You Better Work Bitch
For Women's History Month, I'm asking one simple question: Can That Girlboss Have It All???
Hey! Just a heads up if you’re reading this on e-mail: it may cut off in your inbox. To finish reading, you can click the title and read it on the site! 🍊
What does it mean to have it all?
“She is not the same woman in each magazine advertisement, but she is the same idea” Arlie Hochschild wrote in her book The Second Shift. The working mother is a “liberated” woman who knows how to balance her inherent femininity with the adopted masculinity of participating in the workforce and making money. She can do it all. She has it all. She earned it all. She deserves it all.
Bullshit, But Make It Feminist
Having it all is a term born out of a bastardized version of feminism and the Reaganomic culture of the 1980s. From 1960, women re-entered the workforce in record numbers since World War II. They were also forced to buy into the pop feminist idea that they could do both the domestic household labor and bring home a paycheck. They had to if they were going to keep up with their male counterparts, who were going home to their wives and, according to Hochschild’s extensive work, tuning out.
Married working men were not (and statistically most still are not) going home to take care of their children, they weren’t going home to cook dinner or help around the house in any significant way, some weren’t even going home to keep track of the finances, they were coming home to tune everything out. The whole reason they had wives in the first place was to take care of all of that stuff so they could tune out, that was the luxury and sacrifice of marriage. And now women wanted to go outside of the home where they already had so many responsibilities?? That was well and good, but they shouldn’t expect any support.
The logic of many of the men in Hochschild’s work was that their wives would see how hard it was to work both in and out of the home, quit, and return to the refuge of domestic life. But women didn’t want to give up that independence so easily. The luxury for them was leaving the home, speaking to people their own age about things other than children and homemaking, having a sense (even if it was limited) of social and financial autonomy. So, they continued to work, many determined to prove naysayers wrong.
But they weren’t. Women who admitted how hard it was to raise a family, do the domestic labor, maintain a healthy, happy marriage and go to work were also real about how one of those things has to be sacrificed for the sake of their sanity. You can hire a housekeeper, you can go to marriage counseling, you can put your kids in daycare, but any or all of those things will eat into the paycheck you spent so much time proving you could earn while also juggling all of the other things.
So, instead of facing this reality, the culture at the time seemed to suggest that if you work hard enough, having it all was possible and not only that, but also that you’re a caliber above the rest. Hochschild observes that
“the common portrayal of the supermom suggests that she is energetic and competent because these are her personal characteristics, not because she has been forced to adapt to an overly demanding schedule.”
But who was dictating that culture?
According to Hochschild, two books seem to be at the nexus: Having it All by Helen Gurley Brown and The Superwoman Syndrome by Marjorie Shaevitz. But in Jennifer Szalai’s article “The Complicated Origins of ‘Having It All,’” Brown, at one time editor and chief at Cosmo Magazine, hated the title of her book.
“'Having It All’ sounds so [expletive] cliché to me” Brown once stated, explaining that she wrote her book for what she calls “mouseburgers” or plain, common women with no distinguishing looks or intellect. Get work done (injections, plastic, silicone, etc.), buy clothes you can’t afford, sleep with your boss, do whatever to make it from secretary to the C-suite.
Pop culture took that idea and ran with it, conflating having it all with what the feminist movement was fighting for at the time, which was ending gender discrimination in education and the workforce, reproductive rights1, bringing awareness to intimate partner violence, and proper sexual education.
NOW conferences weren’t asking women to consider how large their breast augmentations should be in order to get a pay raise. Anyone who’s spent more than five minutes with feminist theory knows that centering men and capitulating to the male gaze to reinforce the power dynamics that perpetuate the subjugation of other women goes against what feminism is about. It’s also a terrible investment because there’s no guarantee you’ll get what you actually want.
Brown never proclaimed herself a bastion of the feminist movement, but her work was sold as empowering when it was really undermining. Having it all or whatever Brown wanted to call it was harmful from the beginning. But between the name and the idea, it had an impact. As Szalai puts it:
…we somehow took a puffed-up corporate come-on, one that made Brown herself chafe more than 30 years ago, and twisted it in the collective memory into a false promise of feminism…To say that women expect to “have it all” is to trivialize issues like parental leave, equal pay and safe, affordable child care; it makes women sound like entitled, narcissistic battle-axes while also casting them as fools.
But young girls were watching those fools. They saw the power suits, the sacrifices, the supermoms, the Working Woman Barbie, the Business Executive Barbie. When they grew up, they were determined to be fools too.
