People began writing obituaries for the girlboss when she was just six years old. The Atlantic declared her demise a couple of months into the first US coronavirus lockdown in 2020, and Wired, CNN, Business Insider, Elle, and The Cut soon followed suit. The British magazine i-D called the girlboss “retrospectively cheugy” (uncool and dated), and the meme “gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss,” a parody of the bossbabely wellness gospel “eat, pray, love,” reigned supreme on the internet.
The subcultural enjoyment of anti-girlboss memes (for example, “no more girlbossing, only girlsleeping!”) stays consistently popular. It is a truth universally acknowledged, certainly on TikTok, that the girlboss “girlbossed too close to the sun.”
Yet the funeral for “trickle-down feminism,” eerily, keeps repeating itself, suggesting that, every time we report that the girlboss is dead, we’re being wishful. We seem to have a case of the girlboss is dead, long live the girlboss on our hands. Or, as Forbes put it, “girlboss may be over, but the woman founder is here to stay.” As is, for now, the celebration of people like the “Iron Lady of Israel,” genocidal prime minister Golda Meir (in a biopic starring Helen Mirren), and Ruth Handler, the inventor of a highly salable doll (in the hit movie Barbie).
After all, how could it be otherwise? How could the aspiration to own the means of production instead of alienating your labor possibly “die” in the absence of a mass movement against capitalism? Even the tradwife, despite her avowed commitment to wagelessness, is typically a self-optimizing influencer, firmly still in the formal economy.
The girlboss was born in a conversion-redemption story. “I entered adulthood believing that capitalism was a scam,” the term’s key popularizer Sophia Amoruso wrote in her memoir #Girlboss (2014), “but I’ve instead found that it’s a kind of alchemy. You combine hard work, creativity, and self-determination, and things start to happen.” Funnily enough, Marx also called capitalism a kind of alchemy, albeit his take was that—to be a capitalist—you combine other people’s work with something you own.
The funeral for “trickle-down feminism,” eerily, keeps repeating itself, suggesting that, every time we report that the girlboss is dead, we’re being wishful.
Still, as Amoruso herself implicitly recognized, the girlboss was no more an innovation than was the girldebtor, girljob, girldictator, girlsergeant, girlspy, or indeed, girlsploitation. She actually isn’t six years old at all—more like four hundred, if we remember Margaret Hardenbroeck. Or, if you like, fifty. In 1973, clerical workers in Boston set up a labor group, 9to5, which soon boasted thirteen chapters nationwide with ten thousand members (subsequently, they created a union: District 925 of the Service Employees International Union).
While the founders of 9to5 were New Left radicals, the group soon split into two strands—managerial versus mass activism—when the leadership allowed a gulf to form internally between its rank and file and subgroups like Women in Publishing. While the former prioritized “pulling together,” the latter’s priority was shattering glass ceilings.
It was here that the betrayal of pink-collar workers by their aspirational white-collar “sisters” began, or so the professor of business Allison Elias argues in The Rise of Corporate Feminism (2022). Within 9to5, blurring the lines between employees and managerial wannabe bosses, for example, by letting managers join unions, meant that, slowly but surely, to quote Jess Bergman, “bosses ate feminism” in the pink-collar sector.
The counterinsurgent how-to guide Games Mother Never Taught You: Corporate Gamesmanship for Women, by Betty Lehan Harragan of NOW, was published in 1977 and sold over a million copies. People like Harragan “were disdainful,” as Bergman attests, “of working women who set their sights any lower than CEO.”
Worse, Harragan’s guide to female upward mobility—which foreshadowed Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In manual of 2013—was only the most successful of a glut of professional similar self-help titles—for example, The Right Moves: Succeeding in a Man’s World Without a Harvard MBA (by Charlene Mitchell, 1985) and Feminine Leadership: Or How to Succeed in Business Without Being One of the Boys (Marilyn Loden, also 1985).
In the late socialist Barbara Ehrenreich’s opinion, it was books like these that transformed the “bra-less” 1970s image of the liberated woman into “a tidy executive who carries an attaché case and is skilled in discussing market shares and leveraged buy-outs.”
The whole post-2013 girlboss cultural trend, in short, is Games Mother Never Taught You rebooted—yassified. It is merely the cult of the entrepreneur, cynically using the latest signifiers of un-privilege (intersectional, and girl, in place of the working woman of yesteryear) to self-arrogate strategic innocence while anointing profit seeking with the elixir of progressivism.
