The girlboss was never a feminist ideal

The 2010s turned an eBay hustler into a symbol of corporate feminism she never set out to represent.

The original self-proclaimed “girlboss” was an anti-capitalist kleptomaniac from Sacramento who skipped college, couch-surfed, dumpster-dived, and was, by her own account, “dead set on smashing the system” before she turned an $8 jacket from the Salvation Army into a $100 million company by age 28.

All subsequent debates over the concept of a “girlboss” and whether such a person constitutes a feminist success story, a corporate sellout, or a relic of Obama-era optimism rest on a misunderstanding. The term was coined by a specific individual, Sophia Amoruso, who wrote a book that had a far narrower, and far more practical, aim than what it has come to represent. Girlboss, the book and the brand, was never meant to introduce a new feminist ideal. It was a guidebook for succeeding in the opportunities that feminism had made possible.

Amoruso started selling vintage clothes on eBay not because she had a vision to overthrow the patriarchy by becoming C.E.O. of Nasty Gal, but because she needed to eat something besides dumpster bagels.

Leftist critics argue that the girlboss concept takes women’s energy and channels it into the capitalist machine rather than against it. Amoruso’s answer, which she gives explicitly in the book, is to concede the point and simply ask: Given that we all live inside the machine, what are you going to do to survive?

“I believed that capitalism was the source of all greed, inequality, and destruction in the world,” she writes. “I thought that big corporations were running the world (which I now know they do) and by supporting them, I was condoning their evil ways (which is true, but a girl’s gotta put gas in her car).”

A compromise, not an ideology

Instead of selling an ideology through her book, Amoruso is describing a bargain she made with the world as it exists, and inviting you, #girlboss, to make one for yourself.

The book, published in 2014, makes that clear.

It includes chapters on everything from credit cards and the dangers of debt to job interviews, cover letters, and firing and being fired — the last quoting a businessman who would become president shortly after the book came out. As an author, she has more in common with Richard Bolles than with Betty Friedan, and she says as much, writing that her book is “neither a feminist manifesto nor a memoir.” Her project was not to critique the system, but was instead created to help other women navigate that system by becoming fluent in its rules.

This is the first place where the cultural conversation goes wrong. Feminism, at its most expansive, is about possibility. It asks for a world in which women can move freely between roles that were once rigidly divided. She can decide to work or not work, to lead or not lead, to build a career or a home, and she can expect that men will move across those same boundaries too. Feminism is concerned with power, access, and the shape of the system itself.

“Girlboss,” by contrast, accepts that premise and begins after those questions have already been answered well enough to let certain women in the room where decisions are made. It accepts capitalism as unjust but status quo, and outlines how the women who want to be in that room can succeed within it.

That distinction is easy to miss because the introduction of the girlboss coincided with a particular flattening of feminism in the popular imagination, and the book’s marketing strategy — complete with a hashtag and a millennial-pink cover — was the made-for-Instagram packaging that defined the moment. Feminism became, in many spaces, a story about salaries, visibility, and access to the boardroom. While that moment continues to be important, it also accepted a hierarchy that rewarded the women who brazenly took on traditionally male roles. It did little to affirm that traditionally female roles matter too, or that men should be expected to take them on.

“‘Girlboss’ is a feminist book, and Nasty Gal is a feminist company in the sense that I encourage you, as a girl, to be who you want and do what you want,” Amoruso writes. “But I’m not here calling us ‘womyn’ and blaming men for any of my struggles along the way.”

In the book, Amoruso’s touchstone is not a C.E.O. but a performer: Betty Davis, for whom she named her company and whom she called “the ultimate girlboss” for her subversive, self-possessed presence on stage. The point was that women should be unapologetically ambitious, strange, visible, and unwilling to perform smallness. “I want you to be able to use #girlboss to project yourself into an awesome life where you can do whatever you want,” she writes.

The girlboss, in this sense, is not a woman who escapes female roles. She is a woman who refuses to apologize for the role she chooses — whether that is in a boardroom, on a stage, at home, or elbows-deep in tuna and mayo at Subway (a job, known as “sandwich artist,” that Amoruso recalls fondly throughout her book). She makes full use of the possibilities that feminism promises. She is not a particular brand of feminism. And, paradoxically, the world has proven time and again that a woman can be assertive and successful while explicitly rejecting feminism as a concept. In fact, some of the clearest examples today come from self-consciously anti-feminist figures.

Anti-feminist girlbosses

Popular tradwife influencers like Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm or Nara Smith do not embrace feminism as a political project. They aren’t arguing for structural change, nor are they interested in the language of equality.

And yet, within Amoruso’s terms they are unmistakable girlbosses. They are the breadwinners for their families and their ambition is unabashed. They build brands, command enormous audiences, and exercise total authorship over the presentation of their lives. Their domestic, aesthetic, and maternal labor is meticulously produced, monetized, and distributed.

What links these iterations of girlbosses is not overt politics, but a shared posture of intentionality, ambition, and self-construction within existing systems. Whether in a corporate office or a farmhouse kitchen, the core question remains: Given the world as it is, how do you shape a life that is successful and entirely your own?

This is where the tension with feminism sharpens. When “girlboss” is folded into feminist discourse, empowerment can start to look narrowly defined, measured in visibility, income, careerism, or aesthetic control. Women are celebrated for escaping traditionally feminine roles or for perfecting them into profitable performances, rather than for expanding the legitimacy of all possible choices.

Amoruso herself, the original girlboss, has stepped outside the identity she helped create. Reflecting on her life and work via Substack last month, she draws a distinction between “content” and “substance.”

“I am not the woman who wrote a book called ‘Girlboss’ thirteen years ago. I am not the founder of Nasty Gal. I am not my career, my resume, my track record, or the shorthand version of me that lives in other people’s heads,” she writes.

“What I have and what I’ve done are not who I am. I’m proud of those things. Genuinely. But they are a decade-plus-old trailing indicator of how I once spent my time. They are content. And content is not substance. Content is what you produce … Substance is who you’ve become.”

The girlboss, as it circulated culturally, became pure content. It was first a book, then a Netflix show, then a meme, and now a punchline. But one thing “girlboss” was never meant to be was a new kind of feminism. Rather, it was a strategy for embracing and walking through the doors that feminism opened.

---

Weekend letter of recommendation:

• The new season of “Jury Duty,” known as “Company Retreat,” is out in its entirety. I am only about halfway through so I won’t give you my final take, but I loved the first season and am enjoying this one. The experiment is good ethics discourse fodder and I’ll be interested to hear your thoughts.

• Maibritt Henkel recommends the documentary “Mistress Dispeller.” It looks interesting. Here’s the trailer:

• I saw “The Drama” last weekend. I didn’t love it, but I did enjoy watching it. I recommend that you see it so that you can make up your own mind.