Mattie Kahn: The Power of Girls
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. Okay, let’s get to our conversation.
MORE FROM MATTIE KAHN:
Young and Restless: The Girls Who Sparked America’s Revolutions
Mattie’s Website
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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.
MATTIE KAHN: Yes, I think what we do as a culture is turn narratives of social progress into narratives of personal triumph. Those are easier, I think, to write about. And they're also easier for us to root for. I think Greta Thunberg is the person who comes to mind for everybody as an example of someone we have culturally elevated and for good reason. I mean, she's an incredible communicator, and there's a reason why she has broken through in a way that many others before her have not. But talking about how impressive she is, is a way to not talk about what she's actually asking for. And I think that that's something that in The U. S. In particular, where the child star complex is alive and well, it's a way of talking about young people and their power that feels comfortable to people as opposed to really grappling with what young people are asking for or rather demanding that gets a lot thornier. What does it mean to succeed as a child star? Well, we know what that means. It means ubiquity, a certain level of ubiquity, a certain level of fame, a certain level of success, as we would understand it. What does it mean to communicate effectively for your message? It's a much harder question to answer. And so I do think we have Always, not just in the social media era, but always had a tendency to isolate girls from their movements in their context and say, wow, you've got a bright future ahead of you. Instead of asking, what is this person actually trying to make us do or change?
ELISE: right, yeah, the focus on the precociousness, the adorable nature, and, you know, you write throughout the book about the way that girls are chosen or not chosen or trashed as parts of these movements based on, it's never overtly said, but their marketability, right, their ability to cut through or use the media or capture people's collective attention becomes a tool that's very double edged.
MATTIE: Yes, definitely. And I think that that has to do with where is the point at which it's time for the adults to take over? You know, I think that what we have seen from girls and their effectiveness on behalf of movements is often at the very beginning, doing a lot of the hard publicity work that movements require. I don't think that necessarily everyone feels so good about the fact that it publicizing a movement is part of making it successful. It needs a good PR apparatus, and girls, especially certain kinds of girls, as you say, and as I cover in the book, make for incredible faces for these movements. And then there's a feeling that, okay, now that we've got Mass attention, now it's time for strategy. And that's not something for girls to do, we're not going to have girls deciding where we're dispatching certain people or where we're going to make a policy move. That's work for the adults and that's work for the men. And I think that one of the crushing things historically about being a girl in protest and a girl who has visions for what society should look like is that feeling of being shut out after your face is no longer as useful as it was in the beginning. I think that's starting to change, so I don't want to paint too dour of a picture of what's out there and what's possible, but I do think that that's a tendency that people have had. Okay, you break the door open and then we're going to send the real organizers in to figure out how to kind of land the plane.
ELISE: Right. And as you explain throughout history, whether it's civil rights movement or it's the labor movement in the mills, the quality of the girl varies and changes. But typically when these girls are seen as sweet, innocent, Non threatening, physically, violently, and what did you say, like the elephant that tests the bridge, I don't know if that was your line or someone's line...
MATTIE: was someone's line, yes. Anne Elizabeth Dickinson, one of the more tragic stories, I think, in the book, but so familiar. Yeah, she's the elephant sent across the bridge to see if it'll hold. And, yeah, I think that theory of a test case obtains.
ELISE: Yeah. Well, let's talk about her for a second, because I think so many, particularly now, when media is accessible to all of us, social media is available to all of us, we see this on campuses, but this incredibly precocious girl, can you tell her story and then sort of what, what she was consigned to ultimately or how tired everyone became of hearing from her.
MATTIE: Yes. I mean, if you've read a tabloid, you innately know Anna Elizabeth Dickinson's story. Anna is born pre Civil War in Pennsylvania to Quaker parents. Her living room is a spot on the Underground Railroad. She grows up around progressive parents and from an extremely young age, from a teenager, she starts speaking in public about abolition, something her parents felt very strongly about and she also feels strongly about. And she becomes famous, actually, for going to a public lecture and basically telling off this guy who raises a comment, telling him how stupid he is. And it's a sensation in Philadelphia. This girl who's, you know, 13, 14, 15, is talking back to this elder statesman and she starts to kind of make her way on this circuit, the speaking circuit that is just coming online, as they wouldn't say, of abolitionist speakers who tour basically up and down the eastern seaboard and talk about the evils of slavery and what abolition should look like, and she becomes so Good at it that the republicans who are, of course, fighting to abolish slavery, kind of hire her to help win campaigns. She's sort of a paid surrogate. She becomes the first woman ever in her very early 20s to address the House of Representatives. she criticizes Abraham Lincoln to his face, which is kind of unbelievable for a feeling like he's not going far enough. She's written about in tons of newspapers. She sells out auditoriums. She is just a total sensation. And she works very assiduously throughout the Civil War.
