The Cycle of Erasure

Women create culture. That’s not up for debate. From the embroidered patterns reborn on Etsy to the viral aesthetics surging through TikTok, it’s female makers who ignite movements—often in domestic corners, low-cost studios, or personal struggles turned into beauty. But over and over, these sparks are snatched. Trend forecasters, algorithm hunters, and corporate brands lift the look, the sound, the phrase—polish it for profit—and the originator is erased.

Harvard’s foundational work on cultural capital, particularly by Michèle Lamont and Annette Lareau, uncovers the hidden systems that convert personal, social, and creative assets into power. Cultural capital—things like taste, style, and unique aesthetic language—is often dismissed as “soft,” but it’s what shapes the trends that brands feast on. And crucially, as the Harvard research suggests, cultural capital is not evenly valued across gender, race, or class. It’s extracted from the margins, then revalidated only when filtered through dominant (typically white, male, institutional) lenses. In other words, women make it. Corporations monetize it. Men get the credit. Welcome to the loop.

Take Etsy. A marketplace built around the promise of handmade goods, it’s a space largely driven by women creators—yet its ownership structure, ad policies, and seller fees often disproportionately profit male-led tech interests. The same is true for Pinterest, where feminine taste drives traffic, but user data and monetization serve external shareholders. Even eBay, once a lifeline for many women selling vintage, handmade, or secondhand goods, now grapples with fraud, hacking, and system instability that disproportionately disempowers smaller sellers. (Your account is hacked? Good luck getting it restored if you’re not a verified “Power Seller.”) These platforms don’t just mirror capitalism’s inequalities—they digitize and scale them.

The dominant narrative in popular culture still clings to the myth of the solo genius—the Banksy, the Kanye, the Steve Jobs. But this myth erases the reality of collective innovation, especially the undercurrent of creative women fueling visual and aesthetic worlds. Even when credit is due, it’s often sanitized. Think of the grandmother who first crocheted that granny square pattern now printed on a $600 luxury brand tote. Or the Black hairstylist whose intricate braiding work becomes a Pinterest trend without name, story, or coin attached.

From a Creative Women’s Association (CWA) lens, the issue isn’t just about intellectual theft—it’s economic violence. The consistent appropriation of women’s innovation without recognition or reward reflects a systemic pattern that undervalues the feminine in every form. Emotional labor, storytelling, and aesthetic authorship are repeatedly dismissed as “craft,” “hobby,” or “niche,” while male-dominated fields call the same inputs “design,” “IP,” or “strategy.” The same work, different labels—and different paydays.

But what does the Harvard research actually offer in terms of solving this? While Lamont and Lareau’s 1988 paper primarily maps the theoretical terrain of cultural capital, it sets the stage for several interventions:

Validation Systems: Recognizing alternative forms of capital (emotional, aesthetic, community-based) as legitimate contributions worthy of institutional support.

Gatekeeper Accountability: Calling out the cultural intermediaries—trend forecasters, curators, editors—who have the power to include or exclude voices in mainstream spaces.

Value Reassignment: Advocating for frameworks that measure value beyond market price—social cohesion, heritage preservation, creative identity.

In practice, this means creating economic and legal mechanisms that protect and pay originators:

Digital Provenance Tools: Like blockchain-backed tagging of creative content that links viral trends back to their makers.

Collective Royalties or Guilds: Much like music royalties, visual creators could form cooperative rights-management networks to collect income when their work is used commercially.

Fair Platform Legislation: Including anti-monopoly regulation for digital platforms and legal protections for sellers whose accounts are hacked, misused, or unfairly de-platformed.

We also need a cultural shift—a reframe. Instead of chasing the “new new thing,” what if we asked: Who did this first? What if we respected origin stories as sacred? It’s time to normalize attribution as currency and creativity as labor. Not everything needs to scale. Not every handmade object needs a Shopify plugin. Some things need protection, storytelling, and the dignity of remaining independent.

If we want a truly creative economy, we need to stop mining women for gold and selling them back dust. That means changing the algorithms, rewriting the rules, and demanding equity—not just exposure. Because the next time someone says “it’s just a trend,” you can be sure there’s a woman behind it whose name you’ve never heard.