What Youth Activists Do That Adults Can’t

In 1860, Anna Elizabeth Dickinson—the daughter of Quaker abolitionists—attended a public debate in her native Philadelphia titled “Women’s Rights and Wrongs.” She had not planned to speak. But when a “bristling, dictatorial man”—as she later called him—stood to insist that his daughters were equal to all men, just better suited to domestic lives than commercial pursuits, Dickinson could not resist. She shook her finger at him and thundered her retort: “In heaven’s name, sir, what else is to be expected of such a father?” No wonder his daughters were destined for such circumscribed lives, she was saying; with a father like that, the girls were doomed. The man fled the hall. Dickinson had just turned 17.

Over the next few months, Dickinson showed up at other events. When the Civil War broke out, the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison helped her launch a multistate tour as an orator. Lucretia Mott, the abolitionist and women’s rights activist, admitted that the girl had “more fight than I can go with.” In 1864, Dickinson became the first woman to address the House of Representatives.

But even at age 21, she was still identified in the press as a girl. In the Washington Chronicle, a writer admired her “curls cut short, as if for school,” and her expression lit “with the mirthfulness of a child,” except when it blazed “with the passions of a prophetess.” Dickinson was renowned for her furies—the “fight” that women like Mott could never let themselves muster. But when her girlhood expired, her success was snuffed out with it. In her 30s, she struggled to land even modest speaking gigs. She tried her hand at writing and acting, but got scathing reviews. She remained rageful. It stopped seeming so charming.

Exceptional girl activists have for centuries become famous for their demonstrations of raw emotion in protest. Their precociousness—all that vim and vigor in smaller bodies—has allowed them a public voice even in societies uninterested in hearing from grown women. Whereas adult activists who want to appeal to the masses must typically demonstrate emotional control to be taken seriously, girl activists have in many cases thrived by shouting, screaming, sometimes weeping, and often impudently castigating older generations.

Such melodrama—more than sober charts or poll results or legislative agendas—helps children make their case. In 2013, Malala Yousafzai, whom Taliban militants shot in the head and who later became a global advocate for girls’ education, delivered an incandescent speech in which she warned her audience that she would be loud: “I raise up my voice—not so that I can shout, but so that those without a voice can be heard.” In 2018, Samantha Fuentes, a survivor of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, who’d been wounded in the attack, vomited in the middle of her speech while dozens of live TV cameras rolled. News outlets praised her for continuing the speech afterward. And in 2019, Greta Thunberg cried at the United Nations as she delivered a scathing address to world leaders. “I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope,” Thunberg said. “How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.” A few months later, Time named Thunberg a Person of the Year.

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For adolescents dissatisfied with the status quo, activism can be one of the few opportunities for political expression. “People under 18 have been excluded from all kinds of formal political processes,” Sarah Gaby, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington who studies youth protest movements, told me. Minors can’t vote; they also can’t incorporate nonprofits or run for elected office. Yet their protests work. Research from the United States Institute of Peace has found that major nonviolent protests with democratic aims—such as calls for territorial independence and demands for regime change—with high levels of participation from activists ages of 10 to 29 have greater than average rates of success.

Youth activism has its risks. The USIP research found that although movements that include young people are no more violent than those that adults lead, the state tends to react to them with more aggressive tactics. The USIP report cites other academic work indicating that regimes use violence against young people precisely because they want to deter more youth-led protests. History shows many examples of that kind of preemptive violence: the Children’s Crusade against segregation, in 1963; the Kent State protests of the Vietnam War in 1970; Tiananmen Square, in 1989; and the more recent face-offs between the state and demonstrators in Hong Kong and Iran.

And then there are the accusations. Teenage activists are constantly accused of reading the cue cards of adults. In the Democratic-opposition press back in the 19th century, Dickinson was called a parrot. More recently, right-wing news outlets have dismissed anti-gun-violence activists as puppets. Gaby has observed that adolescent activists tend to burn out faster than adult ones too: Some of them give their all to a cause and then find themselves depleted. They haven’t learned what incremental triumph can look and feel like.

For young women, the burden can exact a particular toll. In Young and Restless: The Girls Who Sparked America’s Revolutions, I make the case that girls are especially capable activists. Although all genders joined the civil-rights movement and the anti-war movement, and now battle the climate crisis, girls are uniquely visible. Thunberg, Yousafzai, and Dickinson have all been perceived as innocent in a way that’s specific to their gender and age. The threat that society’s moral failures—climate inaction, brutal discrimination—pose to them makes their plight feel urgent. But girls are also “doubly disadvantaged,” as USIP calls them: without the political rights of adults, and living in societies that might treat them unequally. Then, when they grow up, the very traits that made them powerful advocates can be used against them. Dickinson had been christened America’s Joan of Arc. She was never burned at the stake, but she was ostracized. She had been a furious girl, and then she was a mad woman.

Young and Restless: The Untold History of American Girls in Protest

By Mattie Kahn

While I worked on Young and Restless, dozens of people asked me versions of the same question: Were the kids all right? Would girls save us? The process of writing this book filled me with hope. Over and over, impatient girls—brimming with the determination that adolescence affords—have stepped into the breach. But young people should not be burdened with compensating for the failures of grown-ups. Instead of just marveling at our indefatigable girls, perhaps adults can work with them.