To state the obvious: a wannabe boss, of any gender, espouses the hope of one day being an owner and a dominator instead of a hustler, let alone a comrade. Deep down, we know this; we know the matter is not actually remotely complicated, and that, as journalist Nicole Froio sums it up, “all girlbosses are bastards.”
Most of us will remain girlproles until we either overthrow class society or, individually, escape into the bossing class. Could it be me? Alongside Cinderella (marriage) plots, tales of professional ascent, entrepreneurial gratification, and upward class mobility such as Working Girl, Joy, I Care A Lot, Legally Blonde, The Devil Wears Prada, Self-Made, Shrill, Survival of the Thickest, and The Intern increasingly saturate our culture.
It is for this reason, pure and simple, that #Girlboss made such a splash. Our collective ears pricked up when we were told how, once upon a time, a pantsuited bossbabe was a vegan freegan, into “petty thievery,” psilocybin, and Earth First meets. Amoruso spilled the tea in retrospective disbelief:
I refused to buy new wood; too angry with capitalism’s disregard for sustainability, I furnished my places with a mix of sidewalk freebies and lifted merch instead. I dumpster-dived at Krispy Kreme, dated a guy who lived in a tree-house, and had hair upon my legs.
Thank God, the “fashion empire” builder’s road-to-Damascus moment came just sixteen pages later:
I got sick of listening to my friends whine about living in poverty while refusing to get a job. Compromise is just part of life. We all, at some point, find ourselves either directly or indirectly supporting something we disagree with. There are ways to avoid this, but it generally includes eating roadkill and making tampons out of socks.
Amoruso used to have principles. But then she realized: this is no way to live. Cut to the image of a new and reformed Sophia. She has renounced shoplifting and hitchhiking and is crying “tears of joy” because she now pays help to clean her house: “Yesterday’s underwear is clean and folded.”
Who folded it? No doubt the ghosts of the well-heeled Harriet Beecher Stowe, May French Sheldon, and Emmeline Pankhurst would all, in their own way, reproach me for asking such an undermining question. (I suspect even Alma White, the big business bishop, and Frances Willard, the “do-everything” temperance mogul, might give this clean-panties-wearing go-getter a hallelujah. Doing everything was always about foisting unromantic aspects of daily social reproduction onto the working classes anyway.)
Does an ambitious woman not deserve to exploit the wage relation, procuring herself a housekeeper, thereby freeing herself up for public feminist accomplishments? Why should the onus not to do so fall particularly on women, who are already at a disadvantage?
Remember that Anglo-feminism, in its earliest days, promised middle-class women economic freedom in the form of emigration to a land where servants were “cheap.” In this way, it was imperial feminists claiming racial exceptionalism that paved the way for capitalist feminists claiming moral exceptionalism.
Another extensive employer of domestic help—and boss of recent note—is Ivanka Trump. In contrast to Amoruso, this particular businesswoman is very much to the manor born and never hated capitalism. Wouldn’t you know, though, that the feminism she preaches is the same?
It’s actually very difficult, as Catherine Rottenberg, the author of The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism, points out, to distinguish between all the New York Times bestsellers in the feminist self-help genre, even though their authors are on different sides of the party/political aisle. Whether it’s Amoruso’s #Girlboss or Trump’s “how-to-succeed guide” Women Who Work, or Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly’s Settle for More, or even the extended liberal think piece Unfinished Business by former Princeton dean Anne-Marie Slaughter, the advice is always mainly that women should work—yes, just work, more—on all facets of their life.
It’s actually very difficult to distinguish between all the New York Times bestsellers in the feminist self-help genre, even though their authors are on different sides of the party/political aisle.
The emphases change from text to text, but the bottom line is mostly, to quote financial coach Glinda Bridgforth, “girl, get your money straight.”
The gospel of feminist capitalism is hard to resist. None other than bell hooks, the black feminist philosopher, refers to Bridgforth’s book Girl, Get Your Money Straight: A Sister’s Guide to Healing Your Bank Account and Funding Your Dreams in seven Simple Steps as a “manifesto” she “believes in.”
Ironically, hooks herself is one of the most-quoted critics of the “lean in feminism” of Sheryl Sandberg, the now billionaire, hailed by Gloria Steinem as “feminism’s new boss,” who was chief operating officer at Facebook between 2008 and 2022. While Forbes in 2013 proclaimed Sandberg the fifth-most influential woman in the world, and Time ranked her as one of the world’s one hundred “leaders,” hooks decried Sandberg’s brand as “faux feminism” and a “whites-only proposition.”
