The Girlboss: A Misunderstood Phenomenon

How Modernity Left Status-Seeking Women Feeling Empty

Back when I worked at a megacorp, they led us into a conference hall for an all-employee meeting to welcome our new president. About a thousand of us streamed into the room, the front stage showing a podium and a large projector screen with WELCOME blazed across it. No one worked with her before, being an implant from a facility in a different state. We only knew her resume was one of a relentless climber, rarely being in the same job for more than two years as she moved up the ladder. Now in her mid-forties, she had reached the peak.

The session started, and a local director in the facility gave his opening, the usual vapid phrases around new beginnings, looking to the future, and other banal platitudes before introducing the new president. She strode up, tall with long blonde hair, a small nose and a black pantsuit. Clearly a looker twenty years ago, and still holding her own. Underneath her large smile in red lipstick was a ceaseless ambition that long ago pushed out any warmth she once had. She introduced herself, confidently letting everyone know her flawless pedigree. She got into what her plans were for the future and stated:

“Now let me tell you something, I am never not available, and I never sleep. We’re going to continue to be a world-class company, and I’m here to make sure everyone gives it everything. I CAN COUNT ON ONE HAND THE NUMBER OF BIRTHDAY PARTIES I HAVE GONE TO FOR MY FIVE CHILDEN.”

The last sentence was supposed to be inspirational, but everyone squirmed in deep discomfort, wondering what fresh hell this woman was planning on unleashing. Undaunted, she continued and introduced her deputy, a pale, paunchy man with a permanent slouch. He introduced himself as “being a bad engineer, which is why I went into management”, and the rest of his speech emanated just as much confidence. The cringe-fest culminated in a Q&A where he went off on a tangent about his impending divorce before our new President graciously snatched the mic from him.

My girlfriend I dated around the same time was entering a different business venture. She was invited to an Arbonne summit by one of her friends. Her friend was a bigwig, did very well for herself and had dozens of subordinates. She drove a new sports car with the proceedings, from her fun money because her husband was also successful. She had the same unceasing energy and drive for status as the company president, just in a different arena. making hundreds of personal contacts and customers while keeping her underlings on task. She was actually a nice, warm lady for all her ambition. My girlfriend tried it for a while before deciding it wasn’t for her, and was only out a couple hundred dollars.

Finally, at the same time my mother, now that all the kids were out of the house, decided to go back to work. Where I lived a couple blocks away was a bridal shop with a constant inflow of customers, and unceasing demand for hemming their wedding dress. Often the same woman would need to have it hemmed a couple times as she would gain weight during the engagement. My mom always quipped, “that’s what happens when they go on birth control.”

She and several other moms would be upstairs chatting and doing adjustments talking the latest gossip around town while a daytime soap opera played on TV. It wasn’t glamorous work, but they had fun keeping up on things while doing the monotonous work. Unfortunately, it would not last long, and the owner found out he could ship the dresses out to China for adjustments at lower cost, and let all of them go.

There ‘s a certain type of woman who is insatiable. Just like the warlord who wants to conquer new lands, there is a type of woman who lives to increase her influence. Historically she would prowl eligible men, finding the most high status one to marry and ruthlessly push him to ascend higher and higher up the hierarchy, planning machinations to make it happen.

Today, this type of woman ensures she gets the right grades, goes to the right schools, and has the right opinions. She sees the business world as the key to recognition, the good life, and status. They take orders well, and can manage ensuring the rules are followed. They tend to be affable unless challenged, and like to pretend they are in charge until the time comes to take decisive action, where they pivot to looking for direction or diluting responsibility to a committee. For those who work under them, this is infuriating, and the companies with a critical mass of them usually devolve into performative edicts as opposed to aggressive change, and the company culture atrophies. We wonder if they’re really cut out for this.

A lot of us on the right, especially the men, have an overly glamorous view of the stay- at-home mom, largely as a reaction to the influx of women in the workforce and the fertility crisis. A common view is the girlboss came out of incentives of modernity and the dissolution of traditional roles. In previous generations, it’s argued, these women would be at home rearing and teaching their children while their husband worked to support the family. The argument is this simple dynamic was the bread and butter of domestic life, and the elevation of women to the workforce has upended that and created these girlbosses, a thoroughly modern type of woman. History, however, is not so cut and dry.

