Top Girls Enjoyment Agency : Top Girls

Marlene works for an employment agency called Top Girls, which slowly emerges as a symbol for the corruption and blind individualism of Thatcherism, as well as the rigged game of life under the patriarchy. The name of the agency, Top Girls, is cutesy and condescending. It points directly to the futility of trying to succeed as a woman in the cruel and misogynistic corporate world—even if a woman makes it to the pinnacle of her profession, she is only a “Top Girl”. She is infantilized, patronized, and she will inevitably hit the glass ceiling—the unofficial but universally acknowledged barrier to advancement which women, minorities, and other marginalized groups unfortunately but inevitably face even in today’s corporate world, and especially in the conservative, Thatcherist word of 1980s England.

The fact that Top Girls is an employment agency rather than a bank, a law firm, or a medical practice is also significant symbolically. The agency has ostensibly feminist goals and an apparent focus on women’s achievements, as the whole point of Top Girls is to place women in the workforce. In oiling the wheels of capitalism and inserting more and more women into the workforce, where they will be pressured to prioritize labor over family, individualism over collectivism, and financial gain over emotional or moral improvement, Top Girls actually perpetuates the structures that allow women to be abused at worst and underestimated at best as they pursue success within the constricting, unfair confines of patriarchy and capitalism alike.