And then she hits her mid twenties. And there is not a career path for someone like her. She has no idea what to do. She has developed sort of a reputation for being hard to work with. And, based on how her political party is doing, she either has more work or less work. The culture kind of moves on from these female orators who have this sort of flash in the pan opportunity around the Civil War and abolition in particular to get really famous really fast. And she just doesn't know how to continue to make money, which she badly needs to do. She's supporting her parents, her mother, her father had died, and her sister, and she decides she might try to be an actress, she writes and plays, she plays Hamlet, she tests out all these other ways of being a public person and nonstick, and in fact, a huge backlash comes for her, newspapers write about how she's so questionably unfeminine, is this really the same girl that we once saw with those red lips and that nice figure, she looks too much like a man, she doesn't behave in a way that feels familiar, There are rumors about her sexuality, that she's gay, which, of course, is an absolute shock and sensation. She drinks a lot and develops definitely a drinking problem, and she basically is accused of being insane and forcibly committed to a mental institution, which she successfully breaks out of, and by the way, she then sues the people who committed her to the institution and the newspapers who wrote about it. But she kind of You know, has this burst of success and then no follow through precisely because there isn't a way to stay famous and public as a political commentator as a woman in this era. And yeah, she suffers for it, terribly. She ends up moving in with a couple, and living out the rest of her days in New York. But she never ever achieves even close to the level of respect that she had as a 17 year old, and it's really crushing for her.
ELISE: Yeah, and you have a great line about how we value these, I think you call them incandescent girls, like they just set us alive. And this I think carries throughout time but we have little tolerance as we all know very well for angry women. And there is a point, right, this inflection point where it becomes unbecoming, or the instinct is just to turn the volume down. And I think there's like something else happening too, and I feel this way as a writer, I don't know if this is how you feel, Mattie too, where as someone who writes, it's like you get to a point where you're like, I feel like I'm just mad and complaining and pointing these things out, but like without an ability to move things into action, I feel like the road runs out, too, for so many of us because there's this natural baton passing, here's the issue, now go take care of it. But as you say, women aren't necessarily represented in those places to take care of it. So you get Greta doing her like classic, now she just says blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Instead of, she's so tired of recounting her points. And yelling at these mostly men.
MATTIE: And I think so tired also of becoming a soundbite, I think that's part of the problem, is when you're an excellent communicator, like you said before, it's a double edged sword, everyone's so in awe of how well you put that, and then what do you do? You're articulate, and you're precocious, and then there's nothing for you besides that, and so, yeah, she has decided, I'm gonna stop giving out these sound bites that are so that move so easily across the Internet and don't seem like they change things. And I think you're exactly right. I mean, I think that anyone who has been moved by a young person speaking about an issue that is close to them has felt that feeling of, Oh my God, look at this child who we've put in this position where they have to cry in front of thousands of people or they have to scream in front of thousands of people and ask yourself the last time a woman talking in front of thousands of people cried or screamed and you felt good about that or the culture responded favorably to that person. I think the idea of Anne Elizabeth Dickenson at 21 Telling off a president to his face is bold and radical and exciting, anyone even a hair older than that and it becomes rude and abrasive and Counterproductive, and that person just wants to be famous and get a headline, and I think that is exactly what Anna ran into, but I think it's something that every woman who has a platform has to be conscious of, and that's why this book is in such a strange position. Why is it that girls have been so well represented in the early stages of leadership of so many of these movements? And yet women are not well represented in leadership to this day in not just movements, but all across our world. I think it's because there is this window for girls. Now, how do we expand the window and make it possible for women to emote publicly in the ways that we reward girls for doing that?
ELISE: Do you have any ideas?
MATTIE: Well, let's start with the dismantling of society as we know it.
ELISE: But awareness is a huge part of it. Just listening to yourself and your own feeling about women who are speaking in public and watching, you know, so much of it is our own awareness of how we judge.
MATTIE: yes, and I think the awareness goes both ways, which is why is it that I hear from sometimes men that I love, whom I think the world of, who say, that person, you know, that woman, she strikes me as inauthentic. Well, she strikes you as inauthentic because she has to run every single thing she says in front of a microphone through 16, 000 filters to make sure she's not tripping over one of your other mine fields of how women should behave. So I think that the question runs both ways, which is like, why is it that it's so much harder to tolerate this range of emotional expression and public expression from women? And also why is it then when that kind of presence takes a certain number of forms, that feels not good to us or inauthentic to us? So it's both sides of the terrible coin.
