Young and Restless: The Girls Who Sparked America's Revolutions

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Penguin, Jun 13, 2023 - Biography & Autobiography - 368 pages
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A "heartening inspiration"(The New York Times), the untold story of the people who have helped spark America’s most transformative social movements throughout history: teenage girls


Nine months before Rosa Parks kicked off the bus boycotts, Claudette Colvin was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. She was fifteen. In 1912, women’s rights activists organized a massive march in support of women’s suffrage. Leading them up Fifth Avenue in Manhattan was not one of the mothers of the movement, but a teenage Chinese immigrant named Mabel Ping-Hua Lee. Half a century before the better-known movements for workers’ rights began, over 1,500 girls—some as young as ten—walked out of factories in Lowell, Massachusetts, demanding safer working conditions and higher wages in one of the nation’s first-ever labor strikes.

Young women have been disenfranchised and discounted, but the true retelling of major social movements in America reveals their might: they have ignited almost every single one.

Young and Restless recounts one of the most foundational and underappreciated forces in moments of American revolution: teenage girls. From the American Revolution itself to the Civil Rights Movement to nuclear disarmament protests and the women’s liberation movement, through Black Lives Matter and school strikes for climate, Mattie Kahn uncovers how girls have leveraged their unique strengths, from fandom to intimate friendships, to organize and lay serious political groundwork for movements that often sidelined them. Their stories illuminate how much we owe to girls throughout the generations, what skills young women use to mobilize and find their voices, and, crucially, what we can all stand to learn from them.
 

Contents

THE MOUTH ON THAT GIRL
29
SEE
43
BAD GIRLS
63
LOST LEADERS
87
TALKING BODIES
137
to an Education
167
LOOK AT ME
185
IN HER FEELINGS
211
STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS
237
CONCLUSION
261
Acknowledgments
269
CLIQUES
287
Bibliography
311
Index
331
Copyright

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About the author (2023)

Mattie Kahn is an award-winning writer and editor. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, Vox, and more. She was the culture director at Glamour, where she covered women’s issues and politics, and a staff editor at Elle. She lives in New York with her husband.

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