We Don’t Need Another Hero - We Need a Heroine

Why Gen X women were set up without a career role model

In this article you will learn:

• Why Gen X women entered work without a viable female career role models

• How paid work was added on top of unpaid labour

• Why mid-life burnout is not a personal failure

• How male career models became the default - and the cost of that

• What reclaiming a ‘heroine’ perspective makes possible

Introduction: The First Generation to Do It All

Gen X women are trailblazers - whether we like that label or not.

We are the first generation of women to truly engage with paid careers at scale. We were told that work would give us purpose, freedom, identity, and financial independence - and in many ways, it has.

Paid work has offered:

• meaning beyond homemaking

• intellectual engagement

• income and autonomy

• identity outside of motherhood

And it has also been far harder than anyone prepared us for.

Gen X women did not replace unpaid labour with paid work - we layered paid work on top of it.

That context matters.

The Load That Never Left

The workload our mothers and grandmothers carried did not disappear.

Yes, washing machines replaced washboards.
Yes, technology made some tasks faster.

But the responsibility did not go away - it was either:

• still done by women

• managed by women

• or outsourced and paid for by women

Add to that pregnancy, birth, menstrual cycles, perimenopause, menopause - and the invisible coordination work of family life - and the maths simply stops working.

You cannot keep adding load without eventually crushing the person carrying it.

The Promise That Didn’t Quite Land

Many Gen X women reach mid-life asking the same quiet question:

Where did it go wrong?

Life was supposed to be:

• easier

• more secure

• more equitable

Yet many women arrive at mid-life:

• burnt out

• financially behind male peers

• with less superannuation

• carrying more debt and responsibility

This isn’t because Gen X women didn’t work hard enough.

It’s because we were sold a future without a realistic model for how it would actually work.

The Missing Heroine

Here’s where I think the gap really sits.

Gen X women had no heroine.

When we were growing up, who were our career role models?

Most of the women we saw:

• were at home

• or financially dependent

• or stuck in marriages they couldn’t afford to leave

Many of us heard stories - or lived them - of mothers who stayed not because they wanted to, but because they had no financial exit.

I heard stories from friends about DV, and saw evidence of it, and it was a tolerated norm providing nobody got really hurt. And most of us had mothers at home who helped with homework and cooked dinner because they had actually put food in the fridge during the day.

At the same time, the women who did work often had done so by fitting into male-defined norms - not by integrating work with women’s lives or needs.

We did not inherit a model of womanhood that included paid work, care, health, and autonomy in the same body.

When Men Became the Template

In the late 80s and 90s, women entered work by copying what we saw.

Power suits.
Shoulder pads.
After-work drinks where deals were done.

Men became the heroes of the career story - because they were the only visible ones who had walked before us.

That worked… until it didn’t.

Because male career models were never designed to account for:

• pregnancy

• cycles

• menopause

• caregiving

• emotional labour

• double shifts

The problem was never women’s ambition - it was the template we were given to live inside that required them to self abandon over, and over.

I don’t doubt for a minute any of this was intended, but it has set women up to fail, and worse blame themselves for the ‘shortcomings’ of womanhood.

The system is broken, not women.

Mid-Life: When the Model Collapses

By mid-life, the challenges become impossible to ignore.

Many women have spent decades:

• pushing through

• not complaining

• shortchanging rest and care

• telling themselves to ‘harden up’

Then mid-life arrives - and the cracks in the system open right up and start to swallow us whole. I have heard countless stories in my practice from women about these struggles, so much so I ran a survey to put data to them and wrote a white paper about it.

The stone cold truth is this:

Bodies change.
Energy shifts.
Tolerance for self-betrayal drops.

Mid-life burnout in Gen X women is not weakness - it is a predictable response to an unsustainable model.

You Were Never Meant to Be a Machine

This matters enough to say plainly:

You were not born to operate like a machine.

If you are struggling, it does not mean you failed to cope.
It may mean the system finally failed you - loudly enough that you can no longer ignore it.

What a Heroine Perspective Makes Possible

A heroine is not a woman who does more.

She is a woman who:

• tells the truth about cost

• honours her capacity

• designs life from the inside out

• stops modelling herself on templates that harm her

The work of mid-life is not to ‘fix’ yourself.

It is to re-orient around who you are now - not who the system needed you to be.

The Invitation

Start small.

Pick the low-hanging fruit - the things that can change without draining what little energy you have left.

Ask yourself:

• What can I stop doing?

• What can I delegate or outsource?

• What can I re-engineer with less effort?

Then ask something deeper:

• Who is a woman I admire now - and what does she embody that I’m allowed to learn from?

You don’t need another hero.

You need permission to become your own heroine - on terms that actually work for you.

If you’d like support navigating this re-orientation, a Soul Strategy Call can help you explore what sustainability might look like in this stage of life.