Young and Restless author Mattie Kahn speaks about her new book and why so many amazing teen girls have been overlooked as organizers.
Long before Greta Thunberg and Malala Yousafzai captured the world’s attention, other daring young girls protested, agitated, and ultimately ignited their own powerful social movements. But throughout history, many of their contributions have been downplayed or dismissed and their stories all but forgotten.
In her new book, Young and Restless, journalist Mattie Kahn attempts to correct the record. She explores the activism of teens like Claudette Colvin, who was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama (months before Rosa Parks was); Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, who at 16 led a massive march in New York City for women’s suffrage; and several others. We spoke to Kahn about these underappreciated labor reformers, radical feminists, and civil rights activists; why she believes girls make for particularly able activists; and more.
Katie Couric Media: What first inspired you to write Young and Restless?
Mattie Kahn: I started working in women’s media as soon as I graduated college, first at ELLE and then at Glamour. In those roles, I was exposed to the most incredible young women. At ELLE, I worked with the activist Marley Dias on a ‘zine project that we called Marley Mag. I still think that she conducted one of Sec. Hillary Clinton’s best interviews in the run-up to the 2016 election. She was 11. At Glamour, I profiled Greta Thunberg and moderated a conversation with some of the girls who helped launch March for Our Lives. I started wondering what made this generation of girls so special and thinking about whether there was a book to be written about what distinguished them. The more research I did, the clearer it became that girls have been at the forefront of social change for literal centuries. I wanted to record those stories somewhere, and the book came out of that process.
Why did you choose to focus only on the activism of girls and not young people generally?
I’ve always been attuned to women’s history and invested in the process of committing it to the record. So many of the girls and young women featured in this book were integral to entire, monumental social movements, but their roles were never fully appreciated. Young people’s contributions to movement work are often minimized, but girls experience a more profound erasure. This book was how I could offer a partial correction to that trend.
One of the book’s epigraphs comes from the poet and activist Maya Angelou, who says it better than I ever could: “I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life’s a bitch. You’ve got to go out and kick ass.” (The other epigraph is from Harry Styles, because it’s important to demonstrate range.) Having been an ambitious, sometimes thwarted teenage girl, I remain in awe of girls’ capacity to organize, activate, and feel. I wanted to honor that.
You write that “the tropes of conventional girlhood” create “able activists.” What do you mean by that?
I credit talking to climate activists for that particular revelation, which became a guiding principle in the book. I was interviewing an organizer who affirmed to me what I’d noticed — that all over the world, it seemed girls were at the forefront of the climate movement. This particular activist told me that she felt girls — raised to be collaborative, to share, to problem solve — had been socialized since birth to become incredible organizers. I don’t believe (and I take great pains in the book to emphasize this!) that girls have some innate advantage when it comes to protest.
What I do think, and what I think the generations of girls included in the book bear out, is that girls are encouraged to develop qualities advantageous to movement work: resourcefulness, consensus-building, self-sacrifice. That’s not all “good” (a little less self-sacrifice, please!), but it is effective in building a corps of capable activists.
We seem to be more willing to recognize and celebrate girls for their role in social movements, but you write that the way the media tends to portray them is still problematic. How so?
Chalk it up to the American culture of child stardom, but I do think the media likes to anoint celebrities. In the book, I quote the scholar Emily Bent, who explores the societal fixation on girl activists and the press’s interest in invoking what she calls “girl-power rhetoric.” She finds that emphasis isolating, rather than empowering. We focus on the powerful, visible girl often at the expense of listening to and internalizing her message. Instead of, for example, talking about solutions to the gun violence epidemic, we talk about how impressive the girls calling for an end to it are; instead of engaging with the policies that girls are calling for, we congratulate them on their precociousness. That’s the risk to me — the elevation of the talented girl over the cause to which she’s working to draw attention. We don’t have to fall for that or turn girls into celebrities, but we often do.
Do you think this generation of girls is more drawn to activism or more likely to be politically engaged than previous generations?
One of the pleasures of spending so much time researching this book was realizing that generations of girls have been just as drawn to activism as this one. I think it can be freeing for girls now to realize that they’re not the first group of people to look around and see a world that isn’t good enough for them and hope to fix it. They’re standing on the shoulders of all the girls who came before them. What I do think is true is that social media gives girls much more of an opportunity to be seen, whether the “powers that be” want to recognize their efforts or not. The internet and social media (and the kind of activism that our digital platforms enable) have their downsides, but I don’t think it can be a bad thing for girls to be able to witness in real-time how many more like-minded people are out there working for a better future.
There are so many remarkable girls that you feature. But is there one who stands out as someone you wish more people knew about?
I hate to choose favorites! I want people to read about all of them! But I have a special love for the girls in the book who grew up and out of their activism at a time when grown women had few opportunities. These smart, brilliant girls had so few options after they stopped being such a spectacle. I’m thinking of the Lowell Mill Girls and the abolitionist Anna Elizabeth Dickinson and Mabel Ping-Hua Lee to name just a few.
What do you hope readers take away from your book?
Girls are so powerful. Be a little afraid.