ELISE: Yeah. And you write, you know, specifically about the civil rights movement how for young black men to be provocative would be death, right? It wasn't necessarily an option, even though they were participants in the movement in significant ways. But that it was the girls who refused to get up on the bus. But what's Outside of there will be no harm to young teenage boys standing up for the climate either, why do we not see a corollary amongst teen boys?
MATTIE: That was actually sort of the beginning of this book. I was working at Glamour Magazine where I was the culture director, and I was spending a lot of time with young climate activists, and I was profiling Greta, in fact, and wanted to bring other voices into the story, and I actually had not set out to talk to girls. I had set out to talk to, as I knew from Greta herself, that there were sort of Greta corollaries all over the world, people running these movements in their own countries. And I wanted to talk to some of the other young people running, you know, school strikes on Fridays, doing other kinds of climate actions. And over and over again, I just ended up in conversation with girls to the point that it became almost funny to me. And I asked one of them why it was that it seemed that the Lay leaders of these movements and all these different countries were in fact girls. And she gave me two answers that were part of the seeds of this book. First, she said she felt that the message of consuming less inherently made more sense to how girls are raised and socialized, rather than how boys are raised and socialized. So, to work together, to share resources, to do something nice for someone else, to do a favor, to hold back so that somebody else can get ahead, it's sadly a message that girls receive from a very young age, and it feels natural in a way that I think the way boys are conventionally socialized, that doesn't feel as natural. And the other thing she said, which plays exactly into what we were talking about before, is that she felt to be an effective organizer, you had to be vulnerable. And you had to be willing to say, I'm scared. I feel this is keeping me up at night. This makes me want to cry. I don't know what I'm going to do. I can't live like this. And that girls, especially teenage girls, were much more comfortable saying those things than boys were. So it was much easier for boys to join a movement that Girls had already started and I don't want to say and I never mean to say in the book that there's something innate about girls that makes that true, but I do think that those messages are messages that girls receive and internalize.
ELISE: no, certainly it's the way that we're socialized, I think. And which is often sort of in this Ouroboros of culture and nature, this is who we're told that we are rather than the way that we're cultured to be. You've probably encountered the work of Carol Gilligan, but she has this line , I think it was in why does patriarchy persist? But for people who don't know Carol Gilligan, she wrote in a different voice in the 80s. Maybe it was the late 70s. She's in her 80s now, but it was about how the development of morality in boys and girls. And it was a study. It was fascinating how boys can see themselves as being in the world. Girls see themselves as being in service to the world. And she has this line that I just can't, Get out of my head, which is that at a certain point, the word don't enters the vocabulary of boys and girls. And for girls, it's I don't know. And for boys, it's I don't care. And I feel like you almost in these movements, you see the inverse happening, where it's like when the caring is required, the girls are there, and then as soon as the knowing is necessary, the boys slash men step in and take it over. I find that like, Incredibly crushing because of course girls know and of course boys care and we have to stop cutting boys off from their feelings and girls off from their knowing. Anyway, let's talk a bit about where we are in this moment in time and obviously this is a huge point of interest and I've heard you speak about where we are culturally on campuses with young people, social media. I mean, I don't even know where to start. I mean, I was that kid. I was writing letters to the editor of the newspaper. I was kind of an idiot, you know, an idealistic idiot. That was all over the map. Like for a minute I was obsessed with Anne Rand and was like becoming a libertarian. And then I was, Like incredibly progressive and other. Anyway, I was all over the place. Of course, nobody was there to document it, including myself. Thank God. But what's happening?
MATTIE: Yes. Well, first of all, I was actually going to say that like you have the space to try on various ideologies and see what felt right. And I think one of the things that I encounter a lot when I talk to young people is a sense of either, you know, dogmatic adherence to a set of received ideals, mostly discovered On social media or a feeling of paralysis of how am I supposed to possibly figure out what I think about anything when it seems like, you know, take one wrong step and you lose everything. I can tell you that writing a book about teenagers will instantly age you about 6000 years. And there is no more humbling experience than asking teenagers questions. I will say that compared to every other kind of work I've ever done, it's actually a mercy, and I wish it were more widely adopted, that when you ask a young person a question that they don't like or that they think is wrong, they just tell you that they think it's stupid. I wish more people I interviewed would just say, you're so off the mark. So that is expedient, but it definitely does make you feel like you're ready for the AARP card, really, at any time. So I don't want to sound like the aged millennial that I am to them, but I do think that a lot more empathy is required for understanding the ways in which young people have to move through the world.
