"Young and Restless” author Mattie Kahn shares how girls shaped American history
Photo credit: Sophie Sahara
Rebellious, rabble-rousing girls have always existed, but stories of how they shaped history are rarely told. Mattie Kahn wants to change that. Her new book “Young and Restless: The Girls Who Sparked America’s Revolutions” chronicles the impact — and subsequent exclusion — of young women and girls in protest movements and cultural progress across two centuries of U.S. history.
Whether fighting for labour and voting rights, racial equality, sexual and reproductive freedom or climate action — girls have leveraged their unique position to organize and call for policy change in innovative ways. The stories recounted in the book demonstrate just that.
At 11, Harriet Hanson led a walkout of her fellow mill workers in Lowell, Massachusetts advocating for fair wages and safe working conditions. In 1912, a teenage Chinese immigrant named Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, led 17,000 women’s suffrage marchers on horseback down Fifth Avenue in New York City. At 15, Claudette Colvin was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a segregated bus in Alabama just nine months before Rosa Parks kicked off the Montgomery Bus Boycotts. In the mid-1960s, university student Heather Tobis founded Jane, an underground abortion referral service, out of her dorm room. All of these girls were bold, bonafide leaders.
“Young and Restless” explains that the way girls are socialised often sets them up to be exceptional activists. “Girls are raised to be resourceful and collaborative, to develop a knack for consensus building and a flair for drama,” Mattie writes. “Even the aspects of female friendship that continue to be denigrated worked to their advantage in the movement. Cliquishness could mean protection. Emotion reinforced the bonds of activism." Yet, despite a proven ability to speak authentically and adeptly across complex issues and drive real progress, girls continue to fight to be heard, taken seriously and credited.
We spoke to Mattie about why the public is so drawn to girl activists, lessons from history and how we can all better support young women fighting for a more equal future.
For U.S.-based Assembly readers, claim your copy of “Young and Restless” while supplies last!
McKinley Tretler: Girls around the world are speaking out about the issues impacting their lives, often at great personal cost. People celebrate their efforts — and they should. But like you write in the book, we can’t leave girls alone to save the world. What do you think we [adults] owe to girl activists?
Mattie Kahn: Striking right at the heart of the book! The way that we can support girl activists is by simply listening to them. Many people I spoke to, both current activists and people looking back on their girlhood activism, felt so unheard. Sometimes I think we see girlhood activism as an extracurricular activity, the way we might see someone being really good at playing the piano or a great athlete — encouraging girls to use their voices, but not really listening to what they're asking for. The last thing a girl with a point of view wants to hear is: “You're so articulate, you phrased that so well.” This could be a girl who wants free period products in her school or who is organizing around a particular climate action. Instead of congratulating girls on how impressive they are, why don’t we actually think about how to help them realize what they're trying to achieve.
MT: What inspired you to write about this topic and these groups of girls now?
MK: In the work that I had done in magazines, I came into contact with just the most impressive young women and I really wanted to spotlight their efforts. I thought, ‘Oh, here's a novel idea, I'm going to write about how this generation of girls is so different from the girls who came before.’ Whenever you have an idea like that, you end up testing your hypothesis by just doing research. It [soon became] so abundantly clear that actually, this was much less of a new phenomenon. Girls have been organizing in these very sophisticated ways since the founding of this country and certainly all over the world. I realized there's a much bigger story to be told here about the strategies and methods that girls have used to get their point across and really to cede some of the most significant social movements in this country. Inadvertently, it became a history book.
MT: Is there a specific anecdote from researching this book that inspired, surprised or frustrated you most?
MK: The anecdotes that stuck with me most were the ones that made me feel like the more things change, the more things stay the same. Anna Elizabeth Dickinson was an abolitionist speaker during the Civil War and the first young woman ever to address Congress in the House of Representatives. She was this magnetic figure and one of the most highly paid orators of her day — really like a Taylor Swift figure touring the country and speaking on the road. I was fascinated by her. At the height of her popularity, there was so much admiration for her. She's so well-spoken. She's so fiery. Men cower when they hear her speak. She gives this talk at the House of Representatives, Lincoln slips into the room halfway through and she criticizes him, saying he's not going far enough. The press reports say the President dropped his face into his hands because he was being chastised by this young woman who has so much power.
