I can’t help but cringe whenever I hear a powerful woman labeled as a girlboss. Though it always seems patronizing to me, I also understand why some women would want to reclaim the feminine associations of the word “girl” and demonstrate that this aspect of their identity is not contrary to positions of leadership or power. However, looking deeper into the rhetoric behind girlboss and the resulting strain of girlboss feminism revealed more issues with the term than I previously thought.
The term girlboss originated from Sophia Amoruso’s 2014 book #girlboss, a memoir meets self-help book about how Amoruso went from high school dropout working odd jobs to the founder and chairman of Nasty Gal retailer before the age of thirty. As defined in the book, a #girlboss is “someone who’s in charge of her own life. She gets what she wants because she works for it.” Despite the simplicity of this definition, there are many elements to being girlboss.
As you might imagine from the “boss” element of the title, girlboss ideology is, at its core, concerned with entrepreneurship and business. As Amoruso’s book recounts how she built her own retailing business, much of her advice about how to become a girlboss is concerned with similar ideas about business and productivity. In many ways, girlboss feminism is a repackaging of the original American mythos in pink femininity, as it promises success to any women who tries her hardest.
Just as the original American dream, this ideology ignores the inequality inherent to American systems and the varying levels of discrimination faced by women of differing identities. It also does little to address the everyday obstacles faced by women in the workforce, instead encouraging them to define success as it has been constructed by patriarchal power structures of corporations. Instead of promoting strains of feminism that actually work to confront systematic challenges, such as intersectionality, girlboss feminism favors hollow promises of prosperity packaged in a false message of empowerment.
Another issue with girlboss feminism is how its faux-feminist rhetoric has been used to further capitalist agendas. In The Lies of the Bossbabes — How MLMs are Holding Back Feminism, Jessica Wood explains how Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) companies often use the language of “bossbabe” feminism to target and appeal to women. Not only do MLMs often sell unnecessary, stereotypically feminine products, but they also appeal to women by promising the opportunity to be a stay-at-home mom while still being a successful entrepreneur. In this way, their marketing plays off the idea that a successful woman must be both a dedicated, at-home caretaker and an economically productive businesswoman. Instead of empowering women to define womanhood in their own terms, the girlboss feminism of MLMs furthers a specific, unattainable image of what it means to be a successful woman.
Though the term is often used ironically nowadays, girlboss feminism still pervades our culture and I continue to hear the term girlboss applied to strong, powerful women. While this article only touches the surface of what is wrong with this strain of feminism, its failings are obvious. I hope we can collectively move past such ideologies and focus on dismantling the harmful systems in place against women.