The Girlboss
The 2010s was all about hustle culture, making money any way you can. For women, that looked like the squad of girlbosses that started their ascent in the mid-2000s. They survived the recession, and they were out for blood.
But this doesn’t look the same as when the men do it. There’s not really a version of The Social Network for places like The Wing or Away or Girlboss (The Netflix show was really, very bad and was cancelled rather hastily) or Thinx. There were no significant friendship betrayals, no enticing, slimy Justin Timberlake characters. Instead, I think there are four essential elements to women’s hustle culture.
Phase 1: Lean in
So, you’ve started your own business. Whether you got a loan from your neighbor Tim Draper or you’ve gone from San Diego to San Francisco pretending to be an anarchist, only to throw the label deep into the garbage bin of used up personalities the moment you upsell a leather jacket on eBay that you bought from a second hand store, you’ve done it. Congratulations!
So, what now? Now, you go on tour espousing how you got to where you are: by misusing and abusing the basic facets of feminism, coating its values in neoliberal double speak. You may or may not know what you’re saying, that you’re possibly undermining the legacy of backbreaking work feminists before you did so you can sit where you are now….but you’re here, that’s what matters. The media gobbles it up. You’re on someone’s woman of the year list, you’ve made it near the middle or the top of someone’s 30 under 30 list. You’ve done it, you’re a disruptor.
Phase 2: Act insane
After your 75th women in business brunch one week, you get back to the hustle and grind of the office. You have a dedicated staff and hundreds if not thousands of young women clawing to get through the doors of your open floor plan loft-turned-office-space in Tribeca or the lower east side just so they can maybe pass you in the aesthetically pleasing hallway where your social media team (one overworked 22 year old with an iPhone) film all of their promo or pick your brain in the breakroom, which is stocked to the brim with all organic snacks and drinks.
But you’re too busy berating your all-women staff over conference calls. Taking those conference calls from the toilet. Firing pregnant women for getting pregnant, retelling, and embellishing the story of how you pulled yourself up from your bootstraps, ignored the haters, and hustled your way to the top from poverty (even though you have literally always been *Rachel Sennott voice*: upper. Middle. Class.). You make snide comments to your subordinates, the very few people of color are ostracized, then singled out when anyone comes sniffing around about diversity. The press isn’t looking good, but the revenue is telling a different story, so you know what? Fuck ‘em. They hate to see a girlboss winning!
Phase 3: Lean back
Well, the numbers are starting to look bad now. People keep rage-tweeting at your 22-year-old social media manager, who is having a breakdown in the pastel pink meditation room you set up, probably just for times like these. Someone, a former employee, has snitched to the press. Loser. Now you’re fielding questions about what mindset you were in when you dialed into a conference call mid-shit, or when you fired a woman for being pregnant, which has been illegal for the last 40 years thanks to the feminism you wouldn’t shut up about in phase one
, you have to pull out all the stops for your apology tour. Get on that podcast, write that Twitter thread, post to your story, which is guaranteed to disappear in 24 hours but at least 100 people have screenshotted it in the first 30 minutes, so it’s immortalized on the gossip pages.
You take responsibility. For what? Who really knows, but you do take responsibility, dammit. And by the way, anyone calling you a racist is a fucking liar. You’re an equal opportunity asshole!! You were in the trenches with everyone else and you definitely weren’t pretending to do the work you force onto other people for a photo op.
The board is reaching out. The shareholders are reaching out. You’re probably getting a divorce. Maybe you just need to get away from it all for a little bit. You knew they hated to see a girlboss winning, but damn, not this much.
Phase 4: How to disappear completely
You still post on Instagram and your loyal followers, the 10k or so who stuck around through #___isoverparty and #whatevergate. No statements to the press, just a few innocuous tweets every once in a while. Coldplay’s Viva la Vida hits a little bit harder than it should these days.
Bonus! Phase 5: The comeback (not really)
You’re back baby!!!! Oh? No one cares? People are flattening you as the insane fake woke bitch from 2014? The media that once shone a light on you as the heir of the next feminist wave are also now calling you the insane fake woke bitch from 2014 but in fancy language?
You start a new company, which doesn’t last long. Your doors shutter as quickly as they opened. Back to the drawing board. Back to Instagram.
Here lies the Girlboss of the 2010s. She gave us everything, which it turns out, was maybe nothing at all. But she did pave the way for so many, including That Girl.
(Who’s) That Girl?
As we moved into the 2020s and everything moved online, TikTok hurled the next iteration of 'having it all onto our phones. That Girl was here. But where did she come from?
