Radical new ways to teach girls and
young women how to push back
Growing up, Caroline Marful was “a very idealistic kid.” She always saw the best in people and in the world. Then she took Grade 11 American history. “Just cuz,” she told me, laughing. The more she learned about slavery and Jim Crow laws, the more that idealism slipped away. As a young Black woman, she had, of course, known those horrible things happened. Yet before that class she had seen them as a by-product of history — examples of outdated thinking, sure, but not really anybody’s fault. “It was the first time I sat there and thought, No, no, no, it’s the people who write policies. It’s the people who are voted into office,” she told me. “They choose these things, and they chose things that I think are terrible.” They also did what they thought was best for them at that time. If she wanted things to change, she realized, she’d have to be in the room when such decisions were made. When it came time to choose her major, she set aside her interest in English and chose to study politics at Queen’s.
While she was there, she realized she’d need more than her university education to gain access to those rooms. “These rooms are usually behind closed doors,” she knew. “They’re usually full of white men.” To start, she co-founded a political leadership conference for women at Queen’s. She wanted to help other women combine their knowledge and skills, rather than seeing them all facing the same issues and getting pushed down individually, continuously. At the time, it never occurred to her that she couldn’t pull off the conference, or learn how to open the necessary doors. “I always feel the need to give my parents credit,” she said. They both immigrated from Ghana when they were Marful’s age, in their early twenties. They didn’t have any networks, but they both went on to get their master’s degrees. “When they raised my sister and I they never really spoke about the barriers that existed in society. It was a very conscious choice. They were never like, ‘Oh, because you’re a girl this,’ or ‘Because you’re Black that.’ It was never the narrative, even though it’s true. They just didn’t continuously vocalize it.”
As a result, she added, she just “goes for things.” So when she had the opportunity to apply for the Girls on Boards program through the not-for-profit G(irls)20, she did so without hesitation. The organization focuses on fostering leadership and decision-making among girls from eighteen to twenty-five years old. In many ways, says Heather Barnabe, the organization’s CEO, they are the forgotten demographic. People love seeing girls look empowered. Companies can see the benefit of bringing on women with experience, someone who might be in their diversity pipeline. But girls in university are politically disruptive, in both their thinking and their actions. To Barnabe, that’s when women really begin to comprehend not only their rights, but also what they’re owed — by their education, by the wider systems in society, by those around them. They also begin to understand how they can contribute to the change they want to see. Which, Barnabe figured, should make them incredibly valuable to both corporate and non-profit boards.
Of course, it’s exactly this potential for change-making that made boards so nervous about signing on to the program and inviting young women — after extensive training and coaching — to serve a one-year term as a “Young Director.” An even tougher sell: Barnabe insisted that if the young women were to participate, they’d not only get a seat at the decision-making table, they’d get a voice. It’s a two-way street, she told me. The young women should feel as though their lived experience matters, because it does. They will have points of view that many of the boards — which are still largely composed of older white men — have not had access to. That’s why, in addition to working on governance training with the young women in their program, G(irls)20 also works with the boards themselves to educate them on how to value and interact with young women in board settings. “What we don’t want is that tokenistic piece,” said Barnabe. She didn’t want to mimic convention that preached training women and letting boards continue on with the status quo. “In reality, it’s the boards who have to change their approach.”
The organization’s approach is innovative, and it’s also challenging. For everyone. No matter how much training the women have, said Barnabe, if there’s one theme among the women, it’s that “none of them feel good enough to be in our program.” It frustrates her. “At the same time,” she added, “of course they don’t. They’ve been messaged their whole lives that they don’t deserve to be in this space.”
Even Marful, for all her confidence and conviction that she belongs in such spaces, found herself surprisingly intimidated when she showed up to her first meeting. She suddenly realized how much she had to learn. It wasn’t until her third board meeting, she told me, that she began to feel like she belonged — an underestimation of her skills and value, she stressed, that was entirely of her own making. Before that third meeting, the executive director of the organization had called Marful and asked her to sit on the executive committee as secretary. Marful’s first response was, “I don’t know anything.” She thought she wasn’t ready. She was still in school, taking the train back from Kingston for every gathering.