But then she gets a little bit older and the press really turns on her. She has a much harder life as she gets older because nobody wanted to hear a grown woman tell them what to do in the way that they kind of tolerated it from a younger person. It was striking to me to watch public opinion turn so quickly. This was happening during the Civil War and it's something that we all [still] have to monitor — how distaste for certain modes of communication, from women and marginalized people in particular, can lead us to disenfranchise and disempower them.
“Keep a diary — write about what you’re doing for yourself and so that one day somebody may find it and know what was going on in the hearts and minds of a teenage girl in 2023”
MT: What do you think it is about girls speaking out that captivates audiences so much?
MK: I think in America we love a child star. Some of these girls who approach the microphone get a little bit of the benefit and a little bit of the peril of that position. The worry is: what if your activism becomes entertainment instead of being taken seriously as a kind of resistance? It's a double-edged sword. On the one hand, I think girls sometimes have easier access to a platform, but on the other hand, they're not engaged as serious, thinking people, even though we all know that they should be.
There is a long legacy of girls occupying that place in American culture of being people onto whom we project a lot of our visions for the future, who capture our imaginations about what's possible for this country. Even in times in this country where women couldn't hold jobs, couldn't vote, couldn't have credit cards in their own names — you see men flock to hear young women speak. How do we make sense of that? And then how do we become less punishing as a society of grown women articulating their passions, their convictions, what they want to see change?
The reality is a young woman, in a lot of ways and in a lot of societies, doesn't have a ton of [legalized] power. So in a lot of ways, it's easier to take a little argumentation from a girl. I think that it is an uncomfortable truth to face that one of the reasons that it can be hard to hear from grown women is that [they] do have more power and that does pose more of a threat to the power structure and the way that it's organized.
MT: Leaders are often happy to cheer girls on and pose for photo ops, but fail to respond in earnest to the solutions girls present. It appears infantilizing, like a ‘pat on the head’ situation.
MK: I think we're all familiar with the type of phrase that starts: ”As the father of daughters...” It may be well intended, but you shouldn’t have to be in a position of authority over girls to know that women and girls deserve equality. I think that sometimes it's seen through that lens — which implies a certain level of, I know what’s better for you than you know for yourself — because parents are comfortable with that position.
The pat on the head comes up so much in the book. Everyone knows what it feels like to be condescended to. As a girl with vision, you're faced with person after person who basically says: ‘Nice try!’ Even the people who are supportive can fall into that habit. We see it certainly in the book. Adults [tell girls], ‘We will take it from here, you've done what you can’. But no, if girls are not in the room, then girls are not having the influence they need to have on these final decisions that are being made.
MT: In the late 1960s, Carol Hanisch popularized the phrase: “The personal is political.” From covering girls’ relationships to dress codes, to friendship and early shopping habits, your book demonstrates just that by covering the wide scope of what girls care about. I also loved learning about some of the country’s first-ever labour strikes initiated by girl mill workers, especially “The Lowell Offering,” a by girls, for girls zine not too dissimilar in spirit from Assembly. Can you share a bit more about that, the topics girls wrote and why it was so radical at that time?
MK: As far as I know, “The Lowell Offering” was the first all-female masthead in the United States of a news publication. It was kind of a zine run by textile mill workers in the 1830s. Girls (recruited from mostly farming families) come to Lowell, Massachusetts to work and for the first time in their lives, they're surrounded by other girls. They live together, work together and they spend their free time together. This is not a time where high school is ubiquitous. This is a time where a girl moves from her father's house to her husband's house. In the beginning, the education of these girls was considered paramount to the project. Professors from Harvard come in for seminars, they have a library. Affinity groups started to form — music, philosophy and all different classes. Some girls started “The Lowell Offering,'' which like you said, was like a for girls, by girls magazine.
You could read the same topics in any yearbook in America today. It's about crushes. It's about friendship. It's about daydreaming. It's about nature. It's about ambitions. [There were] little poems, limericks and essays that the girls commissioned and wrote themselves. The strike that eventually kind of spills over from just their conversations into the pages — the dissatisfaction with the conditions as they begin to change, and with the pay, as it begins to change. I try to be clear about this in the book, it's not like everything was some rosy wonderland. The work was very hard and the conditions were not what we would think of as safe. But the reality is that many of the girls who worked in the mills went on to get educated, to be teachers and got a taste of spending time with their peers, to think about the world around them. They wanted more of that. I loved reading “The Offering” and seeing bits of what I thought of when I was a teenager reflected in the teenage and adolescent lives of these girls living a century before me.
MT: The history taught is mostly the history of men and boys. Girls’ contributions are often unrecorded, disregarded or missing from school curriculums. To change course and ensure a stronger archive moving forward, what tips would you give to girls looking to reclaim their own narrative and drive media attention to the work they’re leading?
MK: Girls sometimes get a bad rap for doing what they can to attract media focus. I talk about one example in the book of a group of girls who organized on the steps of the Texas Capitol in their quinceanera dresses on the eve of a really brutal anti-immigration bill. [In reviewing narratives around the protest,] I found an undercurrent of [people saying] like, ‘that's a stunt, why are they doing that’ — emphasizing the fact that they were essentially wearing costumes to a protest. But that protest got more attention, covered everywhere from NPR and BuzzFeed, to many different news outlets, precisely because these girls knew — as girls for generations have known — how to get attention. It means that when someone like me comes along years later and wants to write about the ways that girls use fashion in protest, I can find that protest. Nobody knows how to use the Internet better than a teenage girl!
My advice [to girls] is to do what you can to be part of the record because history can only be fully known when these things are written about and recorded. Keep a diary — write about what you’re doing for yourself and so that one day somebody may find it and know what was going on in the hearts and minds of a teenage girl in 2023. Find opportunities where you can interface with adults who are organizing, they can be a megaphone and help you be heard. And I would never want to undersell how important a friendship is as a way to sustain your activism. Find somebody who can reinforce the beliefs that you're coming to, mirror that for you and, when you need a distraction, take your mind off of it and help you find that balance. [Activism] is not easy work and it's really great to be able to do it in community.
“We’re always building on the work that people before us do. I think in some ways it’s actually a tool of the status quo to make everyone feel like they’re starting from scratch. There are lots of people out there who have advice, who have perspective, who want to help. You don’t have to fix the whole thing by yourself”
MT: Did writing the book make you reflect on your own memories of girlhood?
MK: In high school, I was really involved in climate activism, particularly in legislation around chemicals and products that we all use every day (i.e deodorant, shampoo, cosmetics). It was something that I spent a ton of time on and fully expected to pursue in college. But along the way, I decided to be a writer. Writing this book made me think about why I stopped pursuing [climate work] in the way that I had in high school. I also wondered how I might have been able to encourage myself to continue to pursue that work and whether there were people from whom I got the message that this wasn't something that I should be spending my time doing. In writing this book, I felt so in touch with that part of myself that really wanted to make the world a better place. It reminded me that the things that concern girls are the things that should concern all of us.
MT: How can writers better contextualize the stories of girl activists and young women-led movements?
MK: This summer has been really instructive — basically every major publication has written about the impact of girls. If you've written about Barbie or Taylor Swift or Beyonce, you have been writing about what a powerful engine, not just girls, but girlhood concerns are for the entire economy. Writers should read their own stories about the entertainment, the music and the makeup that girls are interested in and ask themselves, what would it look like to treat a story with this kind of rigor and talk to this many girls, but about the issues that are keeping them up at night.
Publications know how to write about what girls care about, but they're used to writing about it in a very specific lens, in a very specific section. I would say [to writers]: broaden the aperture a little bit. If you're going to take seriously the way girls are spending their money and the way that girls are streaming something or going to see something, then take seriously, what they're thinking about in school, what they're talking about with their friends and the ways in which they're organizing around climate change, racial justice and all the rest.
MT: What is one thing you hope readers walk away learning?
MK: I would love for people to know the stories of these young women. I put all these stories together so that nobody ever has to say, like, what have young women really accomplished? They're all here in this book and more that couldn't fit in this book. But I also would love for individual readers to recognize that they have more power than they think they do.
MT: “Young and Restless” is optimistic and I love how it also celebrates the power of community. Progress can be a long, arduous process. Girls need to take care of themselves too.
MK: Yeah, totally! There is this prevailing notion by many civil rights activists who are in their 70s or their 80s who say: ‘When I was an activist, I thought I was the first generation to ever realize these problems that were plaguing us.’ In some ways that was useful because it made the stakes feel so urgent and so immediate. But the older they got, the more they realized that every generation does what it can. We're always building on the work that people before us do. I think in some ways it's actually a tool of the status quo to make everyone feel like they're starting from scratch. There are lots of people out there who have advice, who have perspective, who want to help. You don't have to fix the whole thing by yourself. You just have to leave things a little bit easier for the next generation to come along and continue to move the ball forward.
This interview was condensed and edited for clarity.
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