A Girl’s Guide to Joining the Resistance

Being a woman means growing up in a world that tells you to be quiet in a million small ways every day.

The messages are subtle, of course, but omnipresent. Don’t be too big. Don’t be too small. Don’t be too young. Don’t be too old. Don’t try too hard. Don’t be too loud. Don’t take up too much space. Be successful but not threatening. Be beautiful but naturally so. Buy all the things that corporations tell you will help you conform to these impossible standards, but don’t make it obvious that you needed any products to achieve “perfection.” And while you’re spinning out trying to be the thing that you think you must be to be worthwhile, the men around you are free to learn, to speak, to explore, to lead.

It’s easy to say that we should all just say “screw that” and take up space anyway. And . . . we should! But the reality is that it’s way easier said than done.

Motivation and engagement take work. They take constant reaffirmation and reminding of why these fights are so damn important. When my own faith is failing me or weakening, I turn to the greatest teachers I know: other women.

I asked the women I spoke to for this book why we need young women’s voices in this fight. Every answer was beautiful, and I want them all printed on motivational posters to hang on my wall (maybe an Etsy store is in my future?). But instead of doing that, I decided to put them all in one place for you, dear reader.

CARMEN PEREZ, Women’s March National Cochair

“Women are the ones who are the driving forces in many of the issues that we care about. Women are at the forefront. They’ve always been at the forefront. It’s important for us to nurture young people because young people have always led movements. When we look at SNCC [the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee], when we look at the Chicano movement or the American Indian movement, it was young people. And so the way in which I see change is by cultivating the leadership of youth, and specifically young women, so that they can be the agents [of change] in their own families and in their own communities. I see myself in a lot of the young girls that I work with, but the difference between them and myself is that I was given an opportunity and they weren’t. So that’s what I really try to do: give young women opportunities to have access to leadership development or civic engagement or political engagement.”

MARLO THOMAS, Award-Winning Actress, Author, and Activist

“It is up to [young women] now to carry the fight forward, as these issues will define their lives and their children’s lives. Today’s young women are the ones whose reproductive rights are most dangerously under siege. They are the ones carrying student debt into a workforce that still doesn’t pay them fairly in many states. And God knows, they and all young people are the ones who will be most imperiled by whatever environmental damage the planet will suffer in the next half century. But in spite of all these challenges, I feel optimistic—because as someone who participates as much as I can in social media, I am continually inspired by the intelligence and relentlessness of today’s young women warriors. They are keeping us all on the leading edge of modern feminism, and I am learning from them every day.”

LUCY MCBATH, Mother of the Movement, Spokesperson for Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, and Faith Outreach Leader for Everytown for Gun Safety

“The young women of today are the mothers of tomorrow. It’s about preserving your own futures. It’s about protecting your families. Young women are going to be mothers. They’re going to be community leaders, and they’re going to be active in their churches and community organizations. I tell young people all the time that I’m fifty-seven but I’m out there fighting for you. We need you to fight for you.”

PAT SCHROEDER, Former Congresswoman

“If you’re going to make democracy work, you’ve got to work at democracy and social justice. In 2020, women in this country will have had the vote for one hundred years. Equal pay, the obsession with trying to control women’s reproductive rights—things like that should be over with. We should have moved on, and women should be in positions of leadership, and yet in 2017 you just see the Senate deciding there would be thirteen people negotiating the [GOP Senate] health care bill, and they couldn’t bother to put a woman senator in there. You’re just seeing that every single day. We certainly have the education, we have the ability. It’s never too late for equal rights.”

AMANDA GORMAN, Activist and Youth Poet Laureate of the United States

“Young female and femme voices are so vital because they add more to the narrative that is often left untold, and just sociologically speaking, we also see that people who identify as women have a good capacity for collaboration, for empathy, for reaching across the aisles. And while I’ll always be afraid of people using those stereotypes as a way to limit women, I think the strength of identifying as a woman, whether you’re cisgender or trans, it gives you this interesting perspective into not only patriarchy in the United States but also other systems of oppression. One woman can tap into that as a united force, [and] we see an earthquake that rocks the world.”

SARAH MCBRIDE, National Press Secretary for the Human Rights Campaign and LGBTQ Activist

“I can’t underscore enough the importance of young voices in these conversations. Young voices are going to be the voices that inherit this environment, and are learning in our schools, and are gonna be entering the job force. So they have a real stake in the policy discussions that we’re having. But beyond that, they’re so necessary because they’re incredibly effective voices for the types of progressive change we need. When they speak on political issues, they are speaking from a place of history. Young people will be the ones who write the history books of tomorrow. And elected officials, business leaders, and the everyday public—they know that.”

JACKIE CRUZ, Actress and Activist

“All young people need to engage right now in social justice issues. They’re our future—particularly women. We need to learn from a young age the importance of civil engagement, standing up for our rights, and having our voices heard. It starts as young as [immigration rights activist] Sophie Cruz. I mean, she’s six years old.”

GABRIELLE GORMAN, Filmmaker and YoungArts Winner

“I always like to refer back to this pep talk that I saw. [The woman giving the talk] is talking about the danger of the single story that’s only heard from a particular perspective, a particular group of people. That’s why female voices are so important—and to have a diverse range of female voices, people from different sexualities, people from different communities and cultures. I think it’s important to recognize that intersectionality.”

ELIZABETH WARREN, United States Senator

“If not you, then who? If not now, then when? We need more women to speak up and make their voices heard. We need you in this fight.”