And one of the things that is so hard is that they are truly everywhere, everything all at once. They have access to a firehose of information that certainly I didn't have. And I'm, Shocking for them to believe this, not that much older. Like when I was in high school, I cared deeply about the environment and particularly I became very involved in this group that was trying to lobby to get certain chemicals out of cosmetics because I used makeup and I had not yet watched dark waters, but that kind of information was out there and I felt really strongly about that. I did not know in high school every other horrible thing that was happening at the exact same time that what I think, if I were in high school now make me feel like, well, why am I spending my time on this? The world's on fire. So much more is going on. It's so tragic and silly to care about lip gloss when you could be caring about all these other things. I consider it a great mercy that I didn't. No, every bad thing that was happening at every single time. So I could feel really invested in something and success to me when I was 17 and caring a lot about that was about what was going on in Albany in one single legislative session, having the experience of meeting legislators and telling them why this was important to me. That felt huge to me. And it was huge. That was my life.
And I think I meet a lot of young people now feel Not even able to exercise that option of caring about something small and local because things feel so dire and because the stakes feel so high and because every single thing, every place that you show up, every place you choose to put your attention feels to them like a choice that is, you don't care about these other things because they just have access to so much information. And in a lot of ways, I think the access to information is great. Like you said of yourself, I was an idiot in high school and college, and I knew so much less about the world than the average college student now knows. I think it's great that they have much more awareness of what's going on, but I also think it can kind of make you feel like, what's the point of trying to do anything, in a way that's so demoralizing, and is so hard, and not conducive to a better world, in any case. So, that's part of it. One of the things that I feel I end up talking a lot about with young people and with their teachers and parents, is just a little bit more media literacy would do a world of good. There's a feeling that social media is unmediated information and I'm always beating the drum of the fact that it too is mediated by an algorithm, maybe not by an editor. But by an overlord, nonetheless, and I think that just, like you said, awareness is such a big part of the problem. So just the knowledge that the stream of access to what feels like raw fact, just the awareness that that is mediated by forces that you cannot see and every ways and turns you don't have access to, I think is huge, and is liberating. And so I feel that that's a good place to start, just telling people more about how they are receiving the information that they are receiving. Because you can trust young people to get that, but somebody has to tell them that.
ELISE: Yeah. And they're mediated. They're mediated, you know, back in the day when it was just a feed based with no recommendations. Sure, you can call it a platform, but right now for outrage and it's ripping us all apart. And I think that what you were saying is so important. I also sound ancient when I say this, but one to be very conscious of the fact that particularly with high school kids and kids at the beginning of college, they're looking at a world like the view of our world is incredibly dark and pessimistic. I understand that. I tend to be more optimistic than most people though. And then there's a sense of powerlessness, right? You can't vote. You are still in school. It's like, put me in coach. I wanna solve all of these problems rather than just despair. But there's no action. There's very little action. Although then at the same time to the point of your book, you see all these teams being hero wise in our culture. So then there is also a cultural pressure of, well, are you leading a march? Are you organizing? And not that that's not important, but my hope for college or where I felt like I became less of an idiot, and I don't know, I'd be curious for your perspective because I haven't spent a lot of time on campus, but I felt very contained, somewhat contained, but in high school definitely and in college somewhat contained for these dialogues and debates because it wasn't being blasted to the world. There was no audience and so we were put into conflict with each other, sometimes about English literature, sometimes about world events, and our thinking was challenged. And we were in some ways like put in our place by each other and our professors and is that missing now? What's happening?
