How to grieve the Girlboss
What’s next for a generation of women who don’t aspire to climb the corporate ladder
A little over a month ago, Vogue published an opinion piece by Daisy Jones that tickled me just a tad too much. Maybe it was because I had been an aspiring card-holder of the girlboss club, but something about Vogue’s Instagram reference on ‘the death of the girlboss mentality’ was annoyingly captivating. ‘Wait, we are killing the Gilboss now?’ I thought, with a sting of anger, surprisingly followed by a slipped ‘oh, thank fuck for that!’
Well, I was late to the game. It turns out that the term ‘Girlboss culture,’ explored by Jones in her article, had already gathered a plethora of haters in the last few years. If it initially meant to describe the wave of female CEO’s and career woman wanna-bes in rise, the term has most recently been associated with an ‘intersection of white feminism and hustle culture’ and ‘remunerative quasi-feminist liberation fantasy’ promoted by a specific demographic labeled by The Guardian as a ‘pinkwashed hypercapitalist career queen.’ The terms scoff the short-lived reverie of empowerment sold through cute outfits and late nights that turned structural oppression into a self-help industry. And they make sense.
