Transcripts For CSPAN2 Mattie 20240703

Killed. Watched a full program anytime a booktv. Org. Just search chris hedges of the title of his book the greatest evil is war. Now im so pleased introducing at speaker. Mattie kahn is awardwinning and work has been published in the new york times, the washington post, lancet, harpers bazaar, vogue and more. Was a cultural director at glamour she covered womens issues and politics and staff editor at l she joined in conversation tonight the d editorial director for cultur. Mattie kahn is presenting her new book yelled at rest is a grocer sparked. Three accounts one must foundation a underappreciated of americans revolution. Teenage girls whom the American Revolution itself the Civil Rights Movement with protest in the womens Liberation Group through black lives matter in school strikes requirement mattie kahn leverage girls with strength from defendant to organize and lay serious political groundwork for movements have often sidelined them. In the words of Billie Jean King quote young and restless honesty ferocious power teenage girls. Its a bracing retelling of events mattie kahn celebrates girls as leaders and visionaries deserving of recognition of it was soo pleased to host this event here at harvard book sorts and i pray please in welcoming mattie kahn and juliet rubin. [applause]h. Thank you so much. Is this working . We are good cool. Im so excited to be your tonight. I am both a fan and friend of maddies was very lucky to be an early reader of this amazing book. And i cannot wait to hear more abou it. Straight from maddy. Is going to ask your elevator pitch is for this book maybe not everyone has read it yet yet being the operative word that was also a very great elevator buyer hoste. Here. I guess ill start with how it d you conceive of this idea . First off thank you for doing this. I read the acknowledgment first for every book i ever read. I felt a lot of pressure when i wass writing my own acknowledgments wanting if there is a single other person in the world like me who does that. And theay hopes maybe there is e even see the joy and acknowledgments. I did not even eat know when i wrote them which mean shes a true friend. I comek up with the idea for ths book over time. I worked as her host set at l and at glamour. I came into contact with a lot of incredible young women and women across the cultural and political spectrum. I think if youre in a position like i was to work on in that environment and source being pretty normal its just all in a days work that young person who is organizing thousands and thousands of people across the country and around theof world thats normal. But with a little bit of perspective i started to feel like there really was something wiextraordinary happening with this generation of young women such that they weree organizing Global Climate strikes and on the front lines of doing digital activism in ways i found really impressive what he thought it might do is write a book about what was so special about this generation of teenage girls and young women. And then i started researching and just how long this kind of work had been going on that i felt really an adequate. So i spent a year end a half on the proposal im glad my agent is not here tonight she definitelyan wanted that to hapn faster. And then it became the telling of all the social movements that i feel have transformed america told through the lens of teenage girls and the project surprised even me in its scope. It got bigger and bigger and ended w up with us being here. You have this incredible archival work and original reporting which is obviously what you do in your day job as well. What did that process look like . Especially uncovering these stories that had not really been told before . I think the timeline is helpful so i started writing the book during the Research Phase i did that mostt in 20192020. Then i started sitting down and really outlining each chapter and detail in the spring of 2020 when there is nothing but time left back i have more concentrated hours to do research than i ever wouldve wanted. And i think the way i approach might work my journalism and riding in general is always to start as wide as possible. When i was thinking about what these chapters would be or the things i knew belonged in the bookne sort of like one movement at a time i tried to the most general comprehensive that i could possibly fine whatever the biggest everything you wanted to know about this thing. I started there and i was said my hidden talent was reading a huge 800 page book and find the one sentence where a woman is on this random person did this one thanks that i want to read a book about her. The Book Research felt in that process is reading, researching and talking just many people as i could about various social movements in america finding the random clause about a girl who happened to be there and figure everything i roughly could about that person writing lots of footnotes. Emailing fly branch of thehe oy people in their building and were therefore very happy to quite a wild goose chase looking for a document because what else did they have to do in july of 2020 . And following my curiosity. That is the nice thing about having that feeling of being a little bit of an amateur in this work you ask a lot of questions and i think you find a lot of people are happy to share what they know. I love that and i learned so much i was telling you the amounts this uncovered for me after going to school. Going to college the amount i learned about American History just through this book is fast. And im grateful you did that workforce. Was there a story you found particularly surprising or moving as you are doing this research . There are a lot of stories that surprised me. I think youve heard me talk before about a chinese immigrant heavily involved in womens suffrage for right she knew even if she achieved so that movement would be expense extended to her as a noncitizen. I found the story very moving she led this massive march she was so charismatic as a teenager the whole phrase was invented to describe how she charmed her audience they would write you went to a talk by mabel and