Sitting in that first executive meeting, though, she discovered nobody knew everything. They worked together to combine their knowledge. “It’s when I realized the best asset of me being on the board was being me,” she said. They may have known a lot of things she didn’t. “But none of them know what it’s like to be Black, and none of them know what it’s like to be young in today’s day and age.” She stopped trying to model herself after everybody else and started channelling her own thoughts and experiences. It clicked.
Now a graduate, Marful has completed the Girls on Boards program. People always ask her, she added, if she wants to see more Black women in the room. Yes, she’ll answer, 100 percent. She wants to be in the room, and she wants to bring twenty others with her. But she has also realized something else from her time on the board: “If there’s no one in the room, I’d be okay with being the first.”
The summer that Adrienne McRuvie’s daughter turned eight, she decided to read The Mother-Daughter Project. Written by psychotherapists SuEllen Hamkins and Renée Schultz, the book posits that, despite the notoriously rocky time, relationships between mothers and daughters can actually thrive during adolescence. If that happens, the book argues, teen girls also stand a better chance at thriving through what is often a tumultuous transition. The authors’ solution: a “simple but revolutionary idea” to gather moms and daughters into small social groups that meet regularly. In the book, the authors talk about how they developed activities that focused on self-esteem and other issues of growing up, such as friendship and puberty, and eventually body image, drugs, sexuality, and violence against women.353
McRuvie knew immediately that she wanted to try something similar with her daughter. She thought back to a yoga class she’d taught when she and the other students were new mothers. They’d had a sense of collectiveness that she’d missed after everyone finished maternity leave and went back to work. Their children would all be the same age. She contacted four of them, who had daughters. Yes, yes, yes, yes. A group of five mothers and daughters, they’ve been meeting once a month ever since.
Sometimes, they’ll gather and just bond — do something fun, like go to a movie. But, more often than not, McRuvie and the other mothers try to find guest speakers to come in and chat with their girls. When their kids were younger, the mothers, like the book’s authors, focused on things like friendship. As they’ve grown older, they’ve had a naturopath come in to talk about periods. Another woman taught the girls about money, its value, what you can buy with it, how much energy it costs to make it. One filmmaker helped open a discussion about beauty. They held a clothing swap with a stylist who led a conversation on style, personality, and self-expression through clothes. Being different, they tell their daughters, is not a bad thing. They should always be able to express themselves to the world. When I spoke to McRuvie, she’d recently invited a sex therapist to chat with the group. The woman focused on consent and why it’s important. She also talked about pleasure and masturbation — teaching the girls that it is totally normal, totally okay.
The mothers have also brought in a sense of ritualized memory. Every time one of the girls in their group gets her period, McRuvie told me, the mothers gift her with a memory box. They ask her grandmothers to write letters about growing up. They’ve given bracelets and inscribed copies of the bestselling novel The Red Tent. She laughed when she admitted that the first girl to receive one of the boxes was “super embarrassed.” But, McRuvie added, she still has the box, with all of those things inside. She hoped the girls knew why the mothers had given them the period boxes: We don’t want you to have experiences like we had. McRuvie said she remembered what happened when she got her first period. “[I was] sitting in a bathroom at a wedding, in my pretty dress, thinking I was dying,” she said. Nobody had told her what would happen when she got her period. Nobody had told her much about it at all. “This is showing them and telling them that we’re here and we can talk. We’re supporting you and telling you. Your period is not a curse. It’s not the worst thing that’s happening to you. It’s part of your power. It’s who you are.”
McRuvie believed her role as a mother was to create opportunity for her daughter. To give her infinite choices and to help her create the life she wanted. Sure, the world was going to throw up all sorts of roadblocks. But she was doing what she could to ensure her daughter didn’t self-select out of opportunity before the world even told her “No.”
