Since Young and Restless: The Girls Who Sparked America’s Revolutions was released into the world, the two questions I’ve gotten most are: What prompted me to write it? And will girls save the world?
The answer to the first is easier: I started writing this book when I was working as an editor at women’s magazines, routinely interviewing and spending time with activists at least as talented as the wizened old men I’d learned about in high school textbooks. In the beginning, I planned to record their stories so that future textbooks (I hoped) could showcase their historic contributions. I wanted to examine what distinguished this generation of girl activists — from Greta Thunberg to the founders of March for Our Lives. What had allowed them to make this kind of impact?
But then I started to research, and I realized that girls have been on the vanguard of social progress since the American Revolution. A thousand of them could have appeared in the kind of textbooks that once crowed to me about great white men. Their stories had been excised from the record.
I wrote Young and Restless to fill in those gaps. It’s not an account of all of the incredible girls whose work has pushed this nation toward progress. There are more than I could ever name in a single volume and there are an inevitable and heartbreaking number whose stories we can never know because no one ever bothered to write them down. But it is (I hope) a primer. An introduction to some of the most consequential girl activists in America, an examination of how girls organize, and a consideration of what we could stand to learn from them.
The answer to the second question is more complicated: Yes, girls are excellent. But also: Girls shouldn’t have to be. The stories in this book are not all pom-poms and clever chants and girl-power optimism. The girls in this book were not all embraced for their activism or even appreciated for it. Change is hard. Progress is hard. Girls have borne too much of that burden.
We should feel indebted to them, but we should not just be clapping for them from the sidelines. Want a better world? We all better work for it.
Adolescence is complicated even under the most charmed of circumstances. Gen Z has not had the most charmed circumstances. The threat of climate disaster is inexorable. School massacres are a fact of American life. The outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic upended not just the usual rites like prom and graduation but the process of starting an independent life and finding meaningful work. Making new friends and dating have gotten harder. Loneliness is an epidemic too. Gen Z had never been much impressed with its leaders. The bungled governmental response to a once-in-a-lifetime public health crisis does not seem to have inspired new confidence.
In 2022, the Harvard Youth Poll reported that over half of its respondents agree with the statement that politics have proven unable “to meet the challenges” of the present American moment. Still, the poll found no real reduction in Gen Z’s intention to vote in future elections. Their generation was disappointed, but it refused to cede its influence. It has no choice but to engage.
Young people now are even more progressive than their millennial predecessors, which puts them at particular odds with the Republican officeholders who are determined to roll back several decades of social progress. Even Democrats who purport to stand with them on issues like abortion and immigration and LGBTQ+ rights have failed to prevent the fall of Roe, the constant threat to federal programs like DACA, and the introduction of hundreds of legislative proposals designed to target trans people.
Teens are put on this earth to question the decisions that people in power make. That is the superpower of adolescence. But for this latest generation, there is the sense that time is running out.for such normal developmental stages is running out. Adults fall short, but now their foibles have world-altering consequences. The threat of climate disaster is inexorable. School massacres are a fact of American life. The outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic upended not just the usual rites like prom and graduation but the process of starting an independent life and finding meaningful work.
You know the statistics: about girls and depression, about the low confidence Gen Z has in its elected leaders. You must know too that teens are marshaling their own forces to do something about it.
The organization Gen-Z for Change was founded to do just that. It draws on the skills of its leadership and leans on social media to get its points across. It has a progressive bent and a delicious set of guerilla-warfare tactics.
To wit: When a hotline was set up to receive tips about violators of a recent Texas anti-abortion law, volunteers with the nonprofit inundated it with Shrek porn. (The website crashed.) When the Supreme Court draft that indicated Roe would be overturned leaked in 2022, the organization took to TikTok to educate over a million people on the embattled state of reproductive choice.
One of Gen-Z for Change’s fiercest political strategists at that time was Olivia Julianna (now a freelance political consultant), who raised over two million dollars at 19 for abortion care on the back of a Twitter throwdown with a Republican congressman who had tried to humiliate her. She traces the stunning success of that push to the groundwork she and other advocates laid months earlier, when the team tried to organize around immigration reform. It didn’t succeed, but it sold her on the potential of grassroots online activism with a sense of humor. “That helped us create the template,” she said of the failed bid. “We had spreadsheets with journalist contacts, with other creators on TikTok and Twitter and Instagram. That helped set the precedent.”
