Goodreads Doesn't Have It, Data Migration: The Rise of Corporate Feminism

22 Oct, 2025

This is a well written, thorough book. I am in the anarchist community as a democratic anarchist (please read on this before spewing ignorance https://theanarchistlibrary.org/libra...) and there’s a lot of content on “No Girl Bosses”. For the most part, this is a symptom of misogyny in the anarchist community in most uses, but I thought it was worth a deeper dive on its own despite the specific attack of the “girl boss” movement while ignoring equivalent movements in male minority boss movements or lack of women in anarchist finance, bookkeeping, and public interface positions in general in the community. So here’s my review on it through that lens.

Alison Elias does an excellent job showing impossibilities for unionization inherent in what was considered to be women’s work. Secretaries, for example, viewed themselves as the right hand man of the person they worked for and felt that they would be not able to be promoted if they protested or unionized. This was due to the “secretarial monogamy” of the interaction that implied a deprofessionalization of boundaries; relationships or even marriages between secretaries and their bosses at work were so normalized and common that secretaries would demand a “pool of eligible men” to which they could be possibly assigned as secretaries in the early days of the job’s historical popular existence. Therefore, unionization or protest would interrupt this “assigned monogamy” and would make them less likely to be promoted, no matter how they felt about the normalization of being the quiet underpaid competence behind incompetent men (later reflected in the Dolly Parton movie 9 to 5.)

Because of this historical assumption, what I really don’t like about the Alison Elias book is it dances around the fact that this therefore makes it tainted with the same taint as sex work. They weren’t able to unionize because many of them didn’t want to be in the job, and if you were in the job it was hard to wash away the taint of having been in it by not only men who were prone to any sort of sexism they could get away with, but also other women, especially a new brand of secretary-shamer in the later 80s-90s feminist movement. These women would suggest to never become a secretary, but to always opt for a job a man holds, to earn back respect for women instead of fighting the absurdities of even implying the position of secretary, very similar to the”clean and safe” professionalized administrative assistant, was dirty.

When it wasn’t given implicit contempt for being deprofessionalized in a way that made it overlap with sex work, and that that was even encouraged in many cases as long as it led to marriage for the woman, it was then thrown under the bus from a class perspective. Elias only really touches on the class issues and is afraid to touch on the overlap with sex work. I have to say that was cowardly of her as it’s clear. It’s the reason why it’s often depreciated by men who historically have found it acceptable to hit on their secretaries because many times these secretaries encouraged that in order to get married. Now, in the days of the EEOC and the professionalization and bureaucratization of word processing work, that is no longer acceptable. Many of the behaviors that were once “part of the job” such as being excessively submissive, nurturant, fashionable and just a little bit flirty cannot occur. But that history of being expected to clean up competency messes of bosses not as intelligent as yourself while bearing his harassment and half of his wages is part of why women say to respect secretaries, but never become one and never let it get like that again.

The escape from this position and the ghettoization of clerks and secretaries was a really important read. It was extremely hard to get out of that, and to this day it remains implicit when men think it is ok to not only pay a woman at their side miserly wages but to also hit on her while she is the face of competency. The history of the secretary is unfortunately behind a lot of that expectation, and the schools for wealthy heiresses that encouraged such behavior as a step towards marriage to the successful and wealthy but also a backup if finances were squandered by irresponsible families. That women had to bear this kind of behavior or engage it the ghettoization of the clerk, which was considered working class and not to be respected and therefore not eligible to become managers or otherwise later, shows that women were being corralled into a pool of fertile young women or stuck in a depreciated economic loop if they failed to comply. That issue is stark and continues to this day. The “girl boss” movement does indeed highlight the end of that submissiveness, the end of not taking the deserved glory and the wages with it. And that the history of that was earned oftentimes when men undermining and pouting on the sidelines; even fellow men of the working class. That was a very won by women for women victory, one of the rarities of its kind, especially from a unionization perspective.

I think this book is really important for anyone taking a dump on “girl bosses” in one breath and then calling for a union or a strike in another. Though aggressive authoritarianism (fascism) is not ok ever, for any gender, the victories won escaping a black hole of ghettoisation of women’s work should not be erased and thrown under the bus without calling misogyny. To this day, the history of the secretary and the fight to win against all of its tainted history haunts the Women’s rights movement, especially in the case of Hillary’s being Secretary of State often being deliberately misinterpreted on these grounds. The victory of not hiding someone else’s incompetence and not being submissive and shirking the glory is a true victory that has played a huge role in wage equalization for women. I won’t let some tired attack on women disguised as concern for “bosses in general” change the importance of highlighting this truly excruciatingly painful history of work equality for women, a fight I to this day experience myself.