“I don’t need a man”, I proclaim proudly, and my loving, long-term boyfriend looks at me with a frown. But I am correct, as a young woman in my twenties, where sixty years ago I would have needed a ring on my finger and a husband’s last name to get even half the rights I have today, I am no longer in financial or cultural need of a partner.
We’re only fifty years past a woman needing a man’s signature to apply for a mortgage, when the social, financial and cultural security of marriage was a cornerstone of our society. Men needed women to clean their homes and bear their children, and women needed men for a little bit of freedom, money and social relevance (see the term ‘spinster’ that was popular even until the Bridget Jones era of the early 00s). Whilst love stories flourished and courting was the norm, partnership was still driven by an undercurrent of need, especially for the young women denied financial freedom and unable to easily secure jobs outside of the roles of secretary, receptionist and assistant.
Inequality has not been eradicated, and there will forever be an argument that it shouldn’t be, but we do see that the balance has been adjusted. The world, in so many ways, is so different from the time of husbands’ signatures and the financial need to marry. The conversation around gender equality is a tumultuous one, and there is no escaping that. In some ways, the gulf of inequality between genders has been reduced, and in others it has only widened.
But when we look at workspaces, education and the academic world, we do see a noticeable difference. Women have always worked and always been educated. But the content and definition have changed. The workforce was never exclusively male; women have held jobs and worked since time began, especially in lower and working classes- there was an inescapable economic need for women to work. Girls have also always been educated; they’ve gone to school, had governesses or been taught trades. It’s simply that our definition of an education has changed and morphed.
But in our current world, girls continually do better in school and education than boys. They perform better in tests, are more likely to go to university and even do better socially in education. And thus, these educated and knowledgeable women are encouraged into the workforce, they sit in senior roles, run companies, comprise boards and get promotions. Inequality exists, but in the workplace, it’s on a much smaller scale and a lot more subtle.
In recent iterations of the feminist movement, we’ve seen this rhetoric around the working woman expand into the characterisation of “the girlboss”. Stereotypically pastel pink, a little bitchy and pulling all-nighters at the office, she’s the supposedly feminist and more palatable humanisation of hustle culture. At its core, the girlboss was and is a very shallow representative, an extension of choice feminism against the backdrop of a corporate world, in which women are encouraged to overwork themselves and to compete by any means necessary. It is by no means a role model or something to aspire to, taking the very basics of gender equality discourse and narrowly relating it to the dog-eat-dog world of the corporate ladder.
Nevertheless, despite her lack of depth, the girlboss could be deemed a sign of how far we have managed to come, the equality that is so aggressively demanded for men and women in the corporate workplace. But is this the win we think it is?
Our corporate bubble and girlboss feminist exists in a bigger world, a society dominated by capitalism, profit and a staggering wealth divide. A system that supposedly rewards hard work. In a capitalist world, working with money requires the division and separation of people, particularly an exploited workforce, which perpetuates the notion that hard work will lead to success, akin to that of the CEOs who exploit them. It creates competition and greed, a system designed to make its citizens think as individuals, but dehumanises them just as violently. Our society pushes overconsumption en masse, prizing possession and the flow of money over the health of our planet or our citizens.
The core notion and what allows the rapid growth of capitalism is the individualism of it all, the emphasis on protecting and looking out for oneself first, a system that demonises pure altruism and rewards only the most ruthless of individuals. This is where the girlboss slips in, she is equally encouraged to view herself as singular, to compete against her fellow women for jobs, recognition and even respect. She looks down on the women around her and is led to believe they view her in a similar light. And thus she is hyper independent and hyper individual.
Whilst it may just seem selfish, or like the work of bad friends, hyper-individuality has led to the strangulation of community. The “you don’t owe anyone anything” discourse we have witnessed explode in online spaces such as TikTok is simply an extension of this. We fear community, duped into believing it is the death of growth and success. And thus we are no longer there for our friends, around to help family move house or to pick people up from the airport. We’ve been told the village is bad, and being a villager is even worse.
Nowhere is this demonisation clearer than in the rhetoric around relationships online. Vogue recently released an article titled “Is having a boyfriend embarrassing?” And whilst the short piece made some interesting, albeit surface-level points, the reaction online has demonstrated just how trivial connection, community, and relationships have become. It may seem like an aggressive leap between the two, but as Gen-Z take to TikTok and Instagram to discuss their singledom as well as their lack of a so-called village, it’s hard not to see a path from the toxic individualism of the girl boss to the community-less, relationship-avoidant Gen-Z woman.
An “I hate men” rhetoric, which has undercut a variety of cultural conversations and become a catchphrase of a sphere of Gen-Z women, dominates conversation online, further feeding into the hyperindependence and relationship avoidance young people are proudly falling into. The social movement spans from the harmless to the dangerous, from a growth in solo travelling and the sartorial online aesthetic of the “femcel” to the extreme hyper individual mindset that has only fanned the flames of our current loneliness epidemic among young people.
And as Warwick University academic and TikToker, Louisa Munch points out, the Girlboss has already begun to realise the constraints of its very basic ideology. ”She proves that liberation from patriarchy cannot be done within an inherently patriarchal economic and ideological structure. But the girl boss is now being faced with her haunting predecessor: the trad wife. As it seems the neoliberal dream has become a nightmare for many women, the retreat to a former oppression has become appealing.”
Whilst it harks back to the aesthetics and culture of the 1950s housewife, the 2020s iteration, The Tradwife, is born from the same glossy pink handbook of choice feminism as the Girlboss. Far from acknowledging any form of intersectionality or larger political sphere, choice feminism does just that: it allows women to choose any course they want, regardless of any social conditioning or larger economic inequality that may control those choices. Originally, a small subsection of Mormon women and wives on social media, the Tradwife’s floral, somewhat rustic aesthetic relies on the same narrow notions of feminism that support the gilrboss. Perhaps more subtle in its messaging, this predecessor still values isolation and overwork of its workforce (whether in the corporate office or the kitchen), and emphasises the need for a continuous supply of workers. With a little more (the bare minimum) significance placed on community, the Tradwife movement uses religion and typically right-wing politics to create the isolation and segregation needed by capitalism.
Whilst these offcuts and waves of feminism are not to blame for our hyper independence, the larger system that allows them to not only endure, but thrive, continues to push competition and isolation, whether through the hustle culture of the girlboss or the private, nuclear family of the 21st-century tradwife. We have lost any awareness of the significance of connection and community, suffering the consequences in droves, blind to the real cause of these symptoms. The girl boss, like the tradwife, is a product of capitalism and an economic structure that values the volume of exploitable workers over anything else.
“Feminism must be geared towards imagining new fairer futures that face the new challenges that technological advancements like AI pose and aims to dismantle the patriarchal capitalist form of domination that sells us the lie that ‘work will set you free,” demands Louisa. But this starts with love, community and being villagers for our village again.
