“The girlboss is one of the cruelest tricks capitalism ever perpetrated,” wrote Alex Abad-Santos for Vox. “Born in the mid-2010s, she was simultaneously a power fantasy and a utopian promise. 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. As companies grew in her image, so did her mythos; her legacy would be grand and fair, because equality was coming to work. Everyone was supposed to win when girlbosses won. Hard work would finally pay off.”
But alas, it was simply one other bid to distract mainstream mass media from the challenges feminism nonetheless faces, the challenges that the struggle for equality generally nonetheless faces. According to Alexandra Solomon, a professor of gender and gender roles, the “girlboss” inherently has internalized sexism hooked up to it. “Research shows that as women get older, and as women become more powerful, they are perceived as less likable. So by using that term girlboss, there’s a desire to be powerful but a fear of losing likability.” Per Abad-Santos, the verb “to girlboss” turned akin to the verbs of “gaslight” and “gatekeep” on social media like Twitter and TikTok, thus the slang.
All of this proof withstanding, I’ve usually considered how “gaslight gatekeep girlboss” extends past simply the working lady in the twenty first century who has to have “girl” added to her job title so males received’t be too scared of her. I’ve considered girlbosses from centuries and many years previous who wanted to stick to sure requirements of gender and sexuality as a way to be taken severely by the patriarchy together with her threats. In this sense, to gaslight, gatekeep, and girlboss may be three issues a lady should don’t solely to herself to achieve a person’s world however to different girls round her.
Take Betty Friedan. Lauded as the mom of second-wave feminism in the United States with the publication of her landmark guide The Feminine Mystique in 1963, she would assist discovered the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966 and set up the Women’s Strike for Equality in 1970. Naturally, feminism has modified and progressed, principally for the higher, since the generations of our grandmothers. But that doesn’t excuse some of the conduct of girls like Friedan throughout their respective heydays, who just about needed to step on different girls on her strategy to the prime.
It isn’t a secret in feminist research that, in the Nineteen Sixties and ‘70s, Friedan was homophobic. According to her 2001 memoir Life So Far, she alleged that she only knew of one gay man while she was growing up in early 20th-century Illinois and that the “whole idea of homosexuality made [her] profoundly uneasy.” OK, not exactly scandalous since mindsets like that were, unfortunately, the norm at that time. As she got older and feminism progressed, she admitted to having been “square” about the notion of homosexuality in previous decades, suggesting that she wasn’t as homophobic in later life. But that doesn’t justify her conduct and perspective in direction of lesbian girls in the early days of NOW.
Friedan basically didn’t imagine, at the least not in the Nineteen Sixties and ‘70s, that feminism was intersectional. She believed that the plight of lesbian women was separate from those of her group, so to speak, who were fighting for the (white) heterosexual woman’s proper to be free of the kitchen. Friedan’s perspective in direction of lesbians who did handle to hitch NOW at the moment was usually avoidant or hostile. So it ought to come as no shock that with a pacesetter who behaved in such a approach in direction of one other minority, a subgroup of folks from NOW joined to type what would turn into often called the Lavender Menace.
The Lavender Menace was a bunch of lesbian radical feminists who got here collectively to protest the exclusion of each feminists and their points from the feminist motion. It was really Friedan who gave them their title, reminiscent of the Lavender Scare from the Fifties by which homosexuals have been hunted and fired from their U.S. authorities jobs. (The colour lavender can be simply related to the LGBTQ+ rights motion generally.)
“Many feminists, not just Friedan, in the National Organization for Women (NOW) felt that lesbian issues were irrelevant to the majority of women and would hinder the feminist cause, and that identifying the movement with lesbians and their rights would make it harder to win feminist victories,” wrote Linda Napikoski for ThoughtCo. “Many lesbians had found a comfortable activism home within the rising feminist movement, and this exclusion stung. It called into serious question for them the concept of ‘sisterhood.’ If ‘the personal is political,’ how could sexual identity, women identifying with women and not with men, not be part of feminism?”
Friedan did face criticism from fellow feminists for the controversy that led to the forming of what would turn into the Lavender Menace, in addition to her feedback and worries that the group would hinder the total struggle for girls’s equality. As such, creator Rita Mae Brown infamously stop her administrative job for NOW in February 1970, having had sufficient of Friedan’s anti-lesbian and homophobic rhetoric. By 1971, with Friedan now not in cost, NOW started together with lesbian rights and points of their insurance policies, and they’d later turn into one of the central points that NOW considerations themselves with as we speak.
At the National Women’s Conference in Houston, Texas, in 1977, Friedan apologized for selling the exclusion of lesbians and for referring to them as “disrupters” throughout her tenure at NOW, and supported payments that may ban sexual choice discrimination. But sadly, the harm was performed, and lots of lesbian girls felt ostracized from second-wave feminism, needing to take issues into their very own arms reasonably than have the mainstream feminist motion tackle them as girls.
If we predict of Friedan as a sort of girlboss in her day, one who had shattered the proverbial glass ceiling with The Feminine Mystique, who lastly gave phrases to “the problem that has no name,” she wanted to do all the things in her energy to be taken severely by patriarchal mass tradition. Whether it was a political tactic or merely influenced by her personal homophobic prejudices, her determination to exclude lesbians from the second-wave feminist motion was deliberate. While we definitely don’t bear in mind feminism’s second wave for being intersectional, it’s virtually as if Friedan may have backed up her selections by saying, “It’s not personal, it’s business,” the approach any man would flippantly do.
While Friedan’s contributions to second-wave feminism have been immense and influential, she, too, was a sufferer of patriarchy, first for retaining her in the kitchen after which for fooling her into believing that any struggle for girls’s equality may exclude any kind of lady who doesn’t adhere to sure requirements. Ultimately, Friedan’s personal internalized misogyny that went unresolved throughout that period was the factor that hindered the feminist motion, not the Lavender Menace. She, too, was gaslit and gatekept into believing she was a girlboss, and he or she unfold that toxicity round.
It usually appears like an unimaginable uphill battle when the needle for advances in feminism retains getting moved by the still-standing patriarchy. But any warrior value their salt is aware of that the solely strategy to be helpful to their trigger is to struggle their very own battles first. If I’ll paraphrase RuPaul, “If you can’t fight yo’ own battles, how in the hell you gon’ fight everyone else’s?”
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