The girlboss was born in a conversion-redemption story. “I entered adulthood believing that capitalism was a scam,” the term’s key popularizer Sophia Amoruso wrote in her memoir #Girlboss (2014), “but I’ve instead found that it’s a kind of alchemy. You combine hard work, creativity, and self-determination, and things start to happen.”8 Funnily enough, Marx also called capitalism a kind of alchemy, albeit his take was that—to be a capitalist—you combine other people’s work with something you own.