you left mabel lysed by the conversation i love that idea of this captivating young person. I also think she was a good example with the other stories wasit dickinson was abolitionist or greater through the civil war actually the first woman in her very early 20s ever to address the house of representatives and congress. These were two girls that wouldve been identified at their time who tried their best to be platforms there were extended to them in an unlikely way because they were young and female but also could not help but have to brush up against the constraints of a platform like that where you are really giving a microphone but youre not given a lot of power. I think reading those stories which were not stories i went to the book knowing i would include but finding so much hard and sometimes heartbreak in this idea of it being so famous. And so charming but not being taken seriously those were stories that surprised me and also change the direction of the rest of the book. As you have now read it and i feel like i always say this im talking about the book, this is a story these are stories that celebrate teenage girls and what young women are capable of but i would not ever want someone to read this book and think its enough to hear from young women i think if you stop there you run the risk many adults to help you platform these young people in general but never really followed up after that you run that same risk which as you create a star instead of helping and c activists have a long carr in the work that she wants to do. I love what you said this tendency to sick girls were going to save us girls are going to save the world if you could speak a little twitter adult should do. That idea has been around for each successive generation of young people about the founding of the country and many generations later. [laughter] i think i can almost answer and opposition which is one of the things that really work. Has helped young people remain activists and be connected to this work is Intergenerational Partnership but really asking sherry with work being in partnership in commuting conversation if you look towards the most famous activists elders like Gloria Steinem are very committed and not just applauding the next generation of people who were following them but really figuring out how to provide what people need. I always feel young people bring energy to movements. Yet of whats impossible. And so they make a lot possible in the absence of that fear over what maybe cant happen or wont happen. And older people bring perspective. They bring the the knowledge that one defeat isnt an entire failure. You can keep going even if it feels like something is disintegrating that you might feel right now, like this isnt working, but history will look more kindly on it. I really think you need both of those things and so i just feel its such a mistake to say good them. Were were done now because you cant leave it to them. Im wildly impressed by the girls in this im wildly impressed and have so much respect. I wish they didnt have to do it alone. Yeah. I think that is totally right. Speaking interracial relationships. We talked about the climate activists of today, what patterns, what is the same, what is different . One thing thats thehe same s young people have their advantage thinking their parents are outdated. So much culture, so much politics and so much social change and definitely thinking of girls who were working in the 1830s who felt30 like they were the first girls ever to get on entheir own. The feeling of invisibility that young people can have, that is really amazingly the same. Theres so much in the Civil Rights Movement of young people feeling like these problems, these inequities, they are waking up to them in a way their parents never did and they realize their parents thought too. She said it had been a eocontinuance. People who come before them but its a great, i think, advantage of being young to think that youre the firstst person ever o do it because it feels exciting. One of the fun things about process of writing the book is reading the dairies, journal entries and letter and eavesdrop on girls discovering themselves and Nothing Better than seeing somebody she has something to say. I think thats the a commonality. The way that girls are heard, the people who are there to listen, that audience keeps getting bigger and that comes with a lot of power and it comes with a lot of risk. So when dickenson were in abolition, she was making people mad. It can be very loud, i think thats always hard but i think its gotten harder. I cannot imagine personally. Id like to talk about what makes girlhood special. I work at team vogue. You have many worked at many womens magazines. Im always so surprised and impressed by young women and the stories that we get to tell about them so i would love to sort of hear about that, not even necessarily in relation to activism but just how we can see the girl and when did that come to be . When i first started working on the book, i thought i would open in the 1930s when the idea of a teenager became prevalent and i thought maybe i would start in 1901 when a research coined adolescent. I decide its my book, i can do what i want. Part of the reason that i felt latitude girls had conceded themselves as something special, much longer than other people have beente telling them youren a developmental phase. That the awareness of something happening there, out new power coming into focus has been around since 1830s if not before and if you read the dairies, you hearr a lot of what it means to be a teenage girl. When i was working on the book and i would tell people about it, no boys ever done anything. But i wanted to write about girls because i felt like against all odds in terms of how girls have been socialized, not in terms of their enate qualities, they have developed characteristics that i think make them so capable and so savvy precisely because of the obstacles that they always faced and some girls obviously more than others. A lot of real estate in the book is spent on the different experiences that black girls, for example, have had to white girls, immigrant girls. Theres so