The internet has spent the last decade inventing new ways for women to be girls. We have had the girlboss, clean girl, soft girl, “girl dinner,” “girl math,” hot girl summer, lazy girl jobs, and the increasingly ubiquitous “I’m just a girl.” Now, after years of telling women that freedom meant climbing the corporate ladder and needing no man, the algorithm has rediscovered traditional femininity. Sourdough, bows, floral dresses, homemaking, “feminine energy,” and tradwife TikTok have arrived as the correction to the exhausted girlboss.
But replacing the pantsuit with a prairie dress does not by itself recover femininity.
