On a recent autumn night, a friend sat in my mother's kitchen crying inconsolably. She'd had a blazing fight with her husband and screamed something she feared was unforgivable. As she sat slumped at the table with heaving shoulders, she recounted not just the row, but the stressful day that had crescendoed towards it, the exhausting weeks beforehand, their precarious patchwork of childcare, work pressures, sleep deprivation. On and on it went. This much was clear: whatever she'd said in their fight, and the breakdown that followed, were the byproducts of complete and utter exhaustion.
A nonstop campaign of hyper-productivity had left the threads of this professionally successful woman's life pulled so taut that when tugged, there was nothing left for them to do but snap.
She was in her early 40s, 12 years my senior. To me, her collapse seemed like a fairly logical result of the unsustainably high standards and frenetic pace she'd demanded of herself.
But then again, I'm part of a generation that benefits from the critiques of those who have been there and tried that. We've watched the impossibly busy lives that women before us have led. We're suspicious that "having it all" is possible for anyone except the privileged few who can build a nursery next to their C-suite office (as Marissa Mayer did at Yahoo, the same year she ordered remote employees back to the office). We've listened to the honest opinions of the Anne-Marie Slaughters and the Michelle Obamas who've said, "That's a lie."
The "have it all" mantra has limited currency among millennial and Gen Z women. And who isn't sick of the phrase?
And yet, for all our inherited wisdom, maybe we haven't learned much at all. The promise behind "have it all," that we can slog our way to equality and fulfillment, is alive and well in another form. I'm talking about hustle culture.
#Hustle, #slay, #grit, #werk, #riseandgrind. A few years ago, these were the words of the zeitgeist, and logging punishing hours (then posting about it) passed for a personality. The hashtags have aged.
The ethic has simply changed outfits. In 2025, the "996" schedule (9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week) became a point of pride at a wave of AI startups, to the point that . Online, the grind now comes dressed as 5 a.m. routines, "monk mode," and the side hustle you're supposed to launch with whatever energy your day job leaves you.
These catchwords aren't specific to women. "Hustle" has a distinctive start-up bro origin and flavor, and burnout among millennials (Anne Helen Petersen's viral essay, later expanded into her book Can't Even) is a whole-generation issue. But hustle does capture the imagination of young women as a way to wrest control of our lives. Publications like Girlboss itself, with its many pieces on side hustles alone, are a testament to that. "I dream it, I work hard, I grind 'til I own it," sings Beyoncé in "Formation," her Black feminist anthem.
Hustle and "have it all" are different in many ways, but here's how they're similar: they both assume that external factors will give us internal validation. They both require us to be breathlessly hard-working and productive, optimizing every moment of every day. They both link women's empowerment with capitalism, perfectionism, and climbing a socioeconomic class. As writer and scholar Erin Spampinato told Girlboss, "We have set the exact same traps for ourselves once again."
In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was a cruel king whose punishment for outsmarting death was an eternity of back-breaking toil, pushing a boulder up a mountain only to watch it roll back down. Whether the slogan is hustle, "have it all," "lean in," or whatever comes next, does feminism always require Sisyphean toil? Is working harder and faster always the price of progress?
That way of thinking dooms us to make the same mistakes and end up in the same places: exhausted, sobbing wrecks at our friends' kitchen tables. Squeezing a Pomodoro of self-care into your schedule won't fix it. Yes, personal wellness is part of the answer, and there are smart ways to handle workplace stress before it turns into burnout. The bigger question is the brand of feminism we're buying into, and what that means for women's empowerment collectively and for personal fulfillment individually.
Feminism and the Cult of the Grind
When writer Christa Hogan sat down with a special edition of Time called "Women Changing the World," she was looking for takeaways. "I uncapped a highlighter, flipped open to the first interview, and prepared myself to be inspired and moved," she wrote in an essay for The Ascent. It reminded her of when, fresh out of college, she'd interviewed female leaders for a magazine series in a similar pursuit. "I wanted to understand how the women I admired got where they were… Secretly, I also wanted to know how these women managed it all on a personal level."
Isn't this something we all do, reading other women's stories with our figurative highlighters in hand? Even though it's now something of a taboo to ask successful women about work-life balance, we devour the profiles of how she "gets it done," the morning routine videos, the productivity systems, and the inspirational quotes.
On one level, this speaks to a deep yearning to live a full life and piece together a guidebook for doing it. It also speaks to the hope that some magic-bullet solution out there could help us do all of it. But on another level, it's "hustle porn," a term Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian helped popularize, and it perpetuates our insecurities and traps us in a feedback loop of never enough.