Many young people begin to experience — and name — gender inequality at a young age, long before many adults assume they do. In fact, on average, children reportedly first notice gender inequality at eleven years old, and more than half of girls first notice it between the ages of ten and thirteen, according to a 2018 Girl Guides of Canada/Ipsos survey. The survey also discovered that one in three girls between the ages of twelve and seventeen believe they’ve been treated unequally or unfairly because of their gender. (Incidentally, the wage gap has also already started by the time teens are working summer jobs, with girls earning about $3 less than boys.) Such experiences chip away at what girls and boys each believe they can do. For example, one-quarter of young people surveyed believed that boys are more capable than girls at sports, science, math, and leadership roles. Two in ten believed that girls should aspire to mimic traditional gender goals, like marriage and children. The same proportion believed boys are superior to girls, period.354
And while half of girls surveyed said they believed in feminism, 30 percent of them said they were scared or hesitant to speak out for their rights. This fits (depressingly) neatly into the extreme drop in confidence girls experience as they head into adolescence. Between the ages of eight and fourteen, girls’ confidence levels drop by 30 percent, according to a 2018 YPulse poll commissioned by the authors of The Confidence Code for Girls.355 Between the ages of twelve and thirteen alone, the percentage of girls who say they aren’t allowed to fail increases by a staggering 150 percent. During that same, scant year, the percentage of girls who feel pressured to be perfect jumps by 46 percent. “There is virtually no difference in confidence between boys and girls until they hit age twelve,” write the authors, Katty Kay and Claire Shipman. “After age twelve, a confidence gap opens between boys and girls that doesn’t close through adolescence.” It doesn’t even close by the time those girls become adults in their thirties.
“Our culture is teaching girls to embrace a version of selfhood that sharply curtails their power and their potential,” argues Rachel Simmons in her book The Curse of the Good Girl. “In particular the pressure to be ‘Good’ — unerringly nice, polite, modest, and selfless — diminishes girls’ authenticity and their personal authority.”356 It’s what drives girls to fear failure, become averse to risk, and to become overly cautious, silent. Once they’re in adolescence, girls are also more exposed to stressful interpersonal events, like conflict with peer groups or social isolation, and they also tend to ruminate on those events more than boys, leading to higher risks of depression.357 Seen against such a dismal backdrop, ventures like mother-daughter groups — which promote self-love, respect, and community while trying to infuse confidence without selling it as a panacea — seem downright radical. And if we could teach girls to be tender and kind to themselves through adolescence, I wondered, could we also teach them to be angry, aggressive? Could we teach them to be “bad”?
Pan Am Games gold medal winner Gemma Sheehan is standing in front of a group of giggling thirteen-year-old girls. The mixed martial artist founded Girls Who Fight after she retired from cage fighting in her early twenties. With her whole life before her, Sheehan thought about what she wanted most and became determined to teach young women how to protect themselves. To her, that didn’t stop at learning how to break free from somebody’s grasp. If anything, she told the girls assembled there that day, the best thing they could do if somebody attacked them was to run away. A drop-kick in real life rarely worked like it did in the movies. No, if they really wanted to protect themselves — the core of who they were — they had to learn how to stand their ground, be a leader, speak out. It would mean forgetting how to be quiet and learning how to yell.
“You aren’t going to learn this from a lot of people,” she told the group. “People are not going to teach you to speak assertively and not be nice all the time.” But she would.
It was close to the end of a full day of activity. The girls had learned how to break an attacker’s grip and they’d learned how to strike someone. They’d talked about the perils of social media and the bullying they faced online. Yelling at someone, though, was proving to be the most difficult thing they’d done the entire day. Imagine, Sheehan said, that the girl standing next to them in the circle was someone who did not take their “Stop!” as a “stop” — whatever it was they wanted them to stop doing. Now, she told them, practise what you’d say next. Don’t be shy, she said. Don’t worry about looking cool.
They did a few practices as a group. Don’t make it a question at the end, Sheehan added after listening for a moment. Keep eye contact. Keep the bounce out of your voice. Don’t be inviting. Be loud. “Keep it short,” she quipped, “but don’t be sweet.”
After a few more minutes of coaching, she told the group that they were going to turn it into a competition. If they laughed while they said the phrase “Stop doing that!” to the girl next to them, they had to sit down. They were out.
The first girl spoke: “Can you please stop doing that?”
“No ‘please’!” shouted Sheehan.
The next girl laughed when she was done saying the words, and sat down. “I sounded like I was going to kill her,” she said, surprised.
Another girl tried, but broke down in laughter. “I’m out. I’m out.”
