Young and Restless

January 1, 2023

From Black 15-year-old Claudette Colvin, who refused to relinquish her seat on a segregated Montgomery, AL, bus nine months before Rosa Parks took her stand, to teenage Chinese immigrant Mabel Ping-Hua Lee leading a suffrage march up Manhattan's Fifth Avenue in 1912, teenage girls have often been crucial to social justice movements in the United States. Even when sidelined by prejudice, argues Kahn, a former cultural director at Glamour, they found ways to operate effectively behind the scenes.

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2023
A historical review of the ways in which girls' activism has shaped American history. In 2017, while writing an article about the possibility of a women's museum opening in Washington, D.C., journalist Kahn, the former culture director at Glamour and staff writer for Elle, learned for the first time about Sybil Ludington. During the Revolutionary War, 16-year-old Ludington allegedly "outrode Paul Revere" when she warned her community about the impending British invasion. Although the veracity of Ludington's story has since been questioned, the idea of a young girl taking on responsibilities that frightened the adults around her spurred the author to explore the world of historically verified Americans whose heroism has, in the modern era, remained unsung. Kahn profiles girls from a variety of backgrounds and historical eras, including striking millworkers in Lowell, Massachusetts, in the 1800s; Black girls Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith, who refused to give up their bus seats long before Rosa Parks did; and Greta Thunberg, "who turned student strikes for climate into a worldwide phenomenon" when she was only 15. At its best, this well-researched book delves deeply into the lives of girls like Alice de Rivera, who, at age 13, sued Stuyvesant High School in New York for only admitting boys. At times, though, the chapters are so crammed full of information that they feel disjointed or contradictory. In one chapter, for example, Kahn argues that activism both enhances and is detrimental to girls' mental health. Another limitation of the book is the author's almost exclusive focus on cisgender White and Black girls. She only briefly mentions Latine girls demanding immigration reform, trans activists protesting anti-trans laws, and Indigenous activists resisting the Dakota Access Pipeline. Overall, though, the book is thoughtful and compassionate. A critical, informative, not-quite-comprehensive analysis of girls' activism in the U.S.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

April 1, 2023
Kahn spotlights the activism of teen girls. From modern-day reformers like Greta Thunberg and Naomi Wadler to historical cohorts including the Lowell mill girls and female civil rights workers, Kahn illustrates that while young women can be impressionable and passionate, they are also practical, strategic, and uniquely well suited to collaboration and consensus building. Kahn begins in the nineteenth century, with Lowell and Seneca Falls, and carries readers through climate-change activism and the 2018 March for Our Lives in DC. The activism of the 1970s fed on itself, with agitation in schools around the country forming the basis of Title IX. Kahn takes pains to emphasize the collective success girls have achieved; advocacy and movements tend to grow organically, and "female friendship in particular is an overlooked cultural force." Indeed, most of the subjects she interviews, including freedom rider Diane Nash, are wary of taking sole credit. Kahn ends with the somber reality of Roe v. Wade's overturn but also a note of hope. Girls, as she has ably demonstrated, are capable of lasting, progressive change.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

April 10, 2023
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. Agent: Kimberly Witherspoon, InkWell Management.

May 1, 2023

Award-winning writer/editor Kahn writes about teenagers who helped foment change during critical eras in United States history. The book profiles Harriet Hanson, who at age 10 started working at Tremont Mills in Lowell, MA, to help with her family's financial needs. At age 11 in 1836, it was Hanson who helped lead her older coworkers in a strike for better treatment. The book also portrays Anna Elizabeth Dickinson, who was 13 when her anti-enslavement article was published in an 1856 edition of The Liberator, an abolitionist newspaper owned by William Lloyd Garrison. In 1912, more than 10,000 women determined to gain voting rights lined up for a parade down New York's Fifth Avenue behind Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, a Chinese American teenager who rode atop a white horse. This book has catchy chapter titles, such as "Material Girls," "The Mouth on That Girl," and "Stream of Consciousness," and some readers may be put off when the author questions what turns girls into women. Both aspects undermine the book's scholarship and serious intent. VERDICT Kahn covers history up to the present and considers the role of social media for young women engaging with today's challenges. Best suited for school and large libraries.--Ellen Gilbert

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.