People who worked for Hollis corroborated her off-putting conduct.

Her sterner critics called her out in disgust, pointing to Hollis’s casual dehumanization of her housekeeper, whom she described as the woman who “cleans her toilets,” and her Tubman comparison as examples of typical, wrongheaded girlboss attitudes. Hollis’s most generous critics saw her words as a moment of unchecked privilege. If Hollis’s fetish for relentless, unstoppable work and comparison of herself to the creator of the Underground Railroad is a prime example of a girlboss gone wild, so was the swift backlash. “If my life is relatable to most people, I’m doing it wrong,” she continued, and in the accompanying caption she compared herself to a slew of unrelatable women she looks up to, including Harriet Tubman.Įach week we’ll send you the very best from the Vox Culture team, plus a special internet culture edition by Rebecca Jennings on Wednesdays. Hollis wrote in 2016 how much she hated the term, but quotes like hers crystallize the girlboss mentality. “Literally every woman that I look up to is unrelatable,” Rachel Hollis, a very wealthy self-help guru, said in a TikTok video in April, describing how she wills herself to wake up at 4 am to conquer her day. As the concept was codified, the idea of the girlboss became about the melding of professional self and identity, capitalist aspiration, and a specific (and arguably limited) vision of empowerment. Women like Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and former Nasty Gal CEO Sophia Amoruso - who coined the term - were finally wrangling power away from the men who had held it for so long, which was seen as a form of justice. What set girlbosses apart from regular bosses was pinning feminism to hustle. Everyone was supposed to win when girlbosses won. As companies grew in her image, so did her mythos her legacy would be grand and fair, because equality was coming to work.

As a female business leader - be she a CEO, an aspiring CEO, or an independent MLM superseller - the girlboss was going to unapologetically will empires from the rubble of rejection and underestimation she faced all her life. Born in the mid-2010s, she was simultaneously a power fantasy and a utopian promise. The girlboss is one of the cruelest tricks capitalism ever perpetrated.

Gaslight meme