Vulgar History - June 16, 2023


Author Interview： Mattie Kahn (Young and Restless： The Girls Who Sparked America's Revolutions)

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Misogyny

26

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4

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Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
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00:00:00.000 Ready to take your investing knowledge to pro level? This is Fidelity Connects,
00:00:04.400 your daily edge in the markets. Get deep insights on real-time market topics that
00:00:08.860 may impact your investment portfolio. Listen to Fidelity Connects on Spotify today and
00:00:13.300 power your next move tomorrow. Hello and welcome to Vulgar History, 0.88
00:00:29.420 of Feminist Women's History Comedy Podcast. My name is Anne Foster, and today I'm really excited
00:00:34.160 to share this author interview with you. So the woman who I'm talking to is Maddie Kahn,
00:00:39.100 whose book has just been published this week, and it's called Young and Restless,
00:00:42.840 The Girls Who Sparked America's Revolutions. It's such an interesting and necessary book,
00:00:48.040 and she and I talk about in this conversation, when she went to write it, she's like, well,
00:00:51.480 surely someone has written a book like this before, and no one really has, especially not
00:00:55.920 one that's kind of readable and fun and interesting. So she's literally looking at
00:01:00.260 girls, like teenage girls. It's, you know, the concept of teenager wasn't invented until the
00:01:05.300 20th century. So she, but she's looking at previous years as well, but basically
00:01:09.140 young unmarried women and how they came together to spark various revolutions throughout the
00:01:16.320 history of America. And it goes right up to the present day. It's such an interesting book. I
00:01:21.060 know that there are young people who listen to this podcast and I hope that this episode and
00:01:25.660 this book, if you're able to read it, will make you feel seen and maybe inspired, but also for
00:01:31.820 adults listening. It's a reminder that this, it's not new. The fact that young people are making
00:01:37.800 noise, you know, leading the climate strike and stuff like this is building on a legacy of other
00:01:44.160 young people. You know, there's been people of all genders doing this stuff, but this book
00:01:47.840 specifically looks at how young girls have been involved, which is a double edged thing of kind
00:01:52.840 of being like, look at these cute young heroes. And then when they become adults, it's easier
00:01:57.660 to dismiss them because they're not cute anymore. Or also there's just something about
00:02:01.980 something about girls that are easy to sort of tokenize and then also to dismiss. And this book
00:02:07.140 really dives into that. So just to let you know a bit about the author, Maddie Kahn. So her work
00:02:12.600 has been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, Harper's Bazaar,
00:02:16.660 Vogue, Vox, and more. She was the culture director at Glamour, where she covered women's issues in
00:02:21.420 Politics, and a staff editor at Elle Magazine. She lives in New York. And this book is just
00:02:28.280 coming up this week. So I was really excited to get to have a talk with her.
00:02:33.300 So I'm joined today by Maddie Kahn, author of Young and Restless, The Girls Who Sparked
00:02:39.180 America's Revolutions, which is a new nonfiction. I guess you call it like a group biography of
00:02:45.280 numerous girls in American history and how they were revolutionaries, basically. Welcome, Maddie.
00:02:52.500 Thank you.
00:02:53.560 Can you first explain how you came up with the idea for this book, how it came about?
00:02:59.520 Yeah, sure. I worked my whole sort of full-time editor career in women's magazines. So I started
00:03:06.240 working at Elle and I worked there for a bunch of years and then I worked at Glamour. And in the
00:03:10.760 course of working in those places, I felt like I was coming across a lot of incredible young women. 0.98
00:03:15.820 I profiled Greta Thunberg, whose name I think basically most people know, the Swedish climate 0.92
00:03:20.940 activist. And I talked to the teenagers from Parkland who were leading the charge against
00:03:25.980 gun violence. And this was also around the time that Black Lives Matter was coalescing. And I was
00:03:31.800 reading about huge 30,000 person marches that were being planned via Twitter DMs and among high
00:03:39.160 school students. And I thought there's something really amazing about this generation of young
00:03:43.420 women. And I thought, you know, that might be something I want to explore. And so I started
00:03:47.420 thinking that maybe I would write a book about what was going on with this cohort of young women
00:03:53.280 in particular. And then the more work that I did and the more that I read, the more it became clear
00:03:58.680 that this was actually a very old story and that young women have been on the forefront of social
00:04:03.080 change in a way that America seems to have amnesia about in every generation pretty much. And in
00:04:08.680 almost every major social movement for progress. So that was true in the early labor movement of
00:04:14.620 the 1800s where factory workers went on strike, most of whom were young, unmarried women and
00:04:21.120 girls. And then obviously that was true during civil rights when students really helped lead
00:04:25.560 some of the efforts for change. And that continues to be true until today. So the project started
00:04:32.060 with one set of parameters and then it got much, much bigger. But yeah, that was kind of the origin
00:04:36.760 story for me. And how did you, like, do you go into it with sort of an idea of which decades or
00:04:42.660 which stories you're going to look at? Or did that kind of develop as you were starting to research?