The Socialite

Historically, in the economic classes below the aristocracies, the basic arrangement above was largely the norm. Because of pure economic concerns, the separation of tasks in domestic life made this a necessity. Though the wife would help the man in farm chores and the man would train the boy to work in the fields properly or learn a trade, there was a known, general separation. Given they were born into a relatively low status position and most would not see a dramatic difference in their station over their lifetime, it’s reasonable to focus one’s resources on childrearing and building up a positive reputation with the larger community their children would inherit. Status is the ability to make others defer decision making to you or making people take actions on your behalf. The average farmhand or tailor only had a small ability to have such an influence in their sphere. So instead they focused their resources on Honor, the trust people have in your integrity, and Childrearing, caring for one’s child and directly training him for the wider world.

Going up the ladder though to the aristocratic classes, the dynamics change dramatically. When a woman married a high-status man, she entered a realm with access to far more resources to manage and a more fragile social atmosphere. While the lower classes were too busy with basic needs to play political games and non-existent status to fight over, the life of the aristocracy was largely all-encompassing for those who entered into it. While they married or were born into such a life, status is a zero-sum game, with usurpers and plotters trying to take it for their own.

Because of this, politicking is rampant, social delicacies are harshly enforced, and scheming is rampant. The men worked, negotiated, and fought in their circles, and his wife would have a feminine version of the same politicking with the ladies they socialized with. She whispered in her husband’s ear, hoping to direct his power to her ends.

She also dealt with the day-to-day task of managing the labor employed at her household and often her husband’s business. There were servants with a multitude of obligations to fulfill in the fields, in the household, as well as events to prepare for. All these took time to manage and direct with tasks to prioritize and spots to hire and fill. This should sound familiar, like something that a middle manager would handle, or maybe a program manager. High status women took on jobs similar to our modern corporate structure, only now they work for a faceless legal entity as opposed to a household.

When children enter the picture, the woman has countless interpersonal dramas to attend to, servants on the estate to manage, and plenty of money to pay a lower class women to care for her offspring. She can get a wet-nurse for when he/she is an infant, a tutor when he/she gets older, and then a boarding school until he or she is an adult. If male, he would enter the most respected position his parent’s power and prestige can gain him or take over his father’s business. If female, her family’s influence will ensure she married an influential man. So the cycle continues for another generation.

With this in mind, the time taken to actually raise one’s own child, from a purely utilitarian standpoint, could be detrimental. The boarding school allows the teenager to build rapport with other elites, and the rich can afford the best tutors in the world, far better than the mother and father by themselves can offer. The time taken to care and teach for the child will also allow other high-status women to socialize, as they will have more time for gossip, building alliances, and expanding relationships with other women, not to mention assisting her husband with the nuances of business.

While it is good and laudable for both the mother and father to have a direct hand in caring for one’s children, the cold fact remains that:

Childrearing has never been, and never will be, a high status activity.

That watch cost more than your car. I made $970,000 last year. How much you make? You see, pal, that's who I am. And you're nothing. Nice guy? I don't give a shit. Good father? Fuck you -- go home and play with your kids!!

This is not a moral statement, but a statement of fact. You can be the best mother in the world, and shower your children with love and affection. Your child may have happy memories of his childhood from constant quality time with his family and all the traditions that made the household live. All the while, in adulthood those exact motherly instincts put him at a disadvantage compared to his peers. Status is about influencing people to defer to you or getting people to act on your behalf. Status is about power. The only way for a child to confer status to his mother is for the child to grow up and gain power. Then the mother gains status. This is the reason Irish moms used to push for one of their sons to become a priest, or a mother from old money tries to get her daughter to marry the unattractive but networked son of an industry mogul.

Virtuous kids build an honorable house, but not status.

Modern Status Games

Some of the old structures still exist. A colleague of mine, before being hired as a business partner in a medical venture, was invited to a dinner with the other partners and their wives. The interview was to ensure he not only had the skills and social acumen required for his role, but to test his wife, who would enter into a world of socialite intrigue through their powerful husbands. If the wives didn’t like her, he was out.