In the midst of the 2010s girlboss, an aesthetic filled with fake feminist quotes on shirts and totes, there were a couple other moving parts that seem only tangentially connected but came together in a perfect union once the early 20-somethings with tripods and athleisure got their hands on it.
The first was the influencer. The girlboss was a part of a legacy in an institution of self-inflicted patriarchal conformity that was necessary to survive in the corporate, capitalist system. But the influencer? She was an innovator. In Extremely Online, Taylor Lorenz tracks the origin of the influencer back to the halcyon days of the mommy blogger.
It was once taboo to talk about the struggles of being a new mother, but pioneers like Heather Armstrong, Josie George, Rebecca Woolfe, and Sally Whittle opened up online about how hard it was; from breastfeeding to postpartum depression and everything in between, women were forging a new path forward for what motherhood and support systems looked like. It was unglamorous and extremely relatable to women around the world. These women, who candidly and consistently spoke about how mentally, physically, and emotionally weak they felt were dubbed “The Power Moms.”
When companies caught onto this, they started approaching the women with sponsorship deals and ad placements on their sites. Lorenz says that when Armstrong decided to start running ads on her site Dooce in 2004, readers went ballistic. In a post, Armstrong wrote “I’ve considered taking a job outside the home,” she wrote, “but that would mean that I would probably have to give up this website. I don’t possess the juggling skills to raise a baby and work a full or part-time job and maintain the amount of writing I have done here.”
As Lorenz explains, tech and politics blogs had been running ads on their sites for a while; Armstrong was playing catch up in a sense. Despite readers deeming her unimportant enough to make money off her site, she went ahead and did it anyway. The income from the ads soon became higher than her husband’s salary, so he quit his job to help her with the site. Other women followed suit.
While women have had to sell their bodies and beauty for money and survival, I think the mommy blogger is the first time women have had to sell their lives and lifestyle wholesale. Martha was going to teach you how to cook and decorate, Jane was going to teach you how to get in shape, Helen was going to teach you how to get into the C-Suite, but Heather was going to sit there and cry with you about how your life sucks right now, she’ll even bring the wine.
Armstrong and her cohort paved the way for every other influencer to follow suit. Young women in the late 2000s and early 2010s were documenting their lives online, predominantly YouTube and Instagram. There were the vloggers who showed us every waking moment if their lives. They ranged from the perfect (Bethany Mota) to the imperfect, relatable (Emma Chamberlain), to the aspirational (Caroline Calloway (before the book deal, obviously)). They amassed enviable amounts of followers which translated into lucrative brand deals, business ventures, and a scam every now and then.
GOOP Up Your Life
The second was the appropriation of wellness. Wellness in this case, as it has been for many years, is not actually wellness, but an aesthetic wrapped up in a concept, cradled by a vague idea. It’s doing yoga, being mindful, reading misattributed quotes and making them your mantras. It’s ancient rituals and enlightenment that you can only reach by attending a $182 session (of what? Who cares!).
When GOOP started in 2008, it was a lifestyle blog. Gwenyth Paltrow was giving recommendations on where to eat and travel; I see it as a bridge between the bloggers and the Instagram influencer. A year later, she published her first detox with a quote
“My life is good because I am not passive about it. I want to nourish what is real, and I want to do it without wasting time. I love to travel, to cook, to eat, to take care of my body and mind, to work hard…
Whether you want a good place to eat in London, some advice on where to stay in Austin, the recipe I made up this week, or some thoughts from one of my sages, GOOP is a little bit of everything that makes up my life.
Make your life good. Invest in what’s real. Cook a meal for someone you love. Pause before reacting. Clean out your space. Read something beautiful. Treat yourself to something. Go to a city you’ve never been to. Learn something new. Don’t be lazy. Work out and stick with it. GOOP. Make it great.”
Paltrow, whose mother is an Emmy-winning actress and whose father was a successful director and producer, whose god-father is Steven Spielberg, and who has valorously defended her daughter’s right to be a nepo-baby doesn’t really seem like a person who is in touch with anything in particular, least of all the reality for the average person reading her newsletter, which is to say nothing of the average person not reading her newsletter.
In an episode of the podcast Maintenance Phase, Aubrey Gordon recounts how in 2018 GOOP launched a magazine that only lasted for two issues because its parent company Conde Nast insisted on fact checking it and the GOOP editors weren’t really gelling with that vibe. Paltrow knowingly pushed controversy after controversy to bring traffic to her site. Jade eggs, vagina candles, liquid diets, things that spark backlash from Twitter and TikTok Paltrow calls “cultural firestorms.”