00:04:47.780 Well, initially, actually, I thought, well, the concept of a teenager isn't that old. It's sort
00:04:53.320 of an invention of the 1930s and 40s. And I thought maybe the story would start then, that
00:04:57.520 as soon as America sort of developed a vocabulary for this period of adolescence, that's when the
00:05:02.760 story would really begin. But then when I did more research, I felt like I would be shortchanging
00:05:07.980 these amazing young women from an earlier time before we necessarily had the language to describe
00:05:12.860 what stage of life they were in. And so then the timeline stretched back even further. I think one
00:05:17.820 of the things that I thought a lot about and that took a long time to figure out was how I wanted
00:05:24.140 the book to be structured. I knew that I wanted to go in chronological order and I wanted to sort of
00:05:29.380 provide this alternative history of social progress in the U.S. through the lens of teenage girls.
00:05:35.600 But it's hard to choose. You know, I could have filled several books with the stories of amazing
00:05:40.940 young women. And I had to figure out what are the parameters that are going to decide who is and who 0.99
00:05:45.120 isn't in the book. And so one of the things that I did and that developed definitely over time was
00:05:50.340 I wanted to profile individual young women. And I also wanted those stories to each of those
00:05:56.480 stories to illustrate a point about how girls in particular organize. And so the book is both
00:06:02.180 chronological, and as you said, sort of this group biography. And also, I hope that each one of sort
00:06:07.080 of the main stories of these chapters explains a little bit about how girls do their activism,
00:06:12.580 whether that's through, you know, leveraging friendship as a tool of organization, or it's
00:06:18.320 about the value of self-presentation in protest. And that definitely took longer to figure out.
00:06:24.640 And I felt like I started writing the first draft before I totally knew how it was going to go.
00:06:31.000 And over time, it became clearer and clearer that this was, you know, both a chronological story and also a story that I hope answers the question of what makes girls such capable activists.
00:06:41.960 And I really found it really interesting.
00:06:43.900 Like I knew broadly, like some of the eras and things you're talking about, like the labor movement and the civil rights movement, suffragettes and things like that.
00:06:52.280 But you also honed in on some specific people whose names I had never heard. And you were really, I was impressed with how you were able to find, I don't know, for lack of a better word, like intersectional stories. It's not like, here's a bunch of white girls in America doing stuff. It's like, no, you have people who are Chinese immigrants. You talk about, like, obviously the civil rights era, but like, you're really, you're not just talking about just the white people.
00:07:16.280 And even when you are talking about just the white people, you do, like, mention, like, and, you know, heads up, like, it was different for black people and stuff.
00:07:23.960 Like, so it's not just the history of white people.
00:07:26.340 So, yeah, I imagine that was part of your intent with it. 0.85
00:07:30.740 Totally. Yeah, I think that I think one of the things that you're at a disadvantage of when you're ever you're talking about women's history, history in general is, yes, a lot of what we have recorded.
00:07:41.220 We have because the people who are deciding whether to keep or toss, you know, written accounts, oral accounts, those kinds of things, someone had to be deciding those things were worth preserving.
00:07:52.480 And so it's always, always going to be an uphill battle to tell a complete picture of or even a more partially complete picture of what history looks like.
00:08:01.640 Since, of course, a lot of what people decided was worth preserving is a story of white people and of white men in particular.
00:08:07.720 And so I wouldn't even have done the project if I didn't feel like I could at least include stories of people, yeah, who didn't appear in the history books I read in school.
00:08:17.720 And as I always say, like, I got a great education or I felt like I got a really great education.
00:08:21.480 And yet these stories were missing across the board.
00:08:24.520 So it is always a bit of a process of sort of panning for gold to find the stories of people whose names you might not know.
00:08:32.660 I think that one of the things that felt really important to me was to center the voices of the girls themselves.
00:08:40.040 So in also in choosing, I didn't want to just choose young women of any background where all the stories were told about them and we didn't have anything in their own voice.
00:08:50.960 So, for example, you mentioned Chinese immigration. Mabel Pinghua Li shows up in the chapter on the suffrage movement. And what was amazing was to find the minutes from the organization of Chinese students that she was part of that included her speeches, you know, the things she said on the floor.
00:09:08.640 It just felt like this, I don't know, like an echo through history to be able to hear her in her own voice. And I think one of the things you have to be conscious of when you're telling other people's stories for them and they're no longer here to tell them themselves is to think, how can I center their voice as much as possible?
00:09:25.240 And so when I was looking for these other stories, you know, Mexican immigrants, Native American stories across the board that weren't our conventional image of white history, I wanted to be sure that I had those quote marks, that there were places where I could put the voices of these young women.
00:09:42.100 And I will say every time it felt like a huge privilege and nothing would thrill me more than for some of the names of the women in this book to start to feel as familiar to people as the names that we know better from our high school education.
00:09:57.580 I wanted to also ask you about, so I think it's in the very, the introduction of your
00:10:01.120 book, you're talking about one of the inspirations for the book was when you first found out
00:10:05.800 about Sybil Luddington, but then as the introduction goes on, you're like, oh my God, this is a
00:10:11.460 great story.
00:10:12.060 And then you learned who she was.