Another example is the debutante ball, still done through some old money communities in the south.

Overall though, the traditional aristocracies are destroyed, and even old money doesn’t have the same punch it used to. The blue-dogs can become nothing within a generation while up-and-coming entrepreneurs ascend to dominance. Marrying a man born into wealth no longer necessarily confers status, nor does a man with family in high places. The instability of our modern economic landscape could mean their prospects topple with one bad day in the stock market.

The great flattening of hierarchy has also, paradoxically, allowed a smaller number of actors to hoard status for themselves. Instead of a multitude of neighborhood powerbrokers, estates, and positions of honor, the great consolidation has created an influx of middle-managers with limited agency, and true owners of capital continues to decline. There are fewer local tycoons for status seeking women to pursue, and fewer men of old power and renowned lineage to marry into.

There is also the degradation of social structures, such as Churches for men to be respected members of, and women’s clubs for high-class socialites to politic and conspire with. Ambitious, high-powered women have come to the realization that the old way is broken. The deal was women would gain status through their husband, and she would support his work and bear children for him. In the middle of the last century, they realized men aren’t capable of holding their end of the bargain.

Add this to the transformation of domestic life, and it is even starker. Efficiency has created a house where there is little need to hire help, even for the rich. Women of the most modest means have gadgets at her disposal that turn what was once a full-day job, often with help, into a minor nuisance. Whether it’s the washing machine that cut the time cleaning clothes an order of magnitude, the vacuum cleaner that can deep clean better than the best maid, or the dishwasher that made post-dinner a minor inconvenience, the very efficiencies that made their lives easier also made their lives emptier. The house is clean, the kids are at school, the stove and pre-packaged meals makes cooking trivial, and now she’s sitting anxiously alone at home, and it’s not even noon.

The trope of 1950’s bored housewives wasn’t without merit. There was already serious social degradation as people flooded to the suburbs. Mass propaganda in the form of the T.V. homogenized domestic life to an unsustainable degree. Shared bonds between neighborhood families deteriorated. Also, contrary to before times where a wife’s and man’s work were more complementary, a man’s work and a woman’s domestic life kept separating to increasingly distant planes. The woman’s role especially was increasingly constricted as technology and educational institutions made her traditional tasks superfluous. As industrialization accelerated and technology and process ruled the day, business life formalized. The familial bonds between work colleagues, previously just as important as the work itself, fell to the wayside. Industrialization forced hard separation between work and family life, and the man was expected to just do a good job and go home.

With this separation, the women were locked out of not just the workforce, but also status generating activities. The wife was no longer an essential part of a man’s professional life like she did when he had ownership of a small business, and she had no ability for any more status than that of a common housewife, no matter the prestige of her husband.

The economic downturn of the 1970's, along with a generation of women raised by unhappy mothers, led to a perfect storm as women swarmed into the workforce and educational institutions. Relaxed divorce laws encouraged women to have a contingency in case the marriage collapsed, working class families found themselves incapable of living on one income, and ambitious upper class women wanted their own piece of the status pie. Civil rights law forced companies to change their policies to allow the women equal footing. Harsh, blunt talk had to be softened. Strong hierarchies had to be leveled in favor of consensus manufacturing, and implicit male relationships and comradery had to be sterilized to allow women into working groups. Agency was delegated from the individual to the committee.

While it's common knowledge that men don't like competing with women, women also don't like competing with men. While there are outliers, most don't want to have total responsibility. They would prefer to have autonomy in a limited sphere and be shielded by threats outside that sphere. In the domestic sphere, they want control of day-to-day home economics but don't want to protect it from intruders, or be fully responsible for critical financial decisions. The same skills that allowed a Victorian lady to manage an estate translates very well to middle-management. Women entering these positions aren’t usurping traditionally male roles, but reclaiming what was taken from them.

