You can also listen to this podcast on Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Mattie Kahn is a prolific writer whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and more. Mattie was also the culture director at Glamour and a staff editor at Elle. Today, she joins me to talk about her book, Young and Restless: The Girls Who Sparked America’s Revolutions, which is a much-needed survey of young female voices who were and are often at the heart of political movements, whether it was bus boycotts, strikes at mills, or the environmental movement unfolding today. This isn’t just a book about ensuring that the names of these girls are preserved by history, though, this is an examination of why girls are frequently so central to social change, and what it is about their often-precocious voices that can capture the attention of the nation. This, of course, is a double-edged sword, as Mattie’s work explores how quickly we dump these girls, or move on, once they turn into angry women. Today, we also talk about what’s happening on campuses and what a container might look like to hold dialogue, debate, and discourse.
MORE FROM MATTIE KAHN:
Mattie’s Website
Follow Mattie on Instagram
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN: Obviously reading the book, there were a handful of names, I will say only a handful of names that I knew. So thank you for that. It's always great to have more women entered into the history books. I know you weren't discovering these people, but the more we can streamline and beef up these movements, too, because you write a lot about our tendency culturally to choose one to represent all and then we focus all of our attention on that single Spokesperson, generally, like Greta, for example, right.