The Wing: how an exclusive women's club sparked a thousand arguments
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.
Audrey Gelman, the company’s co-founder and CEO, often tells The Wing’s origin story roughly as follows: she was working as a press secretary, and later as a political consultant, dashing from city to city and from meetings to parties. This lifestyle forced her to change her outfits in Starbucks and Amtrak bathrooms, places she found “semi-degrading”. She dreamed of having a more dignified place to go, where women like her – talented, outgoing, highly ambitious – could find like-minded souls, get changed and charge their phones in peace. Thus the idea for The Wing was born.
The company now has eight locations – three in New York City, and one each in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston and Washington DC, with five more scheduled to open imminently. Its first international outpost, on Great Portland Street in London, opens next week. Second locations in London, San Francisco and LA are in the works; there will be 20 Wings by 2020. Over the past two years, The Wing has raised $117.5m in funding, attracting a formidable and diverse array of investors, whose ranks include Serena Williams, President Obama’s friend and former senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, and members of the US women’s soccer team.
Since the moment it opened its doors three years ago, The Wing has attracted the kind of buzz, funding and controversy usually reserved for projects involving Gwyneth Paltrow or Lena Dunham. (Not totally coincidentally, Dunham is a close friend of Gelman’s and a Wing founding member. Gelman had a cameo on Girls, and was famously the basis for the character of .) The attention The Wing generates is, in large part, because it was founded upon a paradox: its brand is steeped in the feminist language of emancipation, empowerment and equality, while its business is based on one of society’s most elitist institutions: the private members’ club. The result is that the company has become a kind of proxy for national debates over issues of gender, race, inclusivity, intersectionality and the limits and possibilities of neoliberal democratic politics. And for The Cricketer magazine, and 16 times less than the total youth membership of the .