many different kinds kiof experiences but i think tht they doav have in common a sense of being underestimated and a sense of wanting to flex your power, whenever that may be available to you. That combination, it doesnt have to be true but right now societily where were at it is true. There are so many protest thes and movements in the book that start with two girls in the cafeteria or in the bleachers saying you know whats kind of messed up and thats the experience of being a teenage girl. I think that quality so far, you can read the book and let me know, so far no one who has been a teenage girl came away from reading it no matter how they spent their teenage years, oh, my god, i know that feeling. When it does come to the activehism one in about civil rights and how adults get embarrassed easily and how it makes teen girls especially effective is they dont have that sense of embarrassment and in the section you talk about what kind of girl do versus a woman canan do and i would like what makes girls protestors. Ei dont do karaoke. I had no problem singing loudly in public and that was when i was a teenage girl. I think that embarrassment which affects everybody not just women and girls is is a powerful for inaction, feeling embarrassed to chant or to march or even to go to something where there might not be a lot of people there like even tonight. I said to julia, how many people will come, thank you all for doing that. That sense of like im doing it no matter what is the unique property, i think, of teenage girls and on the flip side of thatin investment of doing thins with your friends which is, you know, there isnt a teenage girl in the world who doesnt want do it totally alone. So i thinknk the freedom that girls find in that is different than growing up for sure. I also think and this does come around disarmament and other issues too, i think we as a culture tolerate a lot of loud emotion from young people that we find for suspect in women. So if a girl is standing at a podium and sobbing or as in the case of the march for our lives demonstration in washington literally throwing up what happened on live tv, theres a lot of understandable compassion on the part of adults who are watching that and i think admiration for that kind of display of feeling. I think anyone who has watched a woman run for office know its not so welcome in an adult william who woman who is supposed to control herself, not be dramatic, do all the things that are more for effective but less than her power as communicator. I think the purity of c expressn that we tolerate from young peoplele makes them feel both authentic and also allows to accesst empathy from people tht are climbing at power or being ambitious and i think its a sad thing because theres not one person in the book to guy up to be a woman but i also think it does inevitable give young people in particular this really power place in society that is anos opposing window for them. You mentioned friendship and i think that is something so special to girlhood. You want to come in. Good spotting, julia. Moderating. But, you know, i it was such an important part of my girlhood. It was such an important part of your childhood, i would like to know about stories in the book and particularly moment in tactivism. Theres a gate moment that i love that myto editor was like,o we need to keep this in and i was like we are keeping it in. Its a small moment. There are 3 College Students who are going home from school having planned a major demonstration on their the all black campus and theyre headed home in alabama and, sorry, excuse me, headed to georgia from albany, and they are preparing to take the bus back together the and they know they are going to be identified as activists and maybe not say the most welcome reception from their bus driver and the night before they headth back home thy could spend their t time doing y number of thicks and instead they find 3 blouses and thread and they make themselves matching shirts. I felt like i could cry and want to hug them through history because what what can a teenage girl understand more than the arming yourself with that kind of protection. Who can possible hurt a girl who is wearing matching shirts with her best friends . I would like to see you try. I liked i liked that idea of how these rate wales of friendship strengthened protest movement and i liked the idea of fighting against that narrative of hierarchy in protests that i think is ubiquitous in telling in history and what they derive is not leading people. The shirt is one of my faves i have to say. I like the attention of clothes and esthetic choices of the girls. I would love to neglect why you felt that was important to include . I think that working in womens magazines will always leave you with a chip on your shoulder and part of the reason sorry to say, im mostly mean men discredit that because youre political analysis with what the latest trends are in clothes and i always felt it was an advantage to come from a world that taught you that your clothes was powerful communicators and in a world that maybe arent listening so much toy, what you have to say. Its one to have billboards you have to get your message across. I always think, you know, if you ever watch president ial debate and notice one of the candidates is wearing a purple tie, you have participated in analysis, dcongratulations, welcome. Were all doing it. Youre not too serious, you have done this work. So we all think about how we show up in the world. I always quote the Vanessa Freedman column and her column final for the newspaper, the world is not run by naked people. We all have to choose our clothes and were all saying something when we do that and girls assessing standing and know instantly whos cool and who feels comfortable in what theyre wearing, who doesnt wield effectively. I think sometimes that thats the first thing people are going to write about and notice, its its losing out on one of your bestou and most potent toos to pretend that it doesnt matter, it doesnt exist. One of the examples that illustrates that tension well in the book is theres a protest in texas recently when harsh antiimmigration bill came