Well, well, well…
Wellness culture has ballooned into a $5.6 trillion industry. Much of it relies on the motto of self-care. Like the feminist movement, the concept of self-care has been laundered through western capitalist culture to conform to something that makes everyone a bit more comfortable. Much like the terms woke, patriarchy, birthing persons, and narcissist, self-care was used by a closed group of people, in this case doctors. As Aisha Harris explains in A History of Self Care:
“Doctors have long discussed it as a way for patients to treat themselves and exercise healthy habits, most often under the guidance of a health professional…these patients were usually mentally ill and elderly people who required long-term care and otherwise had little autonomy. Later, academics began to look for ways for workers in more high-risk and emotionally daunting professions—trauma therapists, social workers, EMTs, and so on—to combat stress brought on by the job. The belief driving this work was that one cannot adequately take on the problems of others without taking care of oneself (by reading for pleasure or taking the occasional vacation, for instance)—a sentiment you still hear from activists today. And that applied not just to physical welfare but to mental and emotional health.”
During and immediately after the civil rights movement, the term was appropriated by black people. As Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, an assistant professor at the New School explains in Harris’ article, it was “a claiming [of] autonomy over the body as a political act against institutional, technocratic, very racist, and sexist medicine.”
When the Black Panther party adopted the idea in the 1970’s they disseminated information on their free intercommunal programs like free school lunch, something later adopted by the American federal government, and health clinics for people who could not afford health care. Harris touches on a 60 Minutes segment from Dan Rather, who explains that “Wellness is really the ultimate goal in something called ‘self-care’.” She also notes that while wellness was budding into the mainstream, it’s early adopters, like the Black Panthers, were murdered by the United States government.
From the 2000s onward, self-care discourse spikes up, usually through times of national tragedy, think 9/11 or the election of Donald Trump. For black people, self-care conversations were happening a little more frequently, namely every time we opened social media or turned on the news to find another modern day lynching.
Selfish Care
In How Do We Know We’re Doing It Right? Pandora Sykes observes that “Much has changed since Audre Lorde wrote that self-care is an act of ‘political warfare’. In A Burst of Light, written after she was diagnosed with cancer for a second time, Lorde says that ‘Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation.’ As someone commented on Harris’s piece, getting a mani-pedi is more self-indulgence than self-care.
Both Sykes and Fiona Ward talk about the idea of self-coddling. In Ward’s article for Refinery 29, she admits that she “self-cared” her way out of job opportunities, memories with friends, and chances to try new things.
Gordon discusses how self-care has become a term for people, often white women, to bludgeon people over the head as an excuse that should never be questioned. You can’t talk to your friend about their day, you can’t go to that protest, you can’t sign that petition, you can’t make that phone call, you can’t watch the news. This frail, My Year of Rest and Relaxation-esque mindset brought about two very poignant memes:
“Are you in the right headspace to receive information that could possibly hurt you?”
It doesn’t fit into your own personal self-care, so you can’t. Self-care has been radically de-politicized beyond recognition.
After four years of a Trump presidency, the effects of Brexit kicking in, the pandemic, and the race war, the hustle and grind of the girlboss came to a halt partly because it had to and partly because the next generation, Generation Z, had decided they didn’t want to work that hard for a future that if the political landscape, economic landscape and climate change were any indication, wouldn’t be around for much longer, if not at the very least look radically different than the ones their parents grew up in.
I have a theory that if you weren’t focusing on the news (I’m using “focusing” very loosely here) then you were focusing on yourself. I can’t fault people for that at all; it was such a depressing time. But to me, it feels like two streams of people came out of this time changed. One group more socially conscious or at least more self-aware and the other obsessed with water containers, athleisure, and “becoming your highest self.”
These elements set up That Girl to step on the scene, triumphant as ever. The 5-9 before the 9-5 was about hauling ass out of bed before the sun, journaling, meditating, working out, making an aesthetically pleasing breakfast, doing a $315 skincare routine, putting on a monotone (usually beige, white, black or navy) outfit, leaving your luxury apartment, Stanley cup in tow, and getting in your luxury vehicle to go to work.
The 5-9 after the 9-5 was basically the same as the morning routine, but replaced with an aesthetically pleasing dinner, a glass of wine if you’re feeling frisky, and getting into bed to do it all over again. You make runs to Wholefoods and are one of the foremost voices on #restocktok. All of this is done in the name of mental health, wellness, and recovering from the collective trauma of that, depending on how old you are, started in 1981 or 2008 or 2016 or 2020.
