July 30 2026 - 6:00pm
This week, the Atlantic declared that the girlboss was dead. Writer Annie Joy Williams recounted an online feud between two female influencers, Alex Cooper and Alix Earle, arguing that because Cooper is openly ambitious and Earle presents her success as a serendipitous accident, the internet has called the feud in Earle’s favor. The need for women to appear as if they are no longer striving for success is presented as cold, hard evidence that the girlboss has been killed off.
But Cooper and Earle — both with estimated multi-million-dollar net worths — could just as well be two girlbosses not only alive, but thriving. They’re both ambitious and working hard, even if their public personas may differ. That’s why the girlboss isn’t yet dead — but she should be, along with the tradwife. Both are caricatures that don’t reflect the realities of modern women.
The term “girlboss” grew out of the 2010s, when Nasty Gal founder Sophia Amoruso published a memoir entitled #GIRLBOSS, a year after Meta’s Sheryl Sandberg published Lean In. The message in both was that a woman’s worth lay in their financial success, and that she could have it all: professional work and a home life.
By contrast, the tradwife is a glamorized vision of domestic bliss. The term emerged around 2020, propelled by social media creators such as Ballerina Farm’s Hannah Neeleman, who built huge audiences by posting elaborate home-cooked meals and videos of themselves in vintage-inspired dresses.
Google searches for “girlboss” peaked nearly a decade ago, while interest in “tradwife” reached its high-water mark in 2024, suggesting both are more fleeting trends than enduring identities. But, as the Atlantic piece argues, the online world encourages women to see themselves as either girlbosses or tradwives, just as it invites them to pick sides in the Cooper–Earle feud. Who benefits from this false choice? Certainly not women.
Both the girlboss and the tradwife are memes and extremes. And posing either as more or less ambitious discounts the difficulties women face — and the meaningful successes to be had — in both the workforce and at home.
When women are asked what they want in life, there’s a clear majority who are not at the extremes. As the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year, one widely cited survey found that 47% of Gen Z women would rather have a regular job and be “happily married with kids” than be a jobless “trophy wife”, a “highly successful” but single career woman, or someone with a partner and “lots of travel” but no children. The Journal further adds that almost 75% of women want kids.
The girlboss and the tradwife are such caricatures that no one can quite agree on what either term means. Instead, both have become politicized shorthand — girlboss coded as Left, tradwife coded as Right — forcing women into an artificial binary. The truth is far messier. Many women who value their careers leave work because childcare is unaffordable; according to one study, 42% of women who exited the workforce in 2025 cited caregiving costs. Others would prefer to stay home but cannot afford to, or have no partner to rely on. Labels like girlboss and tradwife flatten these realities into ideological stereotypes.
Women should not be diminished for looking more or less like a girlboss or tradwife, particularly since it’s not always clear how much their preference — versus acceptance — may be at play. We are not so simple as to be reduced to a single conjunction-made-proper-noun. Women can define success in many different ways. No pure girlboss or tradwife needs to live for that to happen.