00:10:13.240 And then you learn the next layer of like, oh, actually, but did she do that?
00:10:15.780 Oh, actually, there's other people who did other stuff.
00:10:17.720 Can you talk a bit about your journey with that?
00:10:19.940 Yeah, I think one of the things that's interesting about doing a project like this is you do,
00:10:24.080 and I think this is true of writing in general, at least for me, when I'm being honest, is you go
00:10:28.360 into things like this and you kind of have hopes for what you'll find. And you do, I think, have
00:10:32.780 to check yourself a lot to say like, am I seeing what is really here? Am I seeing what I want to
00:10:37.600 see from this story? And it's true that Sybil Ludington, who is reputed to have ridden farther
00:10:43.060 and faster than Paul Revere to warn her father who had a militia in sort of early America around
00:10:48.940 the time of the Revolutionary War that the British were coming. That story has been told
00:10:53.280 ad nauseum by people who are interested in the metaphor, I think I would say, of Sybil
00:10:59.940 Eddington. She's this teenage girl. She's done this physical feat in service of military power,
00:11:08.020 in service of being a good daughter and warning her father. I first heard the story, which I
00:11:13.080 mentioned in the introduction, when I was covering former Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney for a story
00:11:18.160 for Elle magazine, Maloney was trying to raise money to build a women's history museum on the
00:11:24.140 National Mall, which is a project anyone can read about. It's been going on for like 25 years. But
00:11:28.900 the story of Sublettington was so powerful to the people that she was talking to, because it was
00:11:34.960 like, here's this example of this unsung American girl. And talk about whiteness. I mean, she has 0.74
00:11:40.740 all the qualities I think that we think of as valorous, I guess, a good daughter,
00:11:47.700 white American girl, capable, resourceful, all these things. And when I first heard the story,
00:11:54.480 and I was thinking about this book at the time, I thought like perfect opener for me, you know,
00:11:58.440 ideal, just what I'm looking for. And then when I started doing research into her, I found this
00:12:03.120 really checkered historical record with people, some historians saying she did do that, some
00:12:09.780 scholars saying she probably never, she never did. And no way to really find out. I mean,
00:12:14.900 we don't have, there's no, you can't pull the surveillance footage, you know, there's no way
00:12:19.360 to find out exactly what happened. And in a way I found it to be an even better place to begin
00:12:25.840 to open the book with the reality that some of these things are unknown. And also that women's
00:12:31.640 history, like I said, because it's been deemed unimportant for so long or not even, not even
00:12:37.100 evaluated in terms of its importance, just totally ignored, there's always going to be a little bit
00:12:42.380 of a feeling of quicksand when you're wading through the archives to try to figure out what
00:12:45.620 really happened. And I think that she became an even better place to begin because throughout
00:12:50.660 these many decades in which her story has been invoked by feminists, by people fighting, you know,
00:12:57.740 by people trying to preserve daughters of the American Revolution, you know, on the other side
00:13:01.920 of the political spectrum, her story has always been useful because I think the stories of
00:13:06.240 extraordinary girls have always been useful to people who are trying to make an argument about
00:13:10.460 where this country is headed. And so I wanted to open the book with her and the question mark next
00:13:16.080 to her contributions to American history, because I think anyone who's telling a story like this
00:13:22.400 also has to interrogate themselves, which I felt I was doing a lot during this process of why am I
00:13:27.620 foregrounding these stories? And what am I trying to say about American girls by telling them?
00:13:32.000 So it was a useful check for me. And what do I personally think about Sylva Ludington? I'm sure she did something. But I also think our desire to ascribe this kind of quality of greatness to her says a lot about what we want from American young women.