for debate, a bunch of girls 15 to 20 went to state house to protest and they wore their quincanera dresses, definitely more attention than what had been paid to girls in jeans and shirts. How did you decide to do this and how does it feel to be here this outfit . She said it was uncomfortable. Thats not what she wants to hear but a girl knows if she wants to make her statement, her clothes will be part of that calculus. We always said everyone wears clothes. Its important, always everyone eats. I love that you brought that to the book so much. So, you know, you mentioned all of these girls get older as we all do if we are lucky. You know, what did happen to so many of the activists as they grew out of girlhood, did they stay activists, did they feel that there was repercussions from that being part of their childhood . Im happy the book doesnt end in 1940s or it would be a sad story because for most of the girls who come of age before the Civil Rights Movement there is no the stain in activism. First of all, before the Civil Rights Movement or before second wave ofen feminism there werent places for women to be public figures in society at all. I do think a benchover the early stories in the book are hard, they were hard to research, i often wanted, you know, faint thatsical different endings for the girls in the book and thankfully Civil Rights Movement and feminism comes along and expand opportunities through education, careers and all kinds of change and understanding and make it possible for those young people to continue to be activists. I never wanted to be prescriptive about what the girls should do. She actually never ended up going. Her parents found trial and experience to be demeaned that they decided to leave the city but many girls were able to go because of her. She became a doctor and when i spoke to her she said i feel becoming a doctor is completely an extension of the work i did as aen teenager. Youve dont have to be an activt or politician to still have an impact on your community. I think the amazing thing about esome of the movement that is te young fought for is that it made it possible for them to choose from any number of options to be activist which is some of them became or to become Community Doctors and be involved in their lives that way. So, yeah, first half of the book kind of depressing on the girl to woman transition front. Second part, more uplifting and story of the progress that we have made in terms of what what is possible for an ambitious young woman to do. Agree. I think thats part of the reason. I love that this is such a wideranging history and you do get to see a couple hundred years of progress both from the girls and from the world a little bit just quite nice. You know, did researching this the book talking to the teen girls now, did any of that recast your own teen experience . I apologize to my mother in the process of writing this boom. Youre very close yet i felt i owed her a sorry or two. I think when i was a teenage girl a lot of the work documented in the book and continues to today is done, that was the luck of having been born in a family that told me i could do whatever i wanted. I was respected in class and i never had trouble voicing my opinion and i felt like i could do whatever and i felt like a lot of the things that my mother woulder talk about were ancient history enfaces on ancient and then i got to the working world and i experienced all kinds of slights and, you know, i even found myself nothing terrible, just making me question my own selfworth and i realized that a lot of the stuff is not done and, you know, you shouldnt have to experience it firsthand to appreciate that but i think it made me have a lot of compassion for thet person who thought she would find a world unfold with no obstacles. I wish i could protect that innocence. I think that talking to girls now, a lot of people ask me whether things are worse now, itss harder to be a teenage girl. Dobviously striking rates of depression and anxiety, i dont want to underscore those things at all. Those are t sale. I wished we could go back to that i feel theres a better time to have been a young woman. Unfortunately in. Just think wee more aware of how entrenched some of the problems are and that, of course, cause people to feel anxious and sad but i only hope that that makes us feel we have a collective responsibility to do something about it and not pretend that there was some golden age we wished we could go back to. And i think thats also interesting because obviously this book focuses on progressive activists and for every progressive teen girl theres a girl fighting against the rights that shes fighting for. So could you tell us a little bit about the choice to focus on the girls that are sort of making progress in this one direction knowing that there is, in fact, a whole other book that can be written about the other. Yeah, for every image thatstured inca this the book e inch out of rain is definitely another girl on the other side of the issue holding a protest sign. I would say selfish. I wanted to spend 5 years fighting social progress and that was my own preference. I also think that i wanted to, you know, i do think that there is sort of the negative space of the book is the other book. It is the story of girls who have marched for, you know, against abortion rights who have marched against school desegregation, those girls exist and i do mention them throughout but i wanted to do was to show how progress in this country has driven by teenage girls. I didnt just want to say here is a teenage girl involved in every movement that you e can think of but i wanted to show how teenage girls were on the vanguard of the movements, were initiated the movements. When you look at the flip side, when you think about the teenage girls who fought against progress i dont think they were the first to those position, to those positions, they learned those and became savvy communicators on those issues. I think the other side for lack of a better term has realized how eloquent teenage girls were. I really wanted to show how i felt young people impacted social progress. I think that is totally right and the