The next girl raised her arm, took a deep breath, and drew her fingers together. “I can’t,” she said.
The other girls coaxed her. “You’re talking to your mom! Pretend you’re pissed!”
She almost whispered it.
“Don’t rush it,” said Sheehan. The girl laughed, trying to get it out. “Eye contact,” coaxed Sheehan.
Finally, she said it: “Stop doing that.”
“Good,” said Sheehan. “But you could be meaner. You could be meaner.”
And so it went around the circle. Most girls laughed, and laughed even more uncomfortably when they managed to get the words out. As if they were astounded with themselves for speaking so forcefully, for saying “no,” even if it was all pretend.
Sheehan told me that their mothers had signed them up for the class, maybe with #MeToo on their minds, maybe with the general messy state of the world. Earlier in the day the girls had gone around and said why they were there, what they wanted to be when they grew up. Two of them wanted to be engineers. One wanted to be a surgeon. Another a pediatrician. One a scientist. They told the group they were there to “learn how to kick somebody in the gut,” to “stop someone with a knife,” to “break someone’s nose,” to know how to defend themselves. One girl said that she just “wanted to learn how to be strong.” Another said her mom had forced her to be there.
I wanted to be able to leave that day and see that it had changed the girls. I wanted to witness a clear moment of “before” and “after,” in which the “after” became an epiphany of assertiveness and rebellious belief in themselves. I wanted to see them learn not how to kick somebody in the gut (they did not do this), but what it was inside them that made them want to learn these things. The anger and the injustice and the truth of themselves at the centre of it all. What I saw instead was a subtle war.
The martial arts club where they met was a giant room, lined on one side with mirrors so that the club’s participants could monitor technique while they practised. The girls repeatedly drifted toward the mirrors, almost subconsciously. There, they posed, sticking out their bottoms, tugging down the fronts of their shirts, pursing their lips, sucking in their tummies. There they examined themselves from all angles, frowning or smiling in turn.
A trio of girls, who spent most of lunch scrolling through their “Insta” feeds, decided to take a group selfie at lunch. They all posed, expertly contorting their thin bodies into camera-friendly shapes. “How cute do I look?” asked one. Flash. Flash. Flash. They gathered to look at the results. I heard one girl scream. “Ew! No, no, no,” she shouted. “My arm looks disgusting!” Already, she thought she looked too fat; earlier, she’d complained about another girl, dismissively waving one manicured hand, “Bye, bitch.” The second girl shrugged, her face unsure; she’d pretended to seductively hump one of the punching bags during a snack break, asking her friends to take a picture. The third in the trio made to post the group picture anyway, but seemed to decide against it when the first girl angrily exclaimed, “What the fuck are you doing?” When Sheehan later asked them to turn away from the mirror, a chorus of panicked nos flew into the air.
I felt chilled. These girls seemed to want so much for their lives. And they were up against so much. Wanting them to walk out of there as bad girls who didn’t care about looking perfect or speaking too loudly was a lot to ask in one day. But I hoped it was a start.
“It is quite a complicated thing to teach — confidence,” Sheehan later told me. “It’s not like one can go up to a group of girls and say, ‘Be confident. Don’t listen to social media.’” They might nod and agree, she added, but they’ll still face an avalanche of messaging telling them otherwise as soon as they leave. Unless they begin to train with her consistently, which many girls do (especially those whose parents become dismayed that their daughters have become too timid, too shy), the most she can hope is that they walk away from the day with an open mind. As it is, she always tries to subtly instill assertiveness and even aggression into every activity, whether it be a one-day session or ongoing training. She wants the girls she trains with to become comfortable with telling others what they want and what their boundaries are, whether it will upset someone else our not. She wants them to be able to feel no shame in voicing their competence. They should be able to say, “I’m good at this,” without having to fear someone’s reaction. She wants them to learn to be a little selfish. To take the lead without caring whether anyone thinks they should be a leader.