As for the key ways hustle culture differs from having it all, it promotes a less conventional idea of work-based success, giving more space for entrepreneurship and pursuing passions. The downside is that it's less results-focused. That frantic pace of life isn't a means to an end, like balancing a family with a fulfilling career, or reaching financial independence. Hustle worships hard work as an end in itself.
"In the version of feminism I was most familiar with [as a young adult], financial independence was the litmus test," Hogan told Girlboss. "But once I started a family and decided to stay home, it felt like a demotion. It felt like I had to turn in my feminist card to be a whole person."
"I hope things have changed for the better in the past two decades. I hope younger women are getting more holistic support from female mentors. But what I often see is women kicking ass at work and in their businesses at the expense of their health and the rest of their lives. It seems like in our rush to be equal with men, we're making the same mistakes of misidentifying our value with our bank accounts and accomplishments."
The numbers suggest Hogan's hope for more support hasn't come true yet. In McKinsey and LeanIn.Org's Women in the Workplace 2025 report, only 31% of entry-level women said they have a sponsor, compared with 45% of entry-level men, and just 54% of companies said women's career advancement is a high priority. The same report found a new "ambition gap," with 69% of entry-level women wanting to be promoted versus 80% of men. The report's authors connect that gap to a support gap: when women get the same backing as men, they're just as eager to advance. Grinding harder on your own doesn't close it.
Dr. Stephanie Dowrick is uniquely qualified to speak on both the feminist movement and this very personal question of being "whole." She founded The Women's Press in London in the late 1970s, one of the most influential feminist publishers of the second-wave women's liberation movement, which published iconic texts such as the UK edition of Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Dowrick is also an interfaith minister and the author of best-selling books on inner wellbeing, including Choosing Happiness, Everyday Kindness, and, most recently, Your Name Is Not Anxious.
"The women's liberation movement [of the 1970s] had far more ambitious goals than simply luring women into workaholism," Dowrick told Girlboss. "Yes, it successfully opened up all kinds of seriously overdue educational and work opportunities, but it also asked women to think freshly about what kind of people we wanted to be and also what kind of world we wanted to create and participate in. That second-wave feminism alongside the civil rights movement was genuinely political. It persistently addressed social class and race or ethnicity alongside issues of gender and sexuality."
Hustle culture, on the other hand, "is strongly associated with a version of feminism that is itself highly individualistic and insufficiently questioning of power structures that leave many more people out than they benefit. Those are also the structures that privilege who we are in our work lives and how much we can earn or even 'demand' over any other kind of valuing of human existence. That kind of feminism is brutal. It is also far from radical."
"Very far from 'having it all,' a work-worshipping paradigm actually asks you to sacrifice almost everything else (including how you regard your own mind, heart, and soul) for a depth of validation that comes from way outside yourself. 'I work, therefore I am.' This is not to say interesting work doesn't matter. It does! Hard work, effort, conscientiousness, and trustworthiness also matter greatly. But who and what we are hustling for makes all the difference in the world."
No Step for All Women
Spampinato challenges the breed of feminism that fails to question power structures in an essay for Electric Literature, in which she argues that "having it all" is a "capitalist nightmare" that "pits the dreams of some of us against the labor of the rest."
"We live in an era where we mistake the American dream (that with enough grit, anyone can make it here) for the dream of women's empowerment (that all women will have equal opportunities to each other and men)," Spampinato writes.
Hustle culture is essentially a variety of the grit-focused American dream, repackaged for each new generation. If Jay Gatsby were alive today, perhaps F. Scott Fitzgerald would have him scaling social classes with a stack of side hustles and an AI start-up. It's the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness, so long as you #WerkWerkWerk. It's tethered to individualism and the rewards of capitalism.
Conflating feminism with this culture (productivity-obsessed, grind-'til-I-own-it) creates the same blind spots for which Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In has long been criticized: it buys into an illusion of control and ignores underlying systemic issues.
It also overlooks the fact that achieving your personal ambition, when you happen to be a woman, is a different thing from pursuing collective women's empowerment. You can see the gap between the two in who gets pushed out when the rules change. As companies tightened return-to-office mandates in 2025, labor force participation for women ages 25 to 44 with children under 5 fell from 69.7% to 66.9% in the first half of the year, Fortune reported, citing Bureau of Labor Statistics data. No amount of personal grit fixes a policy that makes work and caregiving incompatible.
"The hustle is inherently a privileged and classist concept," Spampinato said to Girlboss. "It elevates certain kinds of work above others. It's as obtuse as 'having it all' is about the realities of most people's lives."
