The Girlboss Has Left the Building

When the term girlboss was foisted on the public in 2014, the United States was already well on its way to the series of cascading disasters that have shaped 2020, even if they had not yet come fully into focus. That year, an Ebola outbreak briefly seemed as though it might take root in America. Conspiracy theories about the safety of vaccines became popular enough to seed a measles flare-up in New York City. Donald Trump hinted at a future run for president. Michael Brown, a black teenager, was shot and killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri.

Many people sensed a need for change, but not everyone agreed on how much. In her pop-feminist business memoir, , the entrepreneur Sophia Amoruso, who an eBay account into the fast-fashion mini-empire Nasty Gal, proposed a convenient incrementalism. Instead of dismantling the power men had long wielded in America, career women could simply take it for themselves at the office. Like Sheryl Sandberg’s self-help hit before it, argued that the professional success