“After we do a certain move, I’ll ask something like, ‘Who thought that technique was hard or easy? Who really liked that technique and who didn’t?’” Sheehan told me. “The girls will look at each other before anyone raises their hand. ‘Why do you have to look at someone else to decide what you think about what you just learned?’ I’ll always grill my students about that kind of stuff.” Sheehan added that she also teaches co-ed classes in high schools. That’s where she notices the starkest difference between boys and girls. Whenever she introduces a technique, or even when she merely asks them to start jumping around and warming up, she said, the boys will dive right in. But the girls won’t. Often, she said, they’ll play a game of You go first and No, no, you go first, right on into indecisive infinity. They’re afraid of people watching. They’re afraid of looking silly. They’re afraid of being first. “Just do it!” she’ll tell them. “Don’t be afraid of being judged for wanting to be a leader.” Her hope is that the sport will teach them competitiveness, leadership, assertiveness, discipline — all things “girls aren’t finding at a lot of other places.”
The uncomfortable truth is that girls are judged for being leaders. The even more uncomfortable truth, as we are learning, is that even though the judgement won’t easily or even always disappear, they have to find their own way to start leading anyway. If we want adults to embrace new styles of leadership and demolish harmful gender stereotypes, part of the answer, surely, is to start interrupting those limited power structures early so that it won’t be such an uphill journey to break conventions later in life. Opening the world of sports to girls and women — and the values and skills that come with it — does, indeed, work. Research has shown that girls and women who play competitive sports are more likely to enter other competitive domains like business and STEM.358 Others argue that sports help women gain and develop their communication skills and teamwork, as well as, yes, their competitiveness, their assertiveness, and their discipline.359 One 2015 study found that more than half of women C-suite executives had played sports at the university level, and nearly 95 of them continued to play sports.360 It also found that 80 percent of female Fortune 500 executives played competitive sports at one point in their lives.361 Even more striking: former athletes were paid, on average, 7 percent more than non-athletes.362
Not that it’s all as simple as grabbing a ball or a puck and passing your way to the C-suite. As Sheehan herself said, certain sports for women are often not seen as an option. It’s no coincidence that sports also teach success, failure, and competition within highly masculine constructs. In so many ways, sports are prepping women for the masculinity contests they’ll face later in life, teaching them how to be competitive, and to value winning. No wonder women have historically been barred from these literal men’s games, and even today such structures often try to wrestle them into wearing a uniform of perfect femininity when they play (see the skirt-based uniforms in the 1940s-era All-American Girls’ Professional Baseball League; now see the furor over the black — initially banned — catsuit that Serena Williams wore to the 2018 French Open).363 This is changing as women’s participation increases dramatically, and as girls themselves are beginning to challenge how they’re socialized into sports.364 As girls are beginning to change sport itself.
So, yes, it was a start. A start that couldn’t start and stop with one afternoon. A start that needed to transform into a constant interruption — one that blared in over and over again, right into early adulthood and beyond. Then again, preaching the necessity of living a feminist life and actually figuring out how to do it are two very different things.
In early January 2019, sitting at a conference table in New York City with a group of young women, men, and non-binary feminists, I tried to perform an abortion on a papaya. I held the heavy fruit as another woman, also from Toronto, attempted to firmly grip the narrow edge of the papaya with the blade-tips of a speculum. After a few tries — the fruit was slippery — she got it, under the careful guidance of the doctor on hand, a woman who also works as an abortion provider. “Careful,” she told our group. “Remember, all these tools would be sterilized in real life. Don’t let them touch anything else.” We were practising manual vacuum aspiration. A common method for abortion, it removes the uterine contents through suction, applied through a cannula, which another member of my group began to prepare. (Instead of a hand-held syringe, some aspiration procedures use an electric pump; some women choose to medically induce their abortion via pills.)365
Taking turns, my group members used the cannula to draw out some black papaya seeds and deposit them onto the paper covering the table. A papaya was used because it closely resembles a uterus, said a staff member with the Reproductive Health Access Project, which hosted the workshop.
Earlier, the group had spent some time chatting about abortion myths, with group members calling out some of the ones they heard most often: it’s immoral; it’s murder; it’s “everywhere”; if you get one you’re “going to hell”; you’ll never get pregnant again; the whole process is creepy. They engaged in some role play to show the group what respectful, neutral conversations should look like in clinics. Before we split into groups to try with our own papayas, we watched the doctor expertly, smoothly, quickly extract the seeds from her own papaya. The whole point of the workshop, she added, was to cast the procedure as what it is: part of an everyday medical process. Something completely normal.
