Young and Restless
The Girls Who Sparked America's Revolutions
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
NPR's Books We Love 2023
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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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Kahn's sparkling debut profiles young women who have played leading roles in American protest movements and examines "how the tropes of conventional girlhood have made them such able activists." Focusing on women in their teens and early 20s, Kahn's time frame spans from 1836, when 11-year-old Harriet Hanson led workers in a walkout at a New England textile factory, to the present day. The narrative touches on the fights for racial progress (Anna Elizabeth Dickinson published her first antislavery piece in The Liberator in 1855 at age 13); bodily autonomy (the Jane Collective grew out of 19-year-old college student Heather Tobis's efforts to connect pregnant women with trained abortion practitioners in the 1960s); and political equality (18-year-old Charlotte Woodward traveled to Seneca Falls, N.Y., in 1848 for the first women's rights convention). Kahn's tone is breezy but never flippant, and she draws vivid, well-informed sketches of her profile subjects, many of whom are lesser known. Concluding that girls "have pushed this nation and forced it to do better," Kahn calls on adult Americans not simply to pat "ourselves on the back for inviting them to speak to us" but to "ced power to them." It's an inspiring and eye-opening look at how progress happens.
