You were told you could have it all. No one mentioned what it would cost you.
For working mothers who still want achievement and presence, ambition and calm, Superwoman Is Tired is the book that finally tells the truth.
Grounded in research and the candid accounts of real women navigating this every day, it's a long-overdue reconsideration of modern ambition, and a permission slip to define success on your own terms.
Superwoman Is Tired takes readers from the nagging sense that they’re failing to a powerful realisation: the problem isn’t them. The book unpacks how millennial women were encouraged to pursue ambition without a system designed to support it, revealing why modern success so often leads to burnout. By the final chapter, readers have a new lens on how to define success for themselves.
If you're exhausted in a way that sleep doesn't fix, you're not imagining it, and you're definitely not the only one. Among millennial women, this tiredness has become background noise. The surprising part is who it's hitting hardest: the ones who were most “successful” on paper, who did what they were told, worked hard, achieved… and now feel suffocated by the life they built.
We've been encouraged to treat this as an individual shortcoming, fixing it with better time management, better boundaries, more self-care. But what if the issue isn't you? What if it's the impossible job description we've been handed: do the paid work like you don't have a family, and do the family work like you don't have a job?
The promise of “education + ambition = freedom” has turned into a reality of longer hours, always-on culture, expensive childcare, and domestic expectations that still leave the bulk of the mental load on women. When the story is “empowerment”, the blame turns inward, and structural problems start to feel like personal defects.
This book is about reclaiming ambition for the 2020s and beyond. We were promised empowerment, but got exhaustion. Superwoman Is Tired explains how we got here, and how we find our way out.
About the author
Adele Barlow is a writer and marketer with almost two decades of experience working across tech, startups, and mission-driven organisations. After becoming a mother, she began to notice a pattern among the women around her: deep existential exhaustion. Superwoman Is Tired grew out of her desire to understand why.
What comes after ambition?
“Women are in the midst of a revolutionary reckoning with our ambitions. We’re not resigning en masse—because who can afford to quit her job in this economy?!—but we are trying to figure out a new set of goals and guidance for our professional lives. Thanks to long-simmering inequality and stubborn sexism, clarified by the pain of the pandemic, our definitions of success increasingly lie outside the realm of work. We are waking up to the fact that our jobs are never going to love us back. And we are trying to adjust accordingly.”
The Soft-Girl Revolution
“Women who strove to be girlbosses went to bed late and got up early to sweat it out at Barry’s or Soul Cycle. They idolized female business leaders like Sheryl Sandberg and Marissa Mayer (who famously worked from her hospital bed after she delivered twins)…. The next generation of women have watched all of this unfold, observed our burnout and our late nights, our stress fractures and our egg freezing, and said, No thanks. What about if we just didn't try so hard?”
Why millennials are quitting
“For millennials and the younger generation Z and Alphas, who may never be able to afford to buy a home or retire at a reasonable age, there is a growing feeling online that hard work is fortifying a system that, at best, is giving them nothing back and, at worst, is actively screwing them over… The goal of a softer life is more time and energy for what makes you happy and as little time as possible focusing on what doesn’t.”