00:13:47.180 well that really connects to sort of a an overarching theme you talk about it in different
00:13:52.380 ways in different chapters in the book but the concept of like looking at girls and being like
00:13:57.820 they are our future you know like they are these heroes they're these perfect people and at the
00:14:02.380 same time also dismissing girls and what that what that says like how did you i don't know what can
00:14:09.500 you just expand on that that concept i find it so interesting because like with grega tunberg for
00:14:13.840 instance, people are like, oh, she's going to like save the environment. It's like, well,
00:14:16.600 why is it up to her? Yeah, completely. Yes. I think that one of the helpful ways of thinking
00:14:22.760 about it for me is like to think about how we treat American child stars. There's like a similar
00:14:27.780 dynamic there where on the one hand, they're kind of like our hopes and dreams, the most airbrushed
00:14:32.500 version of what American childhood should be. On the other hand, we know that we're kind of
00:14:37.300 putting them through a completely ridiculous, often traumatizing process by elevating them
00:14:43.040 in this way. And yet they feel somehow essential to the culture that like we could never forego
00:14:48.180 our child stars. I think things have changed since the peak of the Disney child star era that I grew
00:14:53.360 up in. Obviously we're far away from the Shirley temples of the world. But I do think that that 0.90
00:14:58.020 push pull around the valorization of childhood and the obsession with childhood, and on the other
00:15:02.920 hand, totally being dismissive of children and anything they might want to contribute to society
00:15:07.280 outside of their cuteness is kind of like a general paradigm of American growing up. I think
00:15:12.800 that with girls in particular, and with, I would say with youth activism in general, there's a
00:15:17.860 feeling of relief on some level that even if we as flawed adults have made mistakes or have
00:15:24.140 compromised or have abandoned our ideals in some way, every generation gets the chance to kind of
00:15:28.860 do it again. And to see principled young people in a culture that is frankly obsessed with youth,
00:15:34.220 I think stokes a lot of enthusiasm from people. But when you listen to what people like Greta or
00:15:40.180 other climate activists or anti-gun violence activists, what they actually say is often,
00:15:46.420 I wish I didn't need to be here. Greta has certainly said that. Tons of people involved in,
00:15:51.700 you know, trying to get gun legislation passed have said that. Why is this my job? Remind me,
00:15:57.220 why do I have to do this? I like to remind people, kids can't vote. You know, most high school
00:16:02.360 students can't vote. Their microphone is really the only leverage that they have in public being
00:16:08.960 able to be heard. And so we, as you know, the voting law passing group of people in society
00:16:17.220 have a lot more power. And it's kind of, I think, a tricky way of absolving ourselves of responsibility
00:16:22.080 to say how amazing young people are and how inspiring they are. We actually have a lot more
00:16:26.820 that we could do than they can. And yet it feels nice to sit back and say how incredible they are
00:16:31.680 and what good they're going to do for society. No, exactly. It's so there's that patronizing
00:16:37.260 it to be like, oh, you know, like the future is bright. Everything's great. Because look at these
00:16:40.800 young people, like the next generation is going to be great where it's like, yeah, but the people
00:16:44.000 in power are like 70 years old. Like they're not leaving. Totally. And I think that it, I think one
00:16:50.840 of the reasons why, one thing that I tried to understand when I was working on this is why is
00:16:54.460 it that there are these girls in basically every single generation and yet their stories fall out
00:16:59.200 of the historical record. And I think one of the reasons is because what people will say or what
00:17:04.680 people on some level will think is that young women are great communicators and they've been 0.99
00:17:09.460 amazing messengers for causes throughout the years, but they don't have strategic power. 1.00
00:17:15.080 They're not political actors the way adults are. I think that's ridiculous. That's one of the 0.96
00:17:20.140 things I try to show in the book is that often the way these girls were organizing was incredibly 0.53
00:17:24.580 strategic. They're not just mouthpieces. They really are sophisticated political strategists. 0.92
00:17:29.960 But I think one of the things that we risk is we move the sphere of power into one group of people, like you said, a lot of white men in their 70s and increasingly in their 80s and some women.
00:17:42.020 And then we move sort of the spotlight onto young activists.
00:17:46.420 We need those things to come closer together.
00:17:48.900 This isn't a huge part of the book, but I am always interested in sort of the policy solutions that will start to give young people more political representation.
00:17:57.400 It really can't be enough to say they're such good messengers for these causes and not take seriously what they think should be done about them.
00:18:05.160 You can't say young people are our future and expect them to fix things and then not give them a seat at the table to be heard on what they think needs to be done.
00:18:11.760 Well, I thought it was interesting, too, in your chapter about the suffragette, where you do like one of the kind of main characters of it is Mabel Ping-Hua Lee.
00:18:19.600 And you mentioned like she was a young girl at that time and she was among many young girls.
00:18:23.700 And I think you say something about that. The suffragette organizers were mostly women, like adult women, but they were like, but they knew the PR of it. Like if they had young women in their parade, like in their marches, that would look good. So they knew, they recognized the power of having young people involved, which is not dissimilar to nowadays, really.
00:18:44.780 Yeah. I mean, I think of the suffragettes, they're such an interesting example, too, because, you know, when you think about that movement, it's this I think is true in all social movements or I would say at least many.
00:18:55.280 But it's particularly stark in the case of advocating for the women's vote, because it was so clear and so palpable that the way to win that battle, you had to get they didn't have the voting power that was going to be needed to give them the right to vote.
00:19:11.100 So you have to win over people who kind of have a basic interest in keeping things the way they are. The people who are empowered to give women the vote are men and no women can vote until they until men give women the power to vote. 0.56
00:19:24.560 So the optics of the campaign were especially important because they had to sell people who sort of had no obvious selfish interest in this fight in coming around.
00:19:38.620 And that made it so that you couldn't just, you know, there was this debate and this comes up in that chapter over going like totally scorched earth, aggressive tactics of organizing versus trying a little bit more of like kind of the placating mode of persuasion.
00:19:55.680 And I think what U.S. activists realize is you kind of need a little bit of both.
00:20:00.320 And one of the things that they recognized early, I think, is that like organizing is also advertising and you need to have a good marketing campaign to pull off the kind of social change that these women were envisioning.
00:20:12.060 And beautiful young women representing America's future as they do were a really big part of that.
00:20:18.420 And that came at tremendous cost. And this is in that chapter two to black women who were sidelined, you know, in the in the public relations part of that campaign and to people like Mabel, who were treated as, you know, being a Chinese immigrant as she was kind of as a curiosity fetishized in this way, even though she was an extraordinarily capable and talented organizer in her own right.
