Mattie Kahn at Harvard Book Store

Young and Restless:
The Girls Who Sparked
America’s Revolutions

Harvard Book Store welcomes writer and editor MATTIE KAHN for a discussion of her new book Young and Restless: The Girls Who Sparked America’s Revolutions.

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About Young and Restless

Nine months before Rosa Parks kicked off the bus boycotts, Claudette Colvin was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. She was fifteen. In 1912, women’s rights activists organized a massive march in support of women’s suffrage. Leading them up Fifth Avenue in Manhattan was not one of the mothers of the movement, but a teenage Chinese immigrant named Mabel Ping-Hua Lee. Half a century before the better-known movements for workers’ rights began, over 1,500 girls—some as young as ten—walked out of factories in Lowell, Massachusetts, demanding safer working conditions and higher wages in one of the nation’s first-ever labor strikes.

Young women have been disenfranchised and discounted, but the true retelling of major social movements in America reveals their might: they have ignited almost every single one.

Young and Restless recounts one of the most foundational and underappreciated forces in moments of American revolution: teenage girls. From the American Revolution itself to the Civil Rights Movement to nuclear disarmament protests and the women’s liberation movement, through Black Lives Matter and school strikes for climate, Mattie Kahn uncovers how girls have leveraged their unique strengths, from fandom to intimate friendships, to organize and lay serious political groundwork for movements that often sidelined them. Their stories illuminate how much we owe to girls throughout the generations, what skills young women use to mobilize and find their voices, and, crucially, what we can all stand to learn from them.

Praise for Young and Restless

“Young and Restless is inspiring without being sentimental, a lively and engaging read that nonetheless challenges and complicates dusty narratives. It’s for anyone who cares about girls and a more just world. You wish this is what you’d learned in history class.” —Irin Carmon, co-author of the New York Times bestselling Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“In Young and Restless, Mattie Kahn treats girl activists with rigor and curiosity, and is clear-eyed in her examination of how we too often erase their social and political contributions from the historical record, iron over the ways their youthful preoccupations shape their engagement, and fetishize their girlhood in a way that makes their growth into adults more challenging. This is a really smart book.” —Rebecca Traister, New York Times bestselling author of Good and Mad

“Young and Restless honors the ferocious power of teenage girls. In this bracing retelling of the social movements, Mattie Kahn celebrates girls not as saviors, but as leaders and visionaries deserving of our recognition.” —Billie Jean King, New York Times bestselling author of All In