insurance companies to charge higher fees for those with trauma related to sexual assault, the shiny lean-in doctrine as promoted by Sandberg feels outdated, even out of touch. By contrast, today’s incarnation of feminism is “the most politically charged since the 1960s”, says Karen Blair, a professor at Central Washington University who specialises in women’s associations. She believes that the centuries-old tradition of women’s clubs “bubbles up more vehemently at certain times in history . . . this is one of those moments.”

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At times The Wing veers into caricature, making me feel like I’m living in a chic feminist version of The Truman Show. One woman, speaking on the phone to an “Instagram influencer”, gushes that the space is the “best thing to ever happen to me personally or professionally”. Another struts into the room wearing sweeping olive green culottes and a group hisses: “God, your outfit!”

Other moments are familiar in the best way. One woman walks in just after 6pm, orders a glass of white wine and reads a magazine alone in a corner, the universal gesture of washing off the day. Across the table an older woman is mentoring a 24-year-old, both in black turtlenecks. “I know it seems like the world is heading in a worse direction,” she says sincerely, shaking her head at whatever grievance the younger woman has just aired. “Do you have a therapist?”

Gelman is in many ways a natural candidate to lead a pseudo-sorority slash feminist coalition. She is well connected: she worked for years in city politics, her wedding was covered by Vogue, and she is a long-time friend of the writer and director Lena Dunham. But she also relishes a perceived outsider status. She calls herself a “goth kid”, with too much social anxiety to stomach networking conferences (“I can’t do the nametags”), and identifies as a “red diaper baby” with little business savvy (“What is marketing, like, actually?” she replies when I note The Wing’s Instagram presence).

At times she seems caught between conflicting tugs to speak her mind and maintain a level of packaged neutrality for someone who spent years leading public relations for the New York City comptroller. “I always, you know, had a very clear political point of view,” she says wryly. But her stances seem to be paying off. In addition to the demand for membership, an e-commerce store has “really taken off”, with merchandise such as a keychain that reads, “GIRLS DOING WHATEVER THE FUCK THEY WANT IN 2017”, which drew the endorsement of Gloria Steinem.

Big brands such as Chanel and Hulu, keen to place their products before the eyes of perceived influential shoppers, have also partnered with The Wing. Where last year it was hard to find investors as “two 28-year-old girls who had, like, no record of doing anything”, this, says Gelman, is no longer the case. In April The Wing raised $8m in series A funding from investors such as venture capital group New Enterprise Associates, which will bankroll three more locations and a bigger staff.

According to Scott Galloway, marketing professor at New York University, in the Trump era “being perceived as a female-friendly firm is just smart”. There is currency for companies in being, or at least appearing, socially conscious, he says, arguing that this has shielded the “big four” technology groups — Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple — from scrutiny in Washington.

Gelman is self-aware enough to admit that for all the feminist idealism of its members this is also a moneymaking venture. “It’s . . . challenging. Like any other male-owned co-working space, we’re similarly rooted in capitalism.”

Critiques have centred on The Wing’s exclusivity. Membership fees are similar to other trendy co-working spots, such as WeWork, though lower than that of swanky social clubs such as Soho House. Prof Blair says these complaints are a throwback to the earlier clubs. “Very rich women bankrolled the fight for the vote in the early 20th century.”

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“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” says Alexis Coe, as she presents me with a 100-page Google document filled with newspaper clippings, chronicling clubs dating back to the 1860s.

Coe, a historian whose help Gelman enlisted to craft The Wing with an eye towards the club movements of previous eras, says the closest blueprint was Sorosis, which most recognise as the first proper US women’s club. When Jane Croly, a news reporter, was excluded from a dinner honouring Charles Dickens in 1868, she and other female journalists in New York formed the group.

Over time the trend yielded ever more specific clubs: for women who advocated against resting your hands on the subway rails, for daughters of the Confederacy, for women who were born in California but now lived in New York. At its peak, more than 5,000 women’s clubs had sprouted across the US, despite former president Grover Cleveland warning that their rise “directly menaces the integrity of our homes”. The movement culminated with women winning the right to vote in 1920, then went to sleep as world wars and the Great Depression took over, before a resurgence in the 1960s, an activist-heavy decade during which women fought for reproductive rights.

The Wing is not the only, nor the first, millennial women’s club. A number of women-centric co-working spaces have popped up in and around San Francisco, promoting themselves as an antidote to a concept that their 19th century predecessors couldn’t have predicted: a technology community dominated by men.

Ellen Pao, the former chief executive of Reddit who was fired from her post at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins in arguably Silicon Valley’s highest-profile discrimination case, told me it’s “completely understandable” for companies such as The Wing to emerge as places for women to “be themselves, often in a work environment that doesn’t”. Such groups can’t solve the discrimination problem alone, she says. But they can contribute to a “comprehensive, inclusive solution that does”.

If The Wing’s pastels are a gesture away from old boys’ clubs, the White House, a new co-working location in San Francisco, cultivates its defiance in the opposite way, with dark mahogany tables and plush leather seats meant to mimic the smoky gentleman’s clubs of the 1950s. Founder Priya Kuber, who has for years worked in Silicon Valley co-working spaces with a “heavy and unspoken bro-code”, says she wants to create a workplace where women can “feel free”.

These new entrants have also stirred into action that monolith of women’s clubs — the 127-year-old General Federation of Women’s Clubs, whose members have included Eleanor Roosevelt and reformer Jane Addams — into a discussion about staying relevant. “I don’t want to say we have to reinvent ourselves, but I think we need to reintroduce ourselves,” says Rosemary Thomas, chief operating officer of the GFWC.

The organisation, which has nearly 100,000 members spanning more than 600 clubs around the world, was set up in 1890 by Croly, who envisaged it as a way to unite the pioneering clubs that had sprouted across the US.

Like Sandberg’s Lean In non-profit, the GFWC strives to be apolitical, but Thomas says, “We certainly are talking about somehow capturing [political] interest into our organisation,” adding, “It’s just a different climate for women in general.” Clubs are moving their meetings to take place in the evenings because many women work full-time. “They don’t need a reason to get out of the house now . . . so we need a different model to attract them.”

As cupcakes are delivered to a glass coffee table across from us, I ask Gelman what she’s learnt. She launches into a more sweeping dissection of what women are searching for in 2017, touching on the decline of organised religion among millennials, our screen-driven culture and the isolation it brings, the value of face-to-face interactions in making us feel tethered to something.

“People don’t go to church or synagogue any more, or at least millennials,” she says. “Some members here say, ‘You know, I’ve felt so lonely.’ ”

Anna Nicolaou is the FT’s US retail and consumer correspondent

Photographs: Martine Fougeron