00:20:41.820 And so one thing I wanted to be sure to do was to never justify the real marginalization of certain women or other groups of people in favor of the overarching cause. I think we all have to be honest about who was sacrificed to achieve whatever progress is achieved, you know, in all of these movements.
00:21:01.860 Well, and I think with Mabel and with some of the other figures you follow, and you're
00:21:05.380 saying you're looking at their actual words, which means you're looking at when they're
00:21:07.980 giving speeches and things, so you're following them into adulthood.
00:21:11.100 And I find that really interesting, too.
00:21:12.840 And we see that happening now today with the young activists.
00:21:15.700 When they grow up, there's not that, oh, aren't they cute?
00:21:19.700 Look at them.
00:21:20.160 They're advocating for things to change.
00:21:21.460 Once they become adults, their voice changes.
00:21:23.440 It changes the way that people view them.
00:21:25.000 It reminds me of a few months ago, I was speaking to an author named Max Wallace.
00:21:29.640 he wrote a new biography of Helen Keller
00:21:31.940 focusing on her revolutionary politics
00:21:33.840 and it was a really similar thing
00:21:35.960 there were people like oh she's this
00:21:37.420 deafblind girl at the well isn't she
00:21:39.740 inspiring and it's like yeah but starting from 0.70
00:21:41.780 age about 18 she was like
00:21:43.440 a rabid like socialist 0.97
00:21:45.600 like she wanted to like destroy
00:21:47.780 capitalism and I was like
00:21:49.540 but she was so cute when she was young
00:21:51.220 so it's just a way to dismiss like if you focus
00:21:53.680 just on what people do when they're kids
00:21:55.560 then it's a way to dismiss what they do
00:21:57.720 as adults in this weird way
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00:24:40.800 Totally.
00:24:41.480 And I also think that,
00:24:42.640 and that's a good example of it too,
00:24:44.660 I think one of the obsessions
00:24:46.100 with turning some of these activists into celebrities,
00:24:48.920 it's a complicated thing
00:24:50.200 because on the one hand,
00:24:51.120 the visibility undoubtedly helps the cause to a degree.
00:24:54.480 You know, we talk more about climate change
00:24:56.820 in the public arena.
00:24:59.800 I think Greta did help that, undoubtedly. 0.88
00:25:02.760 She got people to pay attention in a way
00:25:04.440 that they hadn't been paying attention
00:25:06.120 to tons of grown people who were saying,
00:25:08.340 this is a huge problem.
00:25:09.580 And also, you know, the weather got increasingly bad
00:25:11.500 and everything's falling apart,
00:25:12.760 but let's leave that on the side.
00:25:14.260 But on the other hand, I think one of the things
00:25:16.140 that is very common that happens a lot to young activists,
00:25:19.280 both men and women, is that in a way, the obsession over the cuteness, the articulateness,
00:25:26.340 the precociousness is also a way of kind of separating the person from the movement.
00:25:30.680 It's a way of turning them into a star and not grappling as much with what they're asking for.
00:25:36.660 And I think that that happens a lot. And that's one of the reasons that the transition from being
00:25:40.840 a childhood kind of spokesperson for something to an adult activist and organizer is hard because
00:25:46.460 then the gap between who you are and what you have to offer and the thing that you're actually
00:25:50.960 calling for narrows. And people don't necessarily always want to engage in the thing that you're
00:25:55.180 calling for. So when Helen Keller was an inspirational figure, you know, doing things
00:26:00.500 that spoke to her individual perseverance, that's a great story. But when she's calling for,
00:26:06.460 you know, basically an inversion of our societal structure, well, that doesn't seem so cute
00:26:13.060 anymore. Like that's not, that's not part of the story that we tell about her. That's part of what
00:26:18.340 she's asking for. And I think that's something that increasingly, because I think young people
00:26:23.240 now are so sophisticated, people are really aware of, and it's hard to see if you're an organizer
00:26:28.380 and you want to achieve certain kinds of social change, it's hard to see your own identity be used
00:26:33.920 kind of against the thing that you're asking for. And I was very interested in talking to, you know,
00:26:38.940 once the people that are in the book are still alive after you get past sort of the civil rights
00:26:43.800 movement, in asking them about how that felt, to see themselves turned into kind of a cultural
00:26:48.600 commodity when really they had been trying to redirect attention to, you know, a certain thing
00:26:52.700 that they thought was really wrong. I hope that was such a, like, the way that your book, you
00:26:56.180 mentioned before, like, it's done chronologically, which I found really helpful, I don't know,
00:26:59.760 and interesting, but it also shows, like, generation after generation, like, the young
00:27:03.200 girls were organizing in very similar ways, getting up to present day. If we go back to the
00:27:07.760 very first chapter i was honestly so surprised how long ago your first story was about the low
00:27:13.860 old girls like you were saying like 1836 and i thought 1836 like i assumed this book would
00:27:19.600 have started with the suffragettes there was labor movements in the i don't know 1900s but
00:27:24.420 can you talk about the little girls and the fact that the blood leader that i think it's intentional
00:27:29.300 on your part but you're describing all the stuff she does and then you say she was 11 years old
00:27:33.020 like I'm like what like yeah yeah so I was I like I said I thought that I would begin
00:27:40.060 at the the sort of phrase adolescence the idea of the adolescent is an invention of the 20th
00:27:45.440 century it starts really in the beginning of the 1900s and I definitely thought like that's where
00:27:49.620 the story will begin because at what point do young women recognize themselves as something
00:27:54.180 other than little kids and women like when does that middle stage which is the piece of things
00:28:00.080 that's most interesting to me, when does that come into being? So the Lowell Mill Girls, who I came 1.00
00:28:04.880 across years ago, and actually credit to Rebecca Traister, who has written the books Good and Mad
00:28:10.740 and All the Single Ladies, the Lowell Mill Girls are mentioned in both of those books. I had come
00:28:14.840 across them, I think, just as a reader of those books. And then I can't remember why they came
00:28:20.980 back on my radar when I started researching this book. But what became fascinating to me and what
00:28:25.660 felt like making that the perfect place to begin was that basically in the 1800s, these
00:28:31.660 textile mills begin to be built alongside the rivers in the American Northeast and they
00:28:38.600 need a workforce and farmers aren't going to give up their family farms to go work there.
