Reese Witherspoon, along with several other well-known Hollywood faces, have become successful in more than one area in life, and have every right to be proud of it. While Witherspoon is famously known for her role as Elle Woods in the Legally Blonde franchise, she’s also a very successful business woman and mother. Recently, she opened up about her frustrations towards a tone-deaf 2015 Time article that recognized Witherspoon, Jessica Alba, Blake Lively and more, for being successful business women but in a rather disrespectful way.
During an interview on the We Are Supported By podcast, she discussed her thoughts on the article, admitting that she burst into tears after seeing it because of the disrespectful way it stereotyped women versus men. “I had started a clothing business. Gwyneth was really growing Goop. Blake Lively had a business, Jessica Alba had a business and they did a caricature cartoon of all of us,” she explained according to Too Fab. “We were in ballgowns and they stuck our heads on, and Jessica was holding an iron and I was holding a vacuum cleaner. The whole thing as so offensive that I burst into tears.”
The title of the story was “Hollywood’s New Domestic Divas.” Despite the magazine apologizing for their offensive photos, Witherspoon revealed that she felt by the time they got around to it, the damage was already done. “I’m not even talking about 10 years ago. I’m talking about 2015 when we decided, OK we’re going to be entrepreneurial, take a swing, invest our own money, our own time, or own reputation and try to do something that George Clooney has done, Robert De Niro has done — and getting lampooned for it,” she explained.
“That message to little girls is: ‘If you’ve had success in one area, you can’t have success in another,'” she continued. “There’s several women who’ve said acting is not for me: ‘I don’t want to be an actress anymore. I want to do things that are entrepreneurial and want to have a different kind of life for my family,'” While Witherspoon has her own clothing store in Nashville and she started her own production company, Hello Sunshine, along with a slew of other successes, she’s still managed to keep a successful acting career along the way, with one of her more recently projects, The Morning Show on Apple TV+ being a fan-favorite.