idea of weponizing the image of the girl versus, i think, what happens in progressive movements where it can also be dangerous but sort of value orized. Where do you think we are now when it comes to teen girls and activism . I think something that was really striking to me is, you know, as the story goes chronically we hear from the climate activists and theres a lot of discussion of how do you seek balance, how can you be an activist and also have a life and also live in the world that you are trying to save . Yeah, i mean, there are definitely no easy answers and the nice thing about being a teen arch girl the ability to be single minded is a talent that soon evaporates. So i think there is a really risk ofev devoting your entire adolescence at the expense of your personhood, one of the people that i spoke to for the book said she felt she had to do her whole teenager when she got to college. It was like she had never done the developmental stages that she felt her peers had done because she was operating the the massive spreadsheets and mobilizing people around the country and then, wait, let me try to grow a little bit. I think its tremendously hard and Technology Makes it harder. Theres not a moment of the day now that you cant be working which every adult in the room knows and theres not a moment where you cant be organizing if youre a young people that feels the world is at risk which these girls authentically do. I think the people who have been able to handle it the best and sort s of chartered their way through are the people who have found a way to put a boundary even if its mental between what the work is and what the selfis. Being a teenager is a porous time and thats again why i think its so valuable for young people to have mentors in this work who can say here is the place where you end and the movement begins and those things are not the same. But its hard, i think anyone who has tried to turn off vacation knows its hard and the hardness start younger because of technology and disadvantages. I think thatk thats going to continue to be an issue and i think that its really helpful, someone who is 25 in the Climate Movement qualifies as an elder of the movement. You can imagine what they thought of me issuing my aarp card. I was told regularly how old i was in writing the book. [laughter] no one will tell you truth like a teenage girl will tell you truth so it was a humbling experience. But those older 25yearolds, they have things to teach the next generation of young activists and they have come of age in that age of technology and social media and so i think things little bit little start to improve that way. I think my last question before we open it up to the audience is about elders. One story that we havent spoken about and that i was so struck was co lvin and rosa parks. I would like for you to share what you found there and i feel like the story encapsulates the commitment to themm each other, the hidden histories, the way that we sort of put them against each other. [laughter] its got it all, folks. Yes. So i think of all the girls in the book is the one whose story has been told a little bit better over the past decade if you dont know her name she is build as and i take issue with this spelling for the purposes of explaining who he is i will use it nine months before rosa parks refused to give up her seat in 1955 on a montgomery bus and claudette was arrested and arrested for refusing to give up her seat on this bus and it was a traumatic experience for her not because of what she did but because she sortt of expected to rallyhe Community Around her and she was very surprised that that mostly didnt happen but one person who did rally around colvin was rosa parks who i think people dont necessarily was committed to activism and lead of Naacp Youth Council chapter and given up on activism except to went to school and decided to recommit for the sake of the next generation. They were so close and i love this little anecdote, think knew how the other took her coffee. Claudette slept at rosa parks house and encouraged her to tell the story and in teenage fashion, stop making me tell the story. Everyone knows already about the bus. And then months later obviously we know what rosa parks did and claudette was capsized by the movement. She became pregnant as a teenager. Every one ofyo these movements s a visual medium as much as it is political and ideological exercise and they did not want her to be the face of the movement. What i think is amazing about claudette and encapsulates the story a lot of people now know as thefi first person to do what she did on a bus. Fewer people know her much more Important Role in history which is that after she was kind of dismissed by the movement. The movement came looking for her again because they needed plaintiffs in the case that became known as browder v gal and ended the montgomery busboy cot that rosa parks started and they tried to find every outstanding man possible and none want today do the job and in the end four women, two teenage girls including claudett the e with a newborn son at home and every reason possible to say no she testified in court and her testimony really won the day. They saved her for last, they found her to be again the most emotional, the most per says aif, the best for the movement and she did it. After she did it when there should have been parade in her honor and every person calling her to thank her, no one told her what the results of the case were and no one called. I never wanted to tell a story that made it seem like everything is a happy ending for the girls who do this and claudette waited a long time to get credit and the credit that we give her now is partial and the way we understand her relationship with the movement is inadequate but i have admiration for people who decided evenn when it wasnt going to benefit them that there was something that they just had to do and shes still alive and its an incredible legacy. She changed the world. That story is so powerful and there are many other stories in young and restless which you shouldw read and take a copy. Now we are going the take questions from the audience. If you want the