But as The Take’s video essay on That Girl states, “it can be dangerous to take mental health discussions away from the clinical space and into the commercial space.” For anyone who has benefitted from the women’s movement or the civil rights movements, it is even worse to depoliticize them.
Dolly Parton Was Right
When I look at the last 40 years of women’s labor, it feels like nothing has changed. Partly because it hasn’t. Women are still on average paid less than men, they still carry more of the domestic responsibilities. They are now overtaking men in educational qualifications (this is even more true for women of color, particularly Black women) but if it doesn’t translate into anything, what is the point? Women are now choosier about their partners; less of them are settling for someone who is unemployed, who doesn’t agree with the same political ideologies, who isn’t emotionally available or intelligent. In other words, women have set basic standards for themselves and an overwhelming number of men have failed to rise to the occasion.
Women’s labor has evolved, but it has not changed. Somewhere between women’s liberation and having it all, there has been a consensus — if TikTok is any indication — to survive. We are surviving well, but all of that talk of thriving? It’s still not happening, at least not in a general sense. The mouseburger, the girlboss, that girl, they are all the same person, all with the same insatiable need to have it all. But having it all is a glamour. Szalai says “The built-in vapidity, the vagueness with which “having it all” specifies everything and therefore nothing.” We can’t actually be free of the patriarchy or capitalism or a screaming child or a leery boss or weaponized incompetence from partners or student debt and we also can’t work our way into the C-Suite or into early retirement and stay there; someone will make sure something gets in your way. So, we will have nothing. But is that really true?
You Already Have It All
When I talked about the time I almost got kicked out of Urban Outfitters, I was working through something that I had been ruminating on for a long time: Women are always doing balancing acts. It is one of the most quintessential parts of being a woman. We have to be feminine, but not too feminine (weak). We can be feminist, but not too feminist (ugly, bitter). We have to be pretty but not too pretty (promiscuous). We have to be kind while not seeming dumb. We have to be smart without intellectually challenging men because for many of them it’s a turnoff. This plays out in small ways in everyday life and it’s exhausting work. If you’re queer, trans, or a woman of color, you’re working double time.
When you’re a teenager, companies are always shoving shit in your face telling you that a new jacket or a liquid eyeliner will absolve you of all of your insecurities and every projection put upon you. You’ll be that skinny, pale girl in the American Apparel ad, you’ll be that tall, tan girl on the Hollister poster, free, beautiful, adored, and desired. Failure is nowhere in your orbit. Sometimes you give in and buy the jacket and the eyeliner, and you feel like her. Well, at least until those companies come back around telling you that you now need to buy skinny jeans and the CEO of the company is telling you that you’re too fat and ugly to actually wear them.
Now, as an adult, you have influencers shoving shit in your face. That Girl is telling you to build a morning routine, but it won’t be complete without that $120 yoga mat or their new Gymshark collab. They set up shots of their ‘Day in my life” vlogs, half of which involve them going to Target to buy flat tummy tea and laxative powders. Before her, it was the Girlboss screaming in your face about being successful and self-sufficient by buying tickets to her conference, replete with a masturbatory TEDTalk and a pastel pink tote bag that says something like “girls just want to have fun-damental rights” in the Barbie font (sold separately). Before her it was women who had no interest in the structural and systemic fights that the feminist movement was taking up. These women planted the seed that if you forgo authenticity and rebuke community support, you can have it all. But to me, that looks like having nothing.
In The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf lays out an array of statistics to hammer home the fact that across time and cultures, women are consistently stronger, better, more efficient workers. When western women entered the workforce in droves during the mid to late 20th century, they changed history; they changed the time, they changed the culture. But this came at a huge cost. In her chapter on work, Wolf states:
There has never been such a potentially destabilizing immigrant group asking for a fair chance to compete for access to power… Even with two shifts, at this rate, they would still challenge the status quo. Someone had to come up with a third shift fast….The likelihood of backlash in some severe form was underestimated because the American mind-set celebrates winning and avoids noticing the corollary, that winners win only what losers lose.
But here’s the thing: women don’t lose. We already have it all and we will always be works in progress. You have it all, not because of what you buy or what you do, but because you say so. You will always be a work in progress, not because you need to be fixed or because you need to please anyone, but because you are alive.
(that many American women don’t have anymore thanks to the Supreme Court and the Democrats not codifying Roe v. Wade)