The forced co-ed nature of corporations has been a disaster for efficiency and group cohesion. Every office interaction has to be assumed to be with an interchangeable cog as opposed to an actual man or woman. Because of Civil Rights Law, a corporation will always be terrified of getting sued for making a hostile workplace for women, but never for men. Hence why the ratchet has always shifted to feminine modes of communication and organization. But as hierarchies are flattened and combative dispute resolution removed, so do clear indications of status. Since status is limited by its very nature, making everyone president doesn’t confer the same status to everyone, but simply dilutes the title. Now we you see a generation of women who are confused why the doctorate they spent 8 years getting doesn’t give the level of respect they remember their dad getting, or why she ascended to CEO but feels more like a figurehead than a mover and shaker. The status she thought she earned was an illusion, and possible marriage prospects walked away from the game entirely.

The Family Business

“Keep your work life and family life separate” has been a rule of thumb for working professionals for several generations. While it was a good rule of thumb to avoid letting petty squabbles impact one’s performance, it’s allowed the impersonalization and mechanization of one’s generative output. The relationship between you and a subordinate, or you and the boss, has been commoditized where nothing but tangible output is considered. Factors such as personal loyalties, common interests and culture are inadmissible in modern bureaucracies. While in theory this allows everyone to rise the ladder based on merit alone, in actuality it creates a cutthroat, mercenary culture where everyone only looks out for their own interests, and will exit the minute they aren’t being met.

When I worked for a small firm of a dozen people, the president would invite everyone to his home regularly along with everyone’s spouse. We would have dinner and chat about life and work, and there was a true sense of comradery. His wife helped with the a lot of the paperwork, the employees’ wives felt included in the business, and relationships were formed outside of pure utilitarianism. When a co-worker had to be fired for being drunk working on a customer site, it was truly devastating. We liked the guy. We broke bread with him at these gatherings. He wasn't just a cog in the machine.

In modern business, it would take a revolution to reconstitute the professional classes in a way that mimicked traditional models. Corporations would have to be shrunk to levels where true ownership was possible and the managerial system would have to be overthrown. Hyper-financialization would have to be upended. Meaningless make-work jobs would need to be eliminated, and labor regulations hellbent on social engineering would need to be eradicated.

The elite professional classes would not interview others for a job, but for building partnerships. It would need to be based on not just merit, but complementary worldviews and chemistry. Not only would you ascertain whether he could manage the work required, but also whether you would enjoy having dinner the family every few weeks. Instead of just pay, he would offer a stake of ownership in the company. He would offer status and agency to make actual decisions as opposed to just managing edicts from above. Employment would meet the wants of not only the man, but his wife. The wife would have the power to manage core business affairs with her husband.

As autonomy and ownership grows, so does status. This leaves more men for the girlbosses get to marry into and take part in high-status activities. The work may change from owning estates and small shops to high-tech goods, but the principle remains the same. They would again be a part of operations, working for a family legacy instead of a faceless boss.

In a more stable society, many of the the girlboss middle managers of the modern era would be working in their husband’s business, and be happier for it. Women bristle at the thought of their husband being “the boss”, but they hate total responsibility even more. However, the new normal of a man going to his job and his wife going to a totally unrelated job across town, is detrimental to what a marriage is supposed to be, a romantic as well as economic partnership. As uncouth as it sounds, calling a marriage a business arrangement isn’t inaccurate. As marriage has degraded, it's no coincidence many spouses don't even share the same bank account anymore.

It’s easy for us on the right to winger wave how women shouldn’t care about status, and need to stay home and raise their kids. Many women are fine with this arrangement, and many are better with local jobs where they get to chat and work while the kids are at school. There is a certain kind of woman who will never be satisfied with this, and it’s just as necessary they have a role. Laugh all you want how the new generation of girlbosses are becoming single cat-ladies as their own conception of status clashes with the men they want to pursue, but it’s tragic. These women tended to be intelligent, shrewd, and have a deep instinct that complemented their powerful husbands well, and are only a genetic dead-end now because of the perverse incentives of the corporate world.

Modernity has damaged everyone, even people we tend to despise. Even those who think they have benefitted from the new way of things. While we can’t upend the system now, we can make small changes in our lives to form new, organic relationships that provide a viable alternative to business as usual.

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