Welcome to Feminist Camp: a packed week of workshops, presentations, job-shadowing trips, and a smattering of other events that included an off-Broadway play and a trip to a swanky penthouse cocktail party. Launched over a decade ago, and founded by the Manifesta authors Amy Richards and Jennifer Baumgardner, the camp gathers young feminists of all genders in New York City every year so they can learn, essentially, what it means to build a feminist life. Most of the campers were from all over America, but others hailed from Sweden, Italy, Scotland, and Canada. A lot of them were in university or college; others were recently graduated; one was in her fifties with adult children of her own. About half of them had only recently discovered feminism. As many of them introduced themselves on the first day, they were amazed to learn they weren’t the only ones who came from conservative backgrounds, from deeply religious families, from entire communities that, as one young woman put it, “literally raised me to be a mother.” More than one confessed, with a troubled look, that their entire family had voted for Trump. They had no framework to live a feminist life. What did that even mean? they wanted to know. Could they get a job and be a feminist? Would they ever make money? How would they step outside of academia and disrupt power structures in the real world?
The week introduced them to prison abolitionists who told them how little it took for a Black woman to be sent to jail, and discrimination lawyers who told them how much it took for a company to protect its harassed employees. Campers met UNICEF employees who travelled all over the world, and they met naturopaths who incorporated traditional Chinese medicine into their practices. They learned about emotional labour, the toll it took, and practical steps to address it. Together, we all travelled to a trendy meditation studio, where we sat on oatmeal-coloured pillows, closed our eyes, and took a moment to be calm. We watched a live taping of Democracy Now!, and the campers all shook their heads over the government shutdown. They bought books at the Feminist Press, and buttons, hoop earrings, and women-made clothes from the feminist retail store Bulletin, which offers a bricks-and-mortar space to online brands — it also gives creators back 70 percent of sales and donates 10 percent of its own profits to Planned Parenthood. One of the staff members called the store a “total girl-powered safe space” and remarked that the ethos of the store was, “Yes, I’m shopping for cool shit, but I’m also helping sisters in need.” Inside, the store was an explosion of pink and lemon; outside, a sandwich board read “Impeach Trump but make it fashion.”
On the last day, we all travelled out to Queens to sit inside Judge Toko Serita’s courtroom, where she presides over the innovative Human Trafficking Intervention Court. Run from a harm-reduction perspective, with a stated mission of keeping women out of jail, the court works with community leaders to find solutions for trans and cis women who have been charged with prostitution. As a journalist, I have been in a lot of courtrooms, but I have never been inside one where the judge smiles at the people brought before her and starts with asking, “How are you?” Not only did the inquiry seem genuine, Serita also asked the people before her if they were happy. Were they getting the services they needed? How were their children? Once she was satisfied that the survivors before her were doing well, she’d dismiss their cases.
At a morning break, Serita and the court’s various social workers, victim-services support workers, and community liaisons met to chat with the campers in an empty courtroom, portraits of esteemed white men lining the walls. “I want our visitors to see who is involved in this court,” she said, gesturing to the line of people, mostly women, beside her. “Even though I’m the one wearing the robe on the bench, this court could not be successful without collaboration.”
In so many ways, the week presented the campers with the various iterations and contradictions within feminism. That was deliberate, Richards told them at the week’s close. We start the journey thinking feminism is one thing, she said, and then we learn there is no wrong or right way to practise feminism or to be a feminist. She hoped, she added, that they had also learned from the week’s tensions — “because that’s how we find our own voices.” Surely, the week did have some tensions. When I spoke to some of the campers in the following weeks, all of them pointed to one session, with an artist, as one that stood out most for them.