MATTIE: I mean, I think we need so many more spaces for dialogue that are in person. I think that even when you get to the later chapters of the book that are very positive about what social media has allowed to happen, the ways in which information has been able to travel so much faster. I mean, when you look at the civil rights movement, the ways that Young people were waiting for quote unquote, the civil rights movement to come to town. It's like that's hilarious now to think about that because of course any movement can come anywhere in an instant. And I think in a lot of ways that's an amazing thing, but there is no social progress that hasn't also had a corollary in the real world. There is no only operating online without feet on the ground and people in rooms, you know, pouring over poster board, like the analog way still works and it's still necessary. I think the schools that have done the best job of managing this incredibly hard moment. And by the way, again, I feel so much more empathy, should be extended to people who have to Try to get through class and learn about the world and also deal with whatever's going on outside. There are not enough places for people to talk to each other. And I followed with a lot of interest, a series of lectures that happened at Dartmouth in the fall where a professor of Arab American history and history of the Middle East in general and a professor of Jewish studies made themselves available for just office hours, for people to just come and ask questions. It is so hard to find a place to ask a question. Of course, there have to be rules of the road for That kind of engagement, but imagine how difficult it is to see things that feel so massive and are so devastating and have no place to take your questions about what is going on or what you're seeing in your feed. And again, one of the things that I find myself repeating a lot is when you are feeling despair online, someone is making money off of that, a lot of money off of that. And so having a place in the real world where no financial exchanges are taking place over your sense of sadness and tragedy, which makes sense to feel those things, that's an actual safe space. That's what a safe space should mean, a place where you can actually ask the scary questions and get reasonable answers. Not necessarily that you always agree with, not necessarily that always agree with each other. And so I thought that was a really moving example of what a university is for. It's for dialogue, it's for conversation, and it's for a lot of learning. I agree, when I was in college, I felt so far away from the rest of the world. And I spent a lot of time reading things that had nothing to do, or seemingly nothing to do, with what was going on. You know, texts from, 500 years ago. And that felt really possible, and I think one of the things that is hard for young people today is it feels really impossible. Like, you're putting your blinders on if you're not paying attention constantly to every bad thing that's happening simultaneously.
ELISE: Yeah. And we are certainly not built for this, nor are nervous systems. And I don't know the answer. I mean, I feel like Just as a lay person observing, it feels like the administration of schools, are not social media literate, have no idea how to address it, are equally scared of being attacked and, you know, inflammatory attacks from parents or activist board members, whatever it is, but that they lack the durability to hold it down to, and it feels essential, not only that people who are in that learning phase learn, like this is the time, this is when we learn, this is the only time in your life where you really get to do that in an undivided way, where it's absolutely safe to ask questions and challenge each other's thinking and have your own thinking challenged and evolve.
MATTIE: Yeah, you are as plastic as you'll ever be. I mean, you are as open and porous as you'll ever be, but the idea that not talking is somehow the answer, which I feel is what I see from a lot of administrators, that's anathema to what everything that Learning education is about you as the school cannot have your head in the sand. That is exactly what we can't have, and that's part of what gets us here, this feeling that, well, we can just shut out what's going on. No, you're gonna have to, you're gonna have to do it. And I don't envy you. I'm glad to not be writing the university, but you don't have the choice to opt out.
ELISE: I mean, I'll be curious in, in the coming months and years to see the thorough look back at what's happening. But do you feel like on campuses where there have been protests, protests that have gotten out of control, that potentially hate speech lines crossed, et cetera. Do you feel like it's because there hasn't been an outlet for students to have dialogue? Or do you think there's just anger, rage, fear, terror, grief, and that it needed or wanted an outlet?
MATTIE: I don't know that I feel that it's because there hasn't been dialogue or because there's no space for those things. I would say that historically and I think it's also true now that is the outgrowth of not feeling heard because if you don't feel heard, you do Demand attention and that I think is what a lot of what we see from protests that you know Any one person can pick two protests one that they agree with and one that they think is absolutely horrendous But both of those protests Come from a place of feeling unheard. And so that's a problem for universities to solve. How is it possible not to, you know, create a steam valve for rage on the part of your student body or to stoke that in some way, but to make students feel like there's an address? for the things that they are going through and experiencing, the answer cannot be to say, this is a silly way to behave.
It's just, even if that's how you feel, that's not gonna help anyone arrive at a more nuanced or satisfying to them conclusion about what they see going on, on the planet. So there needs to be, I think, an address for these. feelings and then I also think, yeah, a sense of here's how we do this. Here's how we disagree. This is the way that this goes, you know, and it's going to feel dangerous because actually these issues that I think young people are grappling with, they are the most consequential, formative, important, sometimes life and death conversations that any of us can have, and those conversations are scary, and there's a reason why we don't all like to have them every single day, but the university's job is actually to be that container so that those kinds of conversations that can feel explosive and can get out of hand have a safe way of engaging that is possible within a place that is for this. That is what you are there for. If you're not doing it, you're failing. So I think the question is, how can you make young people feel like they're being listened to? And I think the challenge is, how can you do that and acknowledge that it's not always going to work out the way that they want?