"I think we have to recognize that no real progress is made on the backs of other women or marginalized people, and the vast majority of the mainstream gains we've made have been on those backs … on an individual level people should do what gives them satisfaction and (hopefully) serves their values. That said, we have to understand that our happiness and satisfaction isn't justice."
"If you're actually succeeding in a capitalist setting and your hustle serves you, I get that. It's not the right choice for me, but I could see that happening for some women and being great. I don't think that's what the situation is for most women, and I think that's one of the reasons I'm suspicious of capitalism. It makes us think we all have to 'make it' the same way."
Spampinato recognized the inadequacies of hustle culture in her own life, and did something about it. "One of the reasons I left New York was so I could quit the hustle, because it didn't serve me," she said. "For some people it does, because their hustle contributes to their success. Society values their work, and they show that by paying them for it. But for me, I wanted to write and do other things that don't pay any money, so I was just hustling from tutoring jobs to other freelance gigs and spending all my time on the subway so that I could afford two measly hours of writing time a day."
"So many people try hard (grinding themselves to a pulp) and aren't granted the dignity they deserve as humans, let alone the means to survive in a capitalist system. You shouldn't have to be good to be treated as a human, and women trying to empower themselves through perfection is, in my opinion, us falling for that lie."
Rise Up and Choose
Ultimately, the questions about hustle and feminism lead back to a familiar word in conversations about women's empowerment: choice (and recognizing that having choices is a privilege).
That privilege is unevenly spread. In Deloitte's Women @ Work 2025 survey, only about half of women described their mental health as good, and 29% said they can't detach from work and switch off. Choosing differently is easier for some of us than for others. But when you do have room to choose, use it on purpose.
Hogan says, "It seems to me hustle culture comes from a place of competition, scarcity, and lack. As if women have to hustle to prove their worth, instead of living from a place of their own inherent value as people. Feminism is about empowering women to make their own choices. Our power is found in digging deep and figuring out who we are as individuals and not trying to measure up to someone else's ideal." If you've never sat down and written out what career success looks like on your own terms, that's a practical place to start.
One of Dowrick's books is entirely about choice. Called Choosing Happiness: Life & Soul Essentials (what a radical notion!), it's about our responses, values, and behaviors in our families, work, and communities.
Rather than reducing it to a choice of "hustle or not," Dowrick encourages us to make choices that are "authentically self-supporting," no matter what work environment we're in. Sometimes that's as concrete as negotiating a four-day week before you accept the job. Sometimes it's a quieter shift in how you talk to yourself.
"These are the choices of consciousness and conscience that nurture a priceless inner stability along with inner worth and empowerment," said Dowrick. She offers a (non-exhaustive) list of the kinds of choices we can make each day:
- Check your own sense of agency
- Choose consciously, with some gratitude that you have choices
- Notice phrases like "I have to…" that turn your choices into obligations
- Resist the allure of being "one of the boys" if the "boys'" values aren't yours
- Check the research on what excessive hours actually cost you (the WHO and ILO found that working 55 or more hours a week carries a 35% higher risk of stroke than a 35 to 40 hour week)
- Discover that your potential and vision of life are evolving, not static
- Support other people eagerly and generously
- Develop your creativity and freshness of thought
- Listen sometimes to the "small quiet voice within" and to the messages of your body, instincts, and spirit
- Grow and treasure your aliveness
Prompts like these lead us deeper and reveal the simplicity of our opening question: do you have to hustle, grind, be productivity-obsessed, and toil like Sisyphus to consider yourself a feminist?
Hustle culture and productivity obsessions are exhausting, incurious, and self-aggrandizing. On their own, they also offer an anemic, superficial, and tedious experience of life.
They may be useful from time to time, but overall they're inadequate vehicles for interpreting and expressing feminism, seeking joy, finding fulfillment, or, for that matter, deciding how you'll spend tomorrow. As one founder put it in our 2026 work resolutions roundup, "discernment is its own form of ambition."
"We can live a life fearful of missing out, of being wrong, of making mistakes, of not being noticed. That's a choice. And a poverty," said Dowrick. "Or we can throw ourselves into the heart of life. Work is part of that. It may even be central. But it is not everything."
"At work and beyond it, there's the richness of trying what's new, of falling down, as the Zen phrase would have it, seven times and rising up eight. It's truly liberating, even exhilarating, to discover that it is never our perfection that brings us closer to life or to one another; it is far more likely to be the truth of our vulnerability as well as our excitement. That's also a choice."
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