It had started out benignly enough, in another boardroom, this one borrowed from one of the city’s top law firms. The presenter was an artist who was speaking about her work. The first crack came when she mused about choosing a symbol to represent feminism. Many of the campers were (rightly) uncomfortable with anything that referenced gender binaries. The pink pussy hat received some heated criticism, as campers (rightly) stated that “not all pussies are pink and not all women have pussies.” The fist was also considered and then dismissed, after some campers carefully criticized that it was too close to the Black Power symbol. The conversation darted to flags, and then on to other things. But then, the artist mentioned the word “ally.” Many of the campers shifted in their seats. A few bounced with barely contained emotion, seemingly frustration, anger. None of them particularly liked the word “ally.” One didn’t want allies, but comrades, accomplices, people who were invested in the same goals. Another wondered if the best path was to change the meaning of “ally,” not the word itself. A different camper felt allies were performative activists. A fourth said allies were too concerned with equality and not concerned enough with equity, with the differences between the two. Soon the whole table was talking about language and access to language. “You can’t punish people for doing their best,” ended one camper. “You can’t punish baby feminists.” The campers had completely, unexpectedly, usurped the presentation.
I was interested in speaking with some of the campers a few weeks later to see what they thought, now that there had been time to let it all sink in. One of them, Leslie Lopez, a self-described first-generation college student at the University of North Texas, told me that the week had, in fact, changed her life. She had been scared that she would be in a room of middle-class white women. She had also been worried that she’d be given a seat at the table, but not a voice, something that had happened a lot in the past. Thankfully — intentionally — that was far from the case. Lopez had come to the camp with deep questions about her path after university. She wanted to become an art therapist, but had thought the job would mean abandoning her feminism. Being seen and heard throughout the week, and seeing and hearing other diverse perspectives, had helped her to see that her future as an art therapist was feminist. It had helped her to see other things, too. There was a lot of power in access to language. She thought of one reading she’d completed at school, heavy with academic jargon, only to eventually realize the piece was talking about people with the same lived experience as her. It was her life, shrouded in language many people outside academia wouldn’t understand. She wanted to see more lived experience in her feminism.
One of the other campers, Roman Staebler, a Florida-based artist and former academic who identifies as non-binary, seemed to want to see more radical thinking, more discussion. At twenty-eight, when they attended, part of their reason for coming to the camp, they said, was to figure out what kind of meaningful work they might find outside of academia — a deeply restrictive, patriarchal profession that had ground them down. In that, they said, they got a partial answer: they’d likely have to move outside of their town in Florida if they wanted something else. Yet they were surprised and also disappointed that the itinerary was so jam-packed with sessions and job workshops. What about making space for political discussions, for talk about climate change, for sharing strategies on organizing? They had expected more earnest discussion, more plain urgency. Things, after all, they remarked, were kind of on fire around us. “Whether you want to talk about it locally, nationally, globally, we have got maybe ten years to pull the emergency brake on this thing,” they said. “And so some of the questions that I’ve been grappling with, both big-picture and small-picture, they didn’t come up.”
But they needed to.
With my mind on Staebler’s remarks, I thought back to the last day of Feminist Camp. We’d made our closing remarks at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center For Feminist Art, housed inside the Brooklyn Museum. Outside, over the entrance of the building, in all capitals, red letters announced “DO NOT DISAPPEAR INTO SILENCE.” Inside, Judy Chicago’s iconic 1970s installation The Dinner Party stood on permanent exhibit. I snapped a few photos of the massive triangular table, its large goblets and utensils, the ornately embroidered fabric, all of which appeared to be set for giants. Which, in a way, it was. Huge plates adorned with or shaped into ornately stylized vulvas marked reserved spots for notable women throughout history: the Primordial Goddess, Mary Wollstonecraft, Virginia Woolf, Georgia O’Keeffe. Widely hailed as celebratory, subversive, and revolutionary at the time, it’s also much criticized today, and for good reason. There is only one place set for a woman of colour at the table, and her plate, unlike the rest, is not a vulva, but three faces. As Alice Walker observed in her critical response to the piece: “It occurred to me that perhaps white women feminists, no less than white women generally, cannot imagine that black women have vaginas.”366
In 2018, Chicago responded to the latest round of criticism, saying, essentially, that times had changed. “We need to build upon each other’s achievements if we are ever to break the cycle of erasure that I tried to overcome through The Dinner Party,” she wrote.367 Perhaps everybody was right. Surely, feminism had to change, was changing. If feminists built a table today, it would not be so white, it would not be so focused on a binary view of anatomy. Already, we were disrupting old narratives and building new ones, new tables, in their place. In the same way, we could not rely on old methods to disrupt (very old) power structures.