What does it mean to be listened to, but not to have the road cleared for you, or what does it mean to be really heard and then still have things not go the way that you want them to, or think that they should, and how can those two things exist, because not everyone is going to be happy all the time with the outcome of any decision, and again, I think that that's a learning job, that's a job of this is how it feels to do this, this is what it feels like to lose this round, you know, in whatever the case is. And whatever the protest or the issue of the day is. One of the things that I talk about in the book is to not valorize young people to think that they can do these things themselves. I think historically we have always seen that intergenerational partnership is the way that movements grow and expand and the way people feel resilient about what they're trying to accomplish. The first defeat as a young person, when you feel your morals are on the line, your sense of justice is on the line, that is such a devastating blow and you really need people who've been doing this work for a long time to say, yeah, you're right. That's how that feels. It sucks. It hurts so bad. And this is how, when it happened to me, I got up again and I kept fighting. There is no future for progress without that kind of perspective. You need the fiery engagement of young people and you need the sense of history and the sense of perspective that older people can provide.
ELISE: A hundred percent. And it's interesting thinking about, yes, the necessity for media literacy and understanding how to parse what's real what's propaganda, etc. I feel like and maybe this exists on campuses, I want Shannon Watts is a friend who started mom's demand action, I want her to teach effective advocacy and activism Courses, I'm sure this exists, but there's so much drudgery, There's so much legal work, there's so much just painstaking state by state, court by court work that actually adds up to significant change, even though I know it never feels like that, particularly on issues like common sense gun laws. But we're somehow missing this framework of here is like the long view picture of how we actually start to iterate and make changes on a legislative level and I'm from Montana originally and we have an amazing constitution that one of my sort of aunts helped write when she was a very young woman. I know, isn't that rad?
MATTIE: so rad.
ELISE: Shout out to May Nan Ellingson. Yeah, she was a young delegate who helped write the Montana State Constitution, which is an incredible constitution which protected access to abortion most recently, but it also assures citizens of a clean environment and kids are suing the state. It's amazing, on behalf of the environment and these things are happening, but I feel like that never also breaks through. I'm like, this is what this looks like in action. It's not as glamorous...
MATTIE: yeah, and you end up repeating yourself a lot, and a lot of days in some ways do look the same. I think to the same point of, like, people needing to understand this is what loss looks like, this is what a win looks like. You know, it's not like you wake up and the world has shifted on its axis and everything's changed. A win is someone on the opposing side filed a shoddy piece of paperwork that you get to exploit, and now in that particular case in that particular jurisdiction, you have two more months to make your case, which then results in somebody being able to do X, Y, or Z. It's like, you're right, it is like the ultimate games of chutes and ladders. You're taking steps forward, you're taking steps back, and a lot of it's paperwork.
ELISE: Hmm a lot. Well and planning, you know, it's interesting, I knew obviously far more than the story I was told as a kid about Rosa Parks that she was this older tired seamstress.
MATTIE: yes.
ELISE: I'm not gonna get up. So I was much more aware of her, like much deeper backstory and involvement in the civil rights movement. I did not know about her predecessors and the runs that were taken at getting this going. Can you actually tell us that story?
MATTIE: Totally. So, yes I think a lot of us now know, to your point, that the received story of Rosa Parks is more complicated than it was initially presented to us. She's not that old, first of all.
ELISE: she's not that old, but it's important because these, this is how it's fed to us, is these like singular moments when someone has had enough and then the world changes, right? So that's important to dispute. All right. Sorry to interrupt you.
MATTIE: speaking of paperwork, yes, that's exactly right. There was a group of mostly women in Montgomery, Alabama, who were looking for, straight from Central Casting, the right person to kick off what they had very much intended to be a boycott of the Montgomery buses. And, they had flyers printed. Again, paperwork is so important. And all they had to do was write in the date that the Bus boycott was going to start, and there had actually even been before Claudette Colvin, who I'm about to talk about, there had actually even been others who had, you know, and if you, who had said on various buses, you know, I'm not going to give up my seat, nine months before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in December, that March of the, you know, nine months before, a high school student named Claudette Colvin Had decided not to give up her seat.
She had been attuned to various things that were going on in Montgomery, particularly the fact that a classmate, a slightly older classmate had been arrested, accused of rape, and was going to be put to death over that accusation and she had paid a lot of attention to the ways in which she felt conditions for young black people in Montgomery were viciously unfair and racist. And she was coming home from school. She was supposed to give up her seat on this bus. She refused. She was arrested. And she knew because of, you know, the conversation that was happening, that there was this opportunity for a bus boycott. And that was something that people were talking about. And she felt very much up to the task of leading that movement. Ultimately, that didn't happen for many reasons. The popular reason that people think is because she got pregnant. She did get pregnant, but that happened later. Really, it was that her family wasn't seen as the perfect family to be the face of this kind of an action. You know, you have to think and imagine both the most cynical understanding of that and I think the most strategic understanding of that.
