From my deep appreciation of female friendship to my love of the cosmo, it’s safe to say that I learned a lot from watching Sex And The City. As a journalist, I quickly came to realise that the job looks nothing like what Carrie Bradshaw does (way more deadlines, much less swanning around New York City in Manolos), but I know for sure that watching her typing away at her old Mac computer meant I couldn’t help but wonder if I could do it too.

When it first aired in 1998, the show was (rightfully) hailed as groundbreaking, not just for its depiction of sex, the single life and selfhood, but of women’s careers, too. While not much was shown of the day-to-day of their roles, the characters perfectly encapsulated the kind of ‘work hard, play hard’ mentality that would later give way to #RiseAndGrind and hustle culture messaging. Between Samantha’s power suits, Miranda’s high-powered position, Carrie’s unbelievable $1 a word rate and Charlotte’s polished, arty lifestyle, it would be pretty easy to class Sex And The City as prime early-2000s girlboss career porn, for better or worse. 

Throughout the six seasons (and two films), we watch them grapple with different work dilemmas. Miranda, ever the hustler, is arguably the most driven of the group. A Harvard-educated and overworked lawyer in a male-dominated industry, she struggles with feeling like she’s being taken advantage of at work and passed over because she is a woman while trying to make partner. In season two, while reflecting on the double standards surrounding career-driven women, she utters the iconic line: “I want to enjoy my success, not apologise for it.”

PR-maven Samantha is also extremely successful, managing multiple celebrity clients and always getting the group into the most exclusive events, yet she still faces unfair treatment in the workplace. When her connections land her a meeting with renowned hotel magnate Richard, the meeting takes on a sexist and dismissive tone as she is declared unhireable due to her romantic history. However, the fiery demeanour we’ve seen from her relationships serves her well at work, too, and she ends up taking Richard on as a client (before later dating him). 

Elsewhere in season four, after marrying Trey, Charlotte decides to quit her job as the successful curator of an art gallery, much to the shock of the other women. In a phone argument, Miranda accuses her of being “one of those women we hate who just works until she gets married”, to which Charlotte defiantly replies: “I choose my choice! I choose my choice!” Equally, by the end of the show, Carrie is forced to reconsider her career choices after agreeing to move to Paris with Petrovsky, later finding herself overwhelmed with boredom and a lack of identity without her column.

Even now, as we gear up for season two of the revival series And Just Like That, how, when and why the characters work plays a pivotal part. In the first season, we find out that Miranda quit her job during the Trump administration and decided to retrain as a human rights lawyer. We also learn that the feud between Carrie and Samantha was caused by mixing business and friendship after Carrie hired Samantha to be her book publicist, but let her go when the publishing industry took a turn for the worse. Once again backing herself and her talent, Samantha chose to cut her old friend off rather than have her professionalism questioned. A bold move, but one that has to be respected.

And in the age of flexible working, anti-burnout and work-life balance, who else is better to look to than the queen of doing very little, Carrie herself? The poster girl for working to live, not living to work, she “freelanced occasionally, had a column, lived the dream and married rich. Who said a lack of sleep and working to the bone was the way forward?” as one fan rightfully pointed out on Twitter. 

Of course, Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte are by no means the perfect role models to base your working life on. After all, they are a set of extremely privileged  (and fictional) New York women whose realities are extremely different from our own. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t anything we can learn from them. 

The show, along with And Just Like That, introduced us to plenty of high-powered, prosperous women, from Lisa Todd Wexley and Enid Frick to Patty Aston and Nya Wallace, all of whom interacted with the world in an empowered way. But importantly, just like the people they dated, the characters’ jobs weren’t the whole of their identity. Their interactions, where work is only mentioned occasionally, prove that you can still own your accomplishments and success while knowing that your job isn’t all that you are.

Ultimately, for all its faults, limitations and problematic moments (of which there are plenty), it cannot be denied that Sex And The City taught multiple generations of women that they have value regardless of their age, relationship status or career. 

Images: Getty