AI-JEN POO, Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and Codirector of Caring Across Generations

“Women are often talked about as a special interest group, but we are more than half of all college graduates, more than half the electorate. We are doing 70 percent of the caregiving work, and we are more than 70 percent of all consumers, so our experiences and our perspectives are more defining of the whole than ever. So our perspectives need to be at the table to design solutions that actually work. Because if you’re not looking at the world through the eyes of women, you’re not seeing the whole picture.”

SHANNON WATTS, Founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America

“Women are the secret sauce. Women are what make organizing go. Incorporating women’s ability to be compassionate and passionate and multitask is key to winning and organizing. If you look at the front line of activism for so long—child labor laws, drunk driving, the right to vote—there are so many different areas that you can demonstrate where women have been leading the charge.”

WENDY DAVIS, Former State Senator and Founder of Deeds Not Words

“We need more women, period [in the fight for social justice], but I think we have the greatest potential lift in getting the voices of young women to be part of the conversation simply by virtue of the percentage of the population that young women occupy. By the year 2020, millennials as a whole, women and men, are going to be 40 percent of the eligible voters in this country. If we were able to really turn on the power that young women and young men possess, we would change the dynamic completely of what the conversation is in political contests and in policy making.”

JANAYE INGRAM, National Organizer and Head of Logistics for Women’s March

“Movements have always been led by young people. I think that there is a certain impatience that comes with being young. We are the microwave generation, where everything happens in an instant. You can talk to someone halfway across the world in a click of a button. You can get your food in five minutes, and it’s completely cooked. Everything just happens so fast. Because of that, I think that that impatience has also bled into our understanding of social injustice. We want to see change, and we are going to fight to make that happen. Young people, we can go out, and we can stand in the streets all night, like they did in Ferguson [following the shooting of Michael Brown by white police officer Darren Wilson]. We can stay out all night and do that, days upon days upon days on end. The elders, their responsibility is to guide us, and to engage us, and to tell us how we can better strategize, what lessons they learned.”

DEJA FOXX, High School Student and Reproductive Justice Advocate

“I would encourage other young women to speak their truth and share their experiences, [because] their stories are agents of change. Young people, women, LGBTQ folks, and people of color must be at the forefront of our movements. The future leaders are those who come from diverse backgrounds, and it is time that we take that role up and defy the systematic forces that for so long have held us back. We are the future!”

BOB BLAND, Women’s March National Cochair

“You know the phrase ‘The future is female’? It’s not just a phrase; it’s not just a tag line to sell shirts. It is really the truth. And the reason why it’s so important to have women and girls centered in leadership in all these conversations is, first of all, because it’s the one thing we haven’t tried. You know, patriarchy had a good run. We’ve been doing this for what, a few millennia? And what have we gotten from that? We’ve gotten war, we’ve gotten competition, we’ve gotten capitalism brought to its most sociopathic and extreme. Women have not had the chance to take the lead. And that is why we must now. I remember when Dr. Bernice King was speaking to all of our [Women’s March] organizers in December [2016]. She quoted her mother, Coretta Scott King, and she said, ‘First of all, women, if the soul of the nation is to be saved, I think you must become its soul.’ Women must give birth to whatever the new generation of this country and this society is to become, because we are the connector of everything. Every single person on this earth has something in common with each other. It’s that every single person came out of a woman. There are so many things that divide us, but that is an undeniable fact. And it’s powerful that we are tasked with bringing life into this world.”

ALICIA GARZA, Cofounder of Black Lives Matter Network and Special Projects Director at the National Domestic Workers Alliance

“Young women’s voices are needed in the fight for social justice because there’s so much happening in the world right now that directly impacts women and girls. I look at the photos coming out of the White House these days with a zillion white men sitting around a table making decisions about women’s bodies, our health, and our lives, and it is completely infuriating. There are hardly any women at the table, if any at all. And then if we were to look at the racial and ethnic compositions of those rooms where decisions are being made, they are pale and male. Young women deserve to make decisions that are best for us, and there’s no better time than now to get involved. Otherwise, the health care we need to have safe and healthy families, the communities we desire where children could grow up to become adults and be free of violence, will never materialize.”

SARAH SOPHIE FLICKER, National Organizer for Women’s March, Creative Director and Performer

“Young people just get it. I definitely feel like the smartest thing I do for my activism is hang out with people younger than I am and really allow them to lead. I really enjoy their voices, and I feel like I learn new things all the time. That’s just the obvious, inevitable way that progress happens. If you look at people who are real leaders, like Gloria Steinem, for example, she really knows how to listen. She really values all the younger people coming up. She does not try to tell them what’s what.”

TINA TCHEN, Former Chief of Staff to First Lady Michelle Obama and Executive Director of the Obama White House Council on Women and Girls

“Young women are living lives of inclusion and are fighting for a future with social justice and equal opportunity for all. They are working on creative and innovative solutions. They are resilient and they are powerful. They understand the complexity of opportunity and access, and what it means to have limits on that just because of identity. Most of all, it is their future that is at stake right now and the voices of young women are critical to shaping that future.”

ASHLEY JUDD, Actor, Author, and Activist

“Young people offer fresh thinking, stamina, and a necessary rowdiness. They also have a grasp of existing and emerging technologies and how they continue to revolutionize our world, and they will use them for social movements in ways that those of us who are older can’t begin to envision but will eventually embrace. What’s blatantly obvious is that we currently have the largest youth cohort the planet has ever known. It is a young person’s world. With Hillary [Clinton] recently running for president of the United States and being so eminently qualified, there are fortunately now generations of young women and girls who don’t know that was novel, relative to our nation’s long history of the white man’s stranglehold on power and politics.”