The pressure that is going to be on the person who bears the brunt of this kind of huge collective action is going to be enormous. And movement leaders felt like this is a kid and she is not up to the task of being that person. So she was pretty much cast aside and the months went on. But, I think what people don't know is that Rosa Parks Very much knew the case of Claudette Colvin, and she was actually leading the NAACP youth group at the time and encouraged Claudette to come. One of my favorite stories from working on the book was that in the classic style of adults everywhere, she made Claudette tell the story of her arrest so many times that Claudette was like, I'm so sick of Rosa making me tell this story over and over again. Like no one wants to hear it anymore. So everyone, you know, remains a teenager, even in times of great social change. But they were extremely close and Claudette slept over at her house. They knew how the other person took her coffee. And when other movement leaders moved on from Claudette, Rosa Parks took a real interest in her. One can only imagine months later when Rosa Parks decides not to give up her seat on the bus that she is thinking of Claudette's example when she does that, she knew her story intimately.
Which is not to say Rosa Parks stole Claudette's glory or that there's some kind of level of competition between the two of them, but only to say this is how history works. We build on each other. There is no one actor who just decides to change everything. So, I think then history sort of picks up and we all know that Rosa Parks does become the figurehead of this movement, which by the way, is a very impossible and hard role to be cast in. And she suffered tremendously for that for the rest of her life, finding it very hard to have a job and to even feel safe in her own home. And she had to live apart from her husband, you know, to be an activist is not an easy thing, but what I find really moving about that is that when people, if people know about Claudette Colvin, the story kind of drops out there and they don't know anything else about what happened to her after that. But actually, she continued to play such a profound role in the Montgomery bus boycott, because what ultimately ended the boycott was a court case, Browder v. Gale, which is the court case that ruled that segregation on buses was unconstitutional. And who testified in that case? Who were the plaintiffs? Not one man, I will tell you that much, even though they looked for ministers and lawyers and business people to testify in that case. In fact, it was four women. Two of them were teenagers. One was Claudette. One was another girl who had refused to give up the seat on her bus.
And when the Montgomery bus boycott ultimately comes to an end, it's because that case ruling comes down, the Supreme Court upholds it, and the boycott ends. And I think that That is Claudette's contribution, you know, yes, she was this pioneer, she did this incredible thing, but it's the paperwork, it's the court case, it's her decision to, as a single, young, teenage mom, even though many people have written her off, her decision to sit on the stand and answer questions from opposing counsel, and when they try to say to her, who has put you up to this, Because you are 17, and we know you're not here on your own accord, and she says we are our own leaders, and we are going to take this as far as we need to. And I am so moved by the fact that it's not just the big, bold gesture that history records, it's the fact that even after Rosa Parks becomes the face of this movement, and Claudette feels so burned by this experience of adults, she feels, abandoning her, when they come to her and say, will you testify? She is 17 years old, and she says, of course I will.
ELISE: It's a beautiful story. Mattie, one of my only criticisms of your book, which I loved, is that there's not enough of you in it. And I know that you're a reporter and I know that you're a journalist, but I just want to hear you from now on, just sounding off. Like, I want to hear you casting big theories about how we resolve this or just come to understand it more deeply. cause like you have an amazing mind. I'm sure you know this. I know you know this because of, what did you say at the beginning? You made me laugh. Oh, when you said, this is at the beginning, you write, "I had learned other lessons, was I in first or third or 10th grade when I internalized what girls were and were not supposed to do? Did I even need to be taught? I had been a superlative and dutiful student. I was rewarded with good grades and effusive report cards. I was a pleasure to have in class. I was obedient. I waited to be called on." I mean, there's amazing, and I know you cite some of this research, but about the way that girls are acculturated to be obedient and compliant and how we learn that not only from the wider culture and from our teachers, but from each other. And that's where it gets so insidious because you survey a group of girls and you say, Oh, that's just what, that's just how girls are.
MATTIE: Yeah, I think actually, speaking for myself, I think that was one of the really shocking things about graduating college and getting out into the real world. I had been a great student, and I had teachers who told me, you can do anything. And the way that I got that praise was by following directions. You know, I followed directions so well that I was the top of my class. And I was told this is the route that works. You know, you do what you're told, and then you're rewarded for it. And that worked for me so well until I was 22. And I think one of the things that was shocking was how dare you change the playbook. I am so good at the playbook of being a student. And it has made me Feel special and recognized and important and I really did feel those things as a student. I felt my perspective was so valued. I felt like what I had to say really mattered to male and female teachers, which was a great way to grow up. But what a shock to get out there and find out that actually that Obedience that has served you so well immediately stop serving you like with the flip of a switch. And I think for a lot of young women in particular who feel they really have the number of how the world works, getting out there is just such a surprise. And it required years of figuring out that all those things that had gotten me so far ahead and made me feel so valued, were things that I basically had to drop and I think that is one of the things that is part of that stuff that we're talking about. How unfair that these things that feel so obvious and so useful become impediments to your success.
