I asked the two women if they had heard of Lean In. Randall said she had seen a couple of Sandberg’s TV appearances, but didn’t quite understand the message. I told her that Lean In argues that women need to break down “internal obstacles” within themselves that are preventing them from moving up the work ladder. “There are a lot of barriers women face,” Randall said. She ticked off a few: lousy pay, no benefits, no sick leave, no unions, sexism, and a still highly sex segregated workforce. “There are lots of jobs that are still considered women’s work,” she said. “In one of the mills, I was actually referred to as ‘the girl.’”

What Randall described is what most American working women face. And they are also the sort of problems that the advocates of Lean In and its sister impulses must address if they are not to be seen as individual women empowering themselves by deserting other women—if they are to be called, as Sheryl Sandberg calls herself, feminist.

What about “internal obstacles,” I asked Randall—the sort of obstacles that cause women to curb their ambitions because they’re afraid they won’t be likable? She pondered the question for a time. “I don’t know,” she said finally. “That’s just not the world I came from.”