Surveying Sandberg’s 2010 TED Talk (“Why We Have Too Few Women Leaders”) and her mega-bestseller Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, hooks saw not feminism, but a “corporate infusion of gender equality.” Sandberg’s inability to name white supremacy, or even racial difference, rightly struck hooks as racist. Quoting Sandberg’s 2011 commencement speech at Barnard—”I hope that you have the ambition to lean in to your career and run the world, because the world needs you to change it”—hooks heard “a call to support and perpetuate first world imperialism.”
The iconic author of All About Love and Feminism Is for Everybody was absolutely right to mock Sandberg’s claim, in Lean In, that “conditions for all women will improve when there are more women in leadership roles giving strong and powerful voice to their needs and concerns.” This is the kind of fantasy of cross-class solidarity that doomed the 1970s clerical workers’ movement.
Ironically, however, not long after she published her broadside against the white feminist corporate executive’s bestseller, bell hooks boasted at an event at the New School in New York about being a landlord for feminist reasons. Criticism of this, at the time, stayed in the back channels.
But as political scientist Sophie Smith insists, “Honoring hooks doesn’t require deifying her.” Implicit in hooks’s “get your money” speeches, disappointingly, is the idea that the power garnered by extracting rents from commodified housing is good when the deed owners are black women.
Still, it was thanks in large part to hooks’s widely referenced 2013 critique of Lean In that when a bevy of reviewers later lambasted the shallowness of both #Girlboss and—to a far greater extent—Women Who Work, they were shooting fish in a barrel. In addition to hooks, a small army of comedians and leftists had clamored loudly against boss feminism.
At CNN, Sandberg allies bewailed the trashing of a successful woman. Undeterred, Ali Wong said she didn’t want to lean in, she wanted to lie down. Two authors published books called Lean Out, and three leading socialists penned a counter-manifesto, Feminism for the 99%.
It worked—somewhat. Lean In received flack for being elitist in the Times, the Washington Post, and on NPR. By 2018, amid brewing criminal investigations into Facebook over data misuse, even celebrities knew to avoid uncritical Sandbergism. No less than “Mom-in-Chief” Michelle Obama threw shade: “It’s not enough to lean in because that shit don’t work all the time.”
The cover of Time pleaded with us not to “hate her because she’s successful.” Few and far between were those cultural pundits who hadn’t heard by 2018, that you basically had to be rich to “have it all” in the manner recommended by Sandberg.
The antifeminist “trashers,” as well as comradely feminist killjoys and comedians, did undoubtedly do damage to the credibility of lean-in-ism. At the same time, the self-styled “feminist companies” dulled the ideology’s sheen all by themselves.
In 2015, Amoruso got sued for firing three workers from Nasty Gal
, her start-up, just before they were scheduled to go on maternity leave. Netflix accordingly canceled Girlboss, a show based on her life, and the ex-freegan “She-E-O” had to file for bankruptcy.
Meanwhile, the technology behind biomedical girlboss Elizabeth Holmes’s start-up Theranos was exposed as a complete sham. Miki Agrawal, the founder of Thinx, a “vag-tastic,” wellness-oriented, period-underwear brand, was revealed to preside over a culture of fear, sexual harassment, and ageism, in which members of the mostly female, twentysomething staff were routinely referred to as “children,” while the few employees in their thirties were “nannies.”
Accusations of sinister labor practices among “female-founded” firms became common. The public heard of the “jarring mismatch between feminist mission and lived reality” at, for example, Babeland, the woman and queer-owned sex toy store where workers unionized in 2016.
Former Babeland employee Lena Solow testified:
Customers experience Babeland as a welcoming and fun place to learn about their bodies and celebrate pleasure. But for workers, the experience was far from a feminist ideal. It wasn’t until we bargained our first contract that we secured basic safety protections from workplace harassment, job security, and higher wages for the mostly queer and trans workplace.
In short order, Steph Korey (of the luggage brand Away), Audrey Gelman (of the women-only coworking space The Wing), Leandra Cohen (Man Repeller), Jen Gotch (Ban.do), Christene Barberich (Refinery29), Anna Wintour (Vogue), and Emily Weiss (Glossier) were all forced to step down and/or apologize for their racist management styles. And as they fell from grace, girlboss companies were disproportionately shamed in the press for their unremarkable corporate nefariousness.