00:28:44.080 And the sort of mastermind of the mills decides, why don't I recruit kind of, for lack of a 0.99
00:28:50.720 better term, anachronistically, teenage girls. These girls who are not yet married, who are old
00:28:55.960 enough that they're already helping on their family farms, I'll pay them and then they can 1.00
00:29:01.340 earn this wage. And he had initially envisioned this workforce as like a turnover, you know,
00:29:07.880 100% turnover workforce where girls come and do this for a few years, they end up getting married, 0.63
00:29:12.920 a new generation of girls replaces them. It's not meant to be a career. It's meant to be sort of 1.00
00:29:18.800 holding pen between being a young, young girl and being a married woman. And I don't want to
00:29:24.340 romanticize these mills. I mean, it's brutal, hard labor, but it also was one of the first
00:29:29.180 opportunities that these girls would have had to earn their own money, which I think any person 1.00
00:29:33.480 who's ever gotten that first paycheck knows it's an incredibly powerful thing. And it meant that 0.86
00:29:38.780 these girls were living together away from their families for the first time ever. And so accidentally
00:29:44.300 it sort of invented this high school-like environment in the 1830s, where girls were
00:29:50.280 together away from their parents, away from their siblings as a social cohort long before they would
00:29:57.120 have been expected to go to high school. Certainly, it's just the beginning of women's colleges. 0.89
00:30:01.280 And it's this opportunity to exchange and share and talk and dream and fantasize and have these 0.99
00:30:07.360 kinds of future plotting exercises together outside of the nuclear family. And it became
00:30:13.380 a place where girls for the first time articulated kind of what they wanted from life in a way that
00:30:19.080 no one had ever asked them to think about before. And what I loved about the chapter and what I was
00:30:24.760 insistent on including was the way the girls shopped and the way they spent their money 1.00
00:30:30.000 informed what they felt entitled to. So they start buying their own shoes. They start buying 1.00
00:30:35.320 their own dresses for the first time. And as they kind of round out their personalities through
00:30:39.920 these material things, they start to feel like it's not fair, the conditions here. We're being
00:30:44.880 worked too hard. We're not getting paid enough. And the process of kind of having their own sense
00:30:49.680 of self, their own self-worth, partially as this weird result of this workforce meant that they
00:30:56.780 decided to strike and that they wrote up this constitution for themselves, complete with a
00:31:01.480 preamble that sounds a lot, probably like a constitutional preamble that most people would
00:31:05.400 recognize. And it felt to me really radical. And I just felt like, well, they belong in this book.
00:31:11.740 And yes, Harriet Hansen, who is kind of one of the stars of that chapter, decides, you know,
00:31:17.400 there's no way she's going to miss out on this strike. She ends up leading her entire room of,
00:31:22.020 you know, doffers out of their factories to take to the streets. And yes, she is 11 years old.
