Girlhood Studies

This Special Issue of Girlhood Studies, “A Seat at the Table: Recalling the Promises of Girl Activism and Advocacy,” guest edited by Crystal Leigh Endsley, Emily Bent and Marnina Gonick, offers a remarkable collection of articles on girl activism and advocacy. Its reference to “a seat at the table” is a wonderful reminder of feminist activism in history from Judy Chicago's iconic art installation, The Dinner Party (19741977), made up of 39 place settings at a large triangular table, each representing mythical and historical women (along with another 999 women whose names appear on the Heritage Floor on which the table is positioned, to this Special Issue itself with its list of women and girls who made or are making a difference.

This Special Issue, “A Seat at the Table: Recalling the Promises of Girl Activism and Advocacy,” emerged from a roundtable discussion during the 2023 National Women's Studies Association (NWSA) Conference in Baltimore, Maryland, about working with girls in spaces of political and socio-cultural import. The title of the session was inspired by “A Seat at the Table that I Set: Beyond Social Justice Allies” by Toby Jenkins (2009), in which she explores the roles of social change agents including ally, advocate, and activist. Jenkins's work has been extended to include the role of “artist” as critical to social change (Endsley 2016) and frames how we engage with the fight for girls’ rights in our various capacities. The roundtable was designed to reflect these social change roles and thus brought girl activists, young women, and community and academic feminist partners together to share experiences and lessons learned about intergenerational feminist struggle in nonprofit organizing and social justice movements. Drawing on over twenty years of partnership with adolescent girl leaders, creative performers, and political actors across a variety of settings, we, (along with others involved in the roundtable) imagined rich conversations about the power dynamics shaping intergenerational relationships alongside examinations of how adults support girl advocacy, creativity, and leadership. The NWSA roundtable was meant to bring attendees face-to-face with our challenges, tensions, and moments of joy; we were excited to engage with and learn from each other during the session. At the time, panelists hoped that the audience would consist of a mixture of girl leaders and adult partners who had stories to offer.

We do not speak often about what it means to support girl leaders as movement allies, nor do we detail what it looks like when girls partner with adults as political equals. In this article, I endeavor to address such absences by presenting an intergenerational exchange about the possibilities for girl-led advocacy at the United Nations. Drawing on solicited reflections from members of the Working Group on Girls, I structure conversation among nine current and former girl leaders and adult partners to illustrate how human rights advocacy coalesces in the organization. I chronicle shifting priorities, institutional dynamics, and relational power among members to offer lessons learned about how to foster impactful partnerships with girl leaders today.

I examine how girl activists navigate identity tensions in adult-dominated spaces that celebrate their symbolic value while constraining their political agency. Drawing from a qualitative study of nineteen girl activists, I identify two core tensions: hollow-exceptionalism that sees girls praised as inspiring “wunderkinds” but excluded from real power, and compliance-conviction that expects girls to be agreeable despite their strong beliefs. In response, participants reclaim agency and assert political legitimacy through strategic identity work like rejecting tokenizing praise, reframing critique, and fostering peer affirmation. I identify how girl activists resist adult misrecognition and assert themselves into structures that simultaneously celebrate and silence them. I offer practical implications for adult allies, urging solidarity through rethinking praise, sharing power, resourcing youth-led arenas, and continually reflecting on adult-centric norms.

In this article we explore how young Haryanvi Jaat women in urban India enact affective everyday forms of feminist resistance within patriarchal regimes that regulate sanctioned girlhood. Drawing on qualitative interviews with self-identified girls aged 18 to 24, we theorize what we refer to as relational transgression as a feminist practice enacted through the two micro-modal tactics that we call rigid timidity and girl time. These affective strategies transform compliance, silence, and waiting into means of negotiating gendered control and generating spaces of autonomy. By foregrounding less legible modes of resistance, we expand feminist conceptualizations of activism beyond public, organized protest to include relational acts through which girls imagine and sustain intergenerational feminist futures.