I thought about the many people I’d spoken to about re-envisioning power and leadership. The methods that seemed to work the best — that inspired me most — were less about fixing the girl, fixing the woman. They were not the ones that demanded she change to fit the workplace, the organization, the family, the world, the system. They were the ones that demanded the systems change. More like: they were the ones that demanded the too-broken systems be demolished and completely rebuilt.
So far, I’d focused on individuals, organizations, movements contained to North America. But were we capable of uniting for one huge reckoning on power? And what would it even be? To answer those questions, and to see what that might look like, I needed to join the entire world in Vancouver.
353. Hamkins, SuEllen, and Renée Schultz. The Mother-Daughter Project: How Mothers and Daughters Can Band Together, Beat the Odds, and Thrive Through Adolescence. New York: Plume, 2008; The Mother-Daughter Project. “The Story of the Mother-Daughter Project.” https://themother-daughterproject.com/ourstory.htm.
354. Girl Guides of Canada. “Sexism, Feminism & Equality: What Teens in Canada Really Think.” October 2018. https://www.girlguides.ca/WEB/Documents/GGC/media/thought-leadership/201SexismFeminismEquality-WhatTeensinCanadaReallyThink.pdf.
355. Shipman, Claire, and Katty Kay. “The Confidence Code for Girls: The Confidence Collapse and Why it Matters for The Next Gen.” YPulse poll. 2018. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/588b93f6bf629a6bec7a3bd2/t/5ac39193562fa73cd8a07a89/1522766258986/The+Confidence+Code+for+Girls+x+Ypulse.pdf.
356. Simmons, Rachel. The Curse of the Good Girl. New York: Penguin Publishing Group, 2009, 2.
357. Association for Psychological Science. “Teenage girls are exposed to more stressors that increase depression risk.” News release, October 8, 2014. https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/teenage-girls-are-exposed-to-more-stressors-that-increase-depression-risk.html.
358. Fisher, Maryanne, L., ed. The Oxford Handbook of Women and Competition. Oxford: Oxford Library of Psychology, 2017.
359. Burton, Laura J., and Sarah Leberman. Women in Sport Leadership: Research and Practice for Change. Abingdon: Routledge, 2017.
360. Johnson, Holly. “A look at the link between playing sports and success in business.” ceo Magazine. May 7, 2018. https://www.theceomagazine.com/business/management-leadership/look-link-playing-sports-success-business/.
361. Zarya, Valentina. “What do 65% of the most powerful women have in common? Sports.” Fortune. September 22, 2017. http://fortune.com/2017/09/22/powerful-women-business-sports/.
362. EY. “Research: Does it pay to let girls play?” https://web.archive.org/web/20180122024151/http://www.ey.com/br/pt/about-us/our-sponsorships-and-programs/women-athletes-global-leadership-network---research-does-it-pay-to-let-girls-play.
363. Hensely, Laura. “Catsuits ruled OK for the tennis courts thanks to Serena Williams.” Global News. December 18, 2018. https://globalnews.ca/news/4773018/catsuits-tennis-court/; Nittle, Nadra. “The Serena Williams catsuit ban shows that tennis can’t get past its elitist roots.” Vox. August 28, 2018. https://www.vox.com/2018/8/28/17791518/serena-williams-catsuit-ban-french-open-tennis-racist-sexist-country-club-sport.
364. Fisher, Maryanne L., ed. The Oxford Handbook of Women and Competition.
365. OBOS Abortion Contributors. “Aspiration Abortion.” Our Bodies Our Selves (blog post). April 2, 2014. https://www.ourbodiesourselves.org/book-excerpts/health-article/vacuum-aspiration-abortion/.
366. Weber, Jasmine. “Judy Chicago responds to criticisms about the ‘Dinner Party.” Hyperallergic. August 13, 2018. https://hyperallergic.com/455572/judy-chicago-responds-to-criticisms-about-the-dinner-party/.
367. Chicago, Judy. “A place at the table: an exchange.” New York Review of Books. July 2018. https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/07/11/a-place-at-the-table-an-exchange/.