ELISE: How have you unprogrammed yourself? I feel like I'm just at the beginning, but how have you done it?
MATTIE: I mean, it's been hard and I don't think I'm at the end of it. I think having some bad work experiences were very formative and helpful in a lot of ways. I didn't love it when it was happening, but the realization of you're just going to have to find a different way to exist in the world, that being made so stark, so clearly actually was a good shake. And did sort of shake me out of the ways in which I thought things were going to work and work out for me. I think that just being interested in the kind of feedback that my work gets and getting comfortable with the fact that the stories that I'm proudest of are the stories that have made people most upset. I mean, I spent 22 years never making anyone upset. Everyone was happy with me. That was the nature of how I succeeded. So learning to uncouple people being really pleased with you from succeeding, I think that was the beginning of change and realizing other people's reactions were not always going to be the gold star that my work needed. And honestly, I think learning from and being around men who didn't seem to need that same kind of validation to feel proud of what they were accomplishing and what they were putting out in the world was a good check that it's not always going to come with a gold star. No one's going to write "A" at the top of your paper every single day. You have to believe that your work has intrinsic value and seeing other people doesn't have to be men, but it has for me at least been men, feel that way and walk around with the confidence that that gives you, I wanted that, so I learned to give it to myself.
ELISE: Yeah. But it's interesting. Why is there not that much of you in your book? It's truly like every time you bring yourself into it a little bit, I was like furiously underlining those sections, not to check you, but because it comes alive but was that conscious, just as a journalist, you were like, you feel restrained?
MATTIE: yeah, I mean, I've always, as a writer, not had a ton of myself in my work, and I think that it's something that you're trained to have less of yourself in, especially if you want to be, again, taken seriously. I wanted to write a work of history, I wanted to write a work of history that didn't feel like it was bound to this particular moment in which I was writing it, so that was important to me and conscious. I think that it really was after, I guess just before the book came out that I wrote the first piece of long personal history that I'd ever done. And that was the first story for the Atlantic that came out in, I guess, May 2022. And that was a totally new experience for me to be the protagonist of the story. I just had never felt that before, and so it wasn't a comfortable register to write in. I would say now I've gotten more comfortable with but yeah, the first book, it reflects the mindset of what I felt like I wanted to contribute, which was something that felt more or less timeless, but I do think that, yeah, you get older and you start to feel more comfortable using that I more freely, so maybe book two.
ELISE: Maybe book two. I look forward to it. Cause I completely relate. And I had to be dragged by my editor into my book. I just wanted to diagnose culture and synthesize...
MATTIE: but not be part of culture yourself, of course.
ELISE: No, just be observing. Of course. Yes. But she was like, you have got to get in there and pull us through this material. And I'm so glad that she did because I knew, as I'm sure you know, from looking at history and looking at all of these girls, that our experiences might seem singular, but they are so often not, and that that collective sort of , important, particularly in this work that requires collective action. Not just one.
MATTIE: Not just one.
ELISE: Well, thank you, Mattie. Thanks for joining me. Loved the book.
There are so many places where Young and Restless overlaps with On Our Best Behavior, and we didn’t even get to really most of them. We talked a bit about what happens to girls when they’re singled out for fame to carry these movements and then they way that we trash them, either because they’re no longer relevant or because we decide that we’ve had enough of them. And then of course there’s the question of anger, rage, and aggression and the fact that girls are conditioned, again this is how we’re socialized, this isn’t who we are naturally but all kids have aggression. But from a very young age, girls come to understand whether it’s expressly, directly communicated to them or just something they observe among their peers: that girls don’t push and yell. They might be able to use their anger on behalf of other people but they can’t use it directly really for themselves, and so our anger becomes covert, it becomes alliance building, whisper networks, backstabbing, covert alliances, etc. It’s just as intense, it’s just not as visible and Mattie outlines in this book, we're constantly looking for way to express how we feel while making it somehow palatable to the people around us. So, Mattie and I could have gone quite deep. As she write, near the end: “When do these beloved girls—the ones we mark for praise or for exploitation or as ‘mature for their age’—become women? When does one of them—as Jamie Margolin put it—stop being so cute? Is it when she graduates high school? When she graduates college? When her age at last does not end in ‘-teen’? When she can drink? When she can rent a car? How long is a girl useful?”
Alright, I’ll see you all next week.