Sexism was prevalent in the public commentary on the hardly surprising news that an industry self-defined as liberatory for “women” (as though an industry could ever be collectively liberatory) had failed to make good. For journalist Moira Donegan, it was clear that girlbossery “attracted contempt far out of proportion to its actual numbers or influence.”
“Anti-girlboss memes are an invitation to imagine a world that is not structured by capital, wealth accumulation and exploitation.”
Yet, too, it was the capitalist women who made the claim to moral exceptionalism (by virtue of their “female founded”-ness) in the first place. When they turned out to be the same as the old bosses, and we held them to a higher standard, it is fair to say that that standard was of their own making in the first place.
But ultimately, bosses have more to fear than unduly harsh, even sexist, popular judgment. In 2009, all across France, militant factory workers revived the common 1968-era tactic of “bossnapping,” that is, taking bosses hostage. On the plus side for them, in some cases the hostages were served moules-frites. Were a group of Nasty Gal employees to bossnap Ms. Amoruso, they could serve vegan lentils and dumpstered donuts.
A steady trickle of girlboss disgraces colored the 2010s and early 2020s, accompanied by a constant loop of pro-girlboss, anti-girlboss, and anti-anti-girlboss opinionating on the part of the commentariat. Some leftist “anti-work” critique, as I have suggested, penetrated the zeitgeist, including in the form of “girlresting, girlnapping” memes.
“Anti-girlboss memes are an invitation,” Froio writes, “to imagine a world that is not structured by capital, wealth accumulation and exploitation—an invitation to imagine a world where our time really belongs to us rather than to our employers and our patriarchs.” The crimes of manbosses still outnumbered the girlboss scandal sheet, but a certain “a plague on both your houses” sentiment gained ground among Generation Z.
Unfortunately, when it comes to middle-class millennial Americans, those who are aware that there is an “opposite” feminist view to Lean In are likely to think that it consists of Anne-Marie Slaughter’s one. Slaughter’s Unfinished Business, in reality, is nearly identical, and simply spends a little more time “revaluing” the time a woman spends at home. “If family comes first, work does not come second.”
Thus, Michelle Obama’s line about leaning in— “that shit don’t work”—was widely read to be “Team Slaughter.” (Perhaps relevantly, Slaughter directed policy planning under President Barack Obama.) Slaughter made noises about universal childcare provision, and stressed that “workplaces, not women, need to change.”
But Sandberg and Slaughter fundamentally agreed that the elusive key to “work-family balance” is mostly attitudinal. While the media insisted on pitting Slaughter and Sandberg against one another, “both women’s fundamental assumptions— that achieving a balance constitutes liberation and progress for women—are virtually indistinguishable” trickle-down ideologies, as Rottenberg notes:
Sandberg focuses on changing women’s attitudes about work and self, exhorting them to “lean in” to their careers. Slaughter focuses on legitimating women’s “natural” commitment toward families, while urging social institutions to make room for these attitudes. In both cases there is a deeply held conviction that if high-potential women undertake the task of revaluing their ambition (Sandberg) or the normative expectation that work comes first (Slaughter), then all women will be empowered and will be able to carve out their own felicitous work-family balance.
The First Lady may have dissed the girlboss, in other words, but she did not state the obvious—that both shattering glass ceilings at Fortune 500 firms (à la Sandberg) and letting family come first (à la Slaughter) does less than nothing for people scrubbing the floors at both Facebook HQ and the homes of ruling-class politicians.
The terms lean in and girlboss have come to seem like low-hanging fruit, unworthy of inclusion in, say, a discussion of fascisant dynamics within feminism. It is lurching along, undead. But as the journalist Rafia Zakaria sees it, girlbosses haven’t so much lost ground as changed their costumes: “All of them are still there, wearing intersectional masks that fall off whenever they see a brown feminist stepping out of line.”
Secretly, perhaps, even these wounded egos sense the truth: that the girlboss mirage—the desire that “a visionary woman can be single-handedly responsible for creating an empire and fatally wounding sexism in the process,” as scholar Sarah Arkebauer puts it—cannot but drag itself down in the end. “When these empires falter, the retreat from the top hits similar notes as the rise; the girlboss can’t be culpable—women are judged too harshly, she was trying her best, how could she have known.”
The boss form lives, as does the violently weaponizable innocence its feminine avatars afford.
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Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation by Sophie Lewis is published by Haymarket Books. Excerpt reprinted with permission.