00:31:28.120 So I was interested in sort of this invention accidentally of this period of girlhood that
00:31:33.180 America wouldn't have recognized at that point before we know about teenagers before we even
00:31:37.000 know about adolescence and it felt to me like this really again kind of accidental unleashing
00:31:42.800 of girlhood power that felt like the perfect place to begin I love that I love the way you
00:31:47.820 describe it as a sort of accidental thing like accidentally developing these girls were living
00:31:53.260 together which is sort of inspires a sense of independence but then also they were inspiring
00:31:59.500 each other to start i don't know i i love the fact that it i think that's the sort of thing
00:32:03.920 that people who want to inhibit or reduce the amount of education for girls or to amount like
00:32:09.600 people are banning books and stuff it's like oh young people can't get ideas and this is showing
00:32:13.640 people who've got ideas not by through education specifically but just through proximity just
00:32:18.740 through sort of being together and inspiring each other like you can't stop people from getting
00:32:23.920 these ideas yeah and i write about this too but one of the things that i found so moving about
00:32:29.140 the Lowell Mill girls is that they started these magazines while they were there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
00:32:34.200 They're amazing documents and you, you can read them. You can read all the archives are still
00:32:38.720 there. And there are these incredible, like you would think of them as kind of the doodles in
00:32:42.500 the margins of a history textbook in high school, you know, girls talking about their dreams and,
00:32:47.320 uh, writing funny limericks and having inside jokes and sort of behaving in all the ways that
00:32:51.980 we associate with being a teenager. And what I loved is that years and years and years later,
00:32:58.000 during the beginning of second wave feminism, two books anthologize writing of women in America,
00:33:05.480 and both include excerpts from these magazines, including the Lowell Offering, which is sort of
00:33:11.120 the most famous one. And you would think, you know, these strategic, political, radical second
00:33:17.360 wave feminists, like what are they doing, including the musings of 11-year-olds in these
00:33:25.240 compendiums of and anthologies of women's writing. And when a reviewer for the Times reviews these,
00:33:32.240 and this has got to be in like the 60s and 70s, so almost a century later, he says, and of course
00:33:38.700 they had a man review these books, so just take from it what you will, he says that this, he sees
00:33:43.920 this as like the first feminist writing, this sense of declaration of I'm here, these are my ideas,
00:33:49.680 this is what I want to say. And I really sometimes feel like I could just cry thinking about it. I
00:33:54.200 think that that's so powerful that for generations, young women have said, this is what I think as a
00:34:00.380 way of declaring kind of who they are. And so that also gave me this amazing arc that the second wave
00:34:06.440 feminists and people today do see as their own roots, the Lowell Mill girls, it justified even
00:34:12.960 more for me why they are part of this story. Well, I'm speaking of feminism, but I think we're,
00:34:19.100 you and I are a similar age but it I also I really resonate with the part of the book where
00:34:24.320 you were saying like growing up you were attracted to causes you know like environmental causes and
00:34:29.820 things like that but like feminism was just kind of like no that's not really a thing like that
00:34:33.140 just felt to me um like old-fashioned it's like oh we don't need to worry about that anymore like
00:34:37.640 that's all been solved like everything I felt like that for sure exactly you said something
00:34:43.380 like that in the book as well and I was just like oh yeah no because I didn't see myself I didn't
00:34:48.180 consider myself a feminist until i was in my 20s when i started to actually pay more attention to
00:34:52.640 what was going on in the world but it felt like growing up like in the 90s just sort of like oh 0.95
00:34:57.320 that's just sort of like that's for like older women that's for like women who are like baby
00:35:01.940 boomer age who like go and i don't do a drum circle together and i'm just like that's just
00:35:06.080 kind of a quaint thing it didn't used to matter so what do you see like in terms of the young
00:35:10.480 people that you've talked to more recently like what in terms of them and the word feminism
00:35:16.000 and embracing it? Yeah, I think there still is, and this is unfortunate now that I squarely do
00:35:24.920 identify as a feminist, a sense of that's besides the point as its own goal. That I think when I,
00:35:32.840 you know, I talked to tons of young people for the book, I think a lot of people still do feel
00:35:37.000 like equality, gender equality is a byproduct of fixing some other bigger structural issues
00:35:42.840 in society. And that once we do that stuff, gender equality naturally follows. What I have come to
00:35:48.720 feel, and I don't think I would say to be fair to Gen Z, I'm squarely millennial. I do feel the
00:35:55.300 aversion to the word feminist was more of a millennial thing. And I definitely grew up
00:36:00.880 thinking, you know, my mom, ardent second wave feminist, would tell me about when women couldn't
00:36:06.120 get credit cards in their own names. It just felt like we've done all that already. And the
00:36:10.640 undercurrent of what it really means to live in a gender equal society felt like I didn't really
00:36:16.500 recognize that until I started being a working person and encountering what that looked like.
00:36:20.580 But what I do think is true is that sometimes it can feel like we have other more pressing
00:36:26.040 issues like the annihilation of the planet, for example. Certainly, I think during the George
00:36:32.160 Floyd protests, and I can understand this completely, the charge against feminism has
00:36:38.460 always been these other things are killing us. And feminism is a nice to have, not a need to have 1.00
00:36:44.780 compared to structural forces that are causing more immediate violent damage. I think what a 1.00
00:36:51.700 lot of people have come to recognize now that we're living in a post-Roe society, sexism is
00:36:57.120 deadly and lethal and women die of it really every day. What I think Gen Z is smart about
00:37:05.060 is recognizing that part of that is connected to and needs to be ameliorated by fighting the
00:37:13.100 gun violence epidemic, for example, which disproportionately hurts women, dealing with
00:37:17.280 climate change, which on a global level is going to disproportionately affect poor women of color.
00:37:22.960 And I think that the way in which overlapping global crises make sense to them means that
00:37:28.500 feminism is inherently embedded in these issues in a way that I don't know that when we were young,
00:37:33.800 we fully recognize. So credit to them. I think feminism as a PR move needs to make the immediacy 1.00
00:37:44.040 of our need for it a little bit more obvious. Unfortunately, I think current events are doing 1.00
00:37:49.180 that job for it because I think now that we're living in this very scary time for reproductive
00:37:53.400 rights, it's much clearer to people that this is not something that has been solved.