Julianna relies on the word “we” as less confident speakers use “um” or “like.” It is a rhetorical habit that serves a purpose: to emphasize the collective. She has become the focus of profiles in national publications and can deliver a dependable sound bite. But she doesn’t work alone. “I feel like I’ve been made out to be this character,” she said. She is not a lone ranger or an avatar for a cause. She is an actual person—not “a means to an end.”
“Young women who are in these lines of work—we lose a lot because of the movements we care about,” she said. She feels the pressure to accept overtures from media outlets and invitations to events. “I don’t think people realize there are other people who can be asked to do these things,” she said. But CNN, MSNBC, Business Insider, NPR—the media doesn’t seem to want other people. It wants her: the girl from Twitter.
“You get branded as this activist who is doing these incredible things,” she said. But she has seen that kind of goodwill evaporate fast. When she defies conventional wisdom or shares an unpopular opinion, she loses her street cred: “Then it’s like, well, I’m just a kid.”
Julianna advises candidates. She consults on Gen Z outreach and voter mobilization. She should want to get this part over with: to fast-forward to a time when she does not have to balance school and events. To when she can command even more respect.
Instead, she stews. She wonders whether she—a self-identified queer, disabled woman of color—will ever be able to be seen as a full grown woman. Whether she will be allowed to keep doing this work at this level and with this impact when her age doesn’t make for such a good headline. “You’re a young woman in these spaces. You feel like sometimes you have to take every offer that’s presented to you because you don’t know if you’ll get another,” she said. “You do worry, ‘So what’s my expiration date?’”
Girls will claw and scratch for power, Julianna said. It is the old catfight trope, reclaimed. But Julianna also knows what centuries of girl activists have: that girls are often defenseless. That even begging and pleading and coalition building and volunteering and commanding the best-trained troops on the social media front lines can sometimes fail to overcome the undemocratic and illiberal tactics that conspire to keep people disempowered.
Girls have raised their voices in revolution since the founding of this nation. Modern technologies have amplified them. The internet lets a whisper roar. But something has to come after the podium.
The organization Run for Something supports progressives who want to run for local office and are still at the start of their careers. It has backed millennials and Gen Z candidates in down-ballot races nationwide. It has sent hundreds of them to seats of power in their communities. It endorsed Cassandra Levesque when she ran for the New Hampshire State House in 2018. She was 19.
Levesque had not planned to run for office. She had been thinking about becoming a photographer. She is soft spoken on the phone, with a quiet confidence. She had gotten interested in politics when she wanted to pursue the Gold Award, the ultimate badge of honor in the Girl Scouts, of which she is a member. She was 17, and the practice was legal for girls over 13—with parental consent and the approval of a local judge. She could remember what it had been like to be them. She pictured middle schoolers shopping for wedding dresses and then returning to bedrooms “with band posters and stuffed animals and Barbie dolls.” It seemed insane.
She approached several state legislators in search of someone interested in picking up a bill. One informed her he was not about to overhaul an old law because of “a request from a minor doing a Girl Scout project.” Levesque fumed. Then she ran for state legislature and won.
Cassandra Levesque is old enough now to let her work speak for her. Whether she can continue to be heard in the statehouse will depend on her constituents. She now answers to them. At the start of 2022, she was still fighting to raise the minimum marriage age in New Hampshire. It has inched up from 13 to 16, thanks to her work. She would like to see it raised to 18. In an interview with Politico, she said that the conditions of childhood had changed and its parameters needed to as well. She wanted kids to have the space “to be able to grow up” at their own pace. She wanted to see that time honored.
When Levesque first ran for office, she knew her age was part of the reason her race had drawn so much attention. It never bothered her. When she won the election, it seemed to her like she could now earn the interest—“like I was starting something,” she said.
What a thrill. To still be at the beginning.
From YOUNG AND RESTLESS by Mattie Kahn, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2023 by Mattie Kahn.
Stay up-to-date with the politics team. Sign up for the Teen Vogue Take