In 1914, Sitti Habibah from Pasaman, West Sumatra, wrote that even though her “love”—a weaving school—felt unattainable, with the support of local leaders it could be realized. In this article, I piece together how several Indonesian girl writers described disheartenment about limited educational and employment opportunities through embodied, spiritual, and metaphoric repertoires in letters and poems in Soenting Melajoe, a Malay-language women's periodical. I probe the gender, age, and class dimensions of their solidarity-making. Centering Sitti Habibah's activist praxis (that she called “whispering”) with which she promoted the establishment of a weaving school and opposed child marriage, my analysis reveals how she drew strategically on systems of knowledge and values, including Islamic faith, matrilineal Minangkabau customs, and colonial modernity.

In this article, I examine how Chamas en Acción (CheA) a community-driven feminist empowerment program in Peru, supports migrant adolescent girls who navigate gender-based violence, discrimination, and displacement. My analysis explores how its pedagogical components—participatory workshops, psychosocial support, family engagement, and a dedicated mentoring axis—create conditions for safety, belonging, and political emergence. Drawing on testimonios produced by girls and adult mentors, I show how care-centered practices, based on decolonial feminist ethics, enable participants to reinterpret their experiences, articulate demands, and engage in public action. I argue that mentorship, as one pillar of a broader empowerment model, functions as relational praxis that strengthens agency, fosters intergenerational solidarities, and sustains feminist continuity across territories.

Founded in 2011, Girls Justice League is a girl-led gender justice non-profit organization based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Inspired by bell hooks's approach of truth telling through dialogue, we reflect on a conversation in which six individuals representing current Girls Justice League youth leaders and adult allies offer viewpoints on this organization as a homeplace of meaning making. The conversation explores our past and present learnings about staying true to an intersectional vision of girls’ activism while existing in a capitalist, patriarchal, adultist society based on misogynoir stereotypes, and future imaginings for gender-based activism and collective liberation through youth-adult partnership work.

Transform Education is a transnational network connecting youth-led organizations advancing gender equality in and through education, housed in the United Nations Girls Education Initiative. Our research in the Leading Change project used digital storytelling to document experiences of 12 Transform Education youth activists from Africa and Asia and describe the impact of involvement in this network. Participants described Transform Education as an effective girl- and youth-led vehicle for amplifying their work and building a feminist collective that cultivates agency and community. They recommend the Transform Education / United Nations Girls Education Initiative partnership as a model of intergenerational collaboration.

This issue would not be complete without the voices of the three girls whose poems appear below. We can imagine using them as texts in a classroom lesson that explores contemporary girls’ experiences or as a counterpoint to adult scholarship in that these are girls speaking for themselves. The first poem is by Kayla Dudley, a poet, artivist, and teaching artist whose work explores societal issues, identity, and the intersections of race, gender, and justice. Here, she establishes an unapologetic foundation for how poetry functions as activism for girls like her. Next, is a poem by Helena Donato-Sapp, a 15-year-old Youth Poet Laureate of Long Beach, California, who issues a poetic clarion call for the need to listen to girls’ voices. She is an accomplished activist and educator internationally recognized for her work in the areas of Disability Justice, Anti-Bullying, and Black Girlhood. We close this section with a poem by Olivia Altidor, an activist, writer, spoken word poet and lifelong student based in New York. Her poem was performed at the United Nations in 2024. She has collaborated with the Working Group on Girls and Commission on the Status of Women in many roles for the past seven years.

the world told me to hush,

cross my legs, soften my tone,

be grateful, be quiet.

We believe in the power of youth voice.

Stop telling us that we are going to be the “leaders of tomorrow”

when we are busy being changemakers today.

See us now. Hear us now. It is now.

We live in a world so beautiful!

But how beautiful can this world really be?

Marginal divide, girls losing their lives

And people are living on those streets. . .

Crystal Leigh Endsley. 2023. Quantum Justice: Global Girls Cultivating Disruption through Spoken Word Poetry. Austin, TX, University of Texas Press.