00:37:58.540 No, exactly. And so that's why I really appreciate that your book goes chronologically
00:38:02.600 and like ending with contemporary issues like talking about what's going on like today's
00:38:08.360 the young activists of today who are you know teenagers now and I don't know I say I've not
00:38:13.880 I don't think there was a book like this before and I really appreciated the way that you
00:38:18.400 wrapped everything together and sort of to show as you said like I think the answer to my very
00:38:22.900 first question you thought like oh right about like this like unprecedented thing young girls
00:38:27.560 today where it's like, oh, no, this has been, yeah. Yeah, seriously precedented, it turns out.
00:38:34.200 Yeah. And one of the things I want, I hope that the book does is because it's this collection
00:38:38.260 of stories that it makes it harder to forget again about the contributions of young women
00:38:43.260 so that hopefully whoever comes after Gen Z won't feel like they are the first people to be doing 1.00
00:38:49.580 this. And I also think it really is a tactic of the status quo to accelerate that process of
00:38:55.480 amnesia, it's much harder to start again than it is to recognize that you're building on this
00:39:00.000 incredible foundation. And so if young women really understood and were allowed to really
00:39:04.240 understand, and we see this now with all this policing of education, if they really were allowed
00:39:09.180 to see themselves as part of this continuum of women who have organized to try to make the world
00:39:13.920 better, it wouldn't feel necessarily quite so daunting as it does now thinking that you're
00:39:18.840 the first person to recognize these issues. And so I would love for the book to be that touchstone
00:39:24.540 to say you are building on incredible, incredible work of previous generations and that work can be
00:39:30.900 done. And the older women who did this before, a lot of them are still around and they would love
00:39:35.340 for you to ask them what it was like when they were teenagers, you know, fighting these battles.
00:39:39.700 And I think that is, in a lot of ways, there are parts of the book that I think are a little bleak
00:39:43.900 for a story about the incredible qualities of teenage girls. But I think the hopeful note is
00:39:49.660 that I do believe intergenerational organizing is the answer to some of the feelings of burnout
00:39:55.620 and resignation that young women feel. And I hope that the book is a reminder to people that this
00:40:00.840 work is ongoing. People have always been doing it and we have pushed things forward. I will say I
00:40:05.780 didn't feel quite so optimistic last summer when I was re-editing the chapter on Roe to account for
00:40:11.780 recent developments on that front, but I have huge faith in young women and writing this book has
00:40:16.420 only given me more i think that's a beautiful way to end this conversation i know that there are
00:40:22.880 some there are young people who listen to this podcast which startled me when i first figured
00:40:27.600 that i just thought i was you know like i just got as a feminist women's history podcast and i
00:40:32.700 just figured that my audience would be adult people but like i've heard from like eighth
00:40:36.260 graders like people in high school who are listening to it so i think that this book is
00:40:39.900 and that's why i was really drawn to your book to be like yeah like let's talk about
00:40:43.480 young girls in history and how they've always been organizing and speaking out and stuff.
00:40:48.860 So I think it's really great to have this book as a reminder to adults, as well as inspire younger
00:40:54.580 people. And I like to tell people too, if you've ever read a book that had any kind of military
00:40:59.660 history in it, you've read about and taken seriously the history of teenage boys. So here
00:41:05.520 is your opportunity to take seriously the history of teenage girls, which deserves to me no less
00:41:10.060 attention, no less admiration. I think people often forget the soldiers that you love to read
00:41:15.640 about are 18, 19, 20. So I think we can make room on our shelves for one book about the incredible
00:41:21.620 contributions of young women. Well, thank you so much for joining me today.
00:41:25.960 Thank you for having me.
00:41:28.220 So again, the title of Maddie's book is Young and Restless, The Girls Who Sparked America's
00:41:33.400 Revolutions. And it's just come out this week. So you'll be able to pick that up wherever you get
00:41:38.200 your books from. And there's a link in the show notes so you can learn more about her and about
00:41:42.980 her book and also links to buy the book as well. And so this podcast is Vulgar History. You can
00:41:48.980 follow us on Instagram at vulgarhistorypod. I'm on TikTok at vulgarhistory. You can find transcripts
00:41:56.000 for recent episodes at vulgarhistory.com. Those are done by Aveline Malek of The Wordery.
00:42:02.040 I also have a Patreon, which is patreon.com slash annfosterwriter, where you can get early
00:42:06.460 ad-free access to my podcast and also some bonus podcasts only available for Patreons only. I also
00:42:13.420 have a merch store, so you can go to vulgarhistory.com slash store. That's the good link for people who
00:42:18.660 are in the US. If you live elsewhere, just in terms of shipping costs and stuff, I recommend
00:42:23.820 using the alternate store, which is vulgarhistory.redbubble.com. And anyway, I hope you're
00:42:30.620 all having a nice day when you're listening to this. And I'll be back next week with some more
00:42:36.000 episodes. So until then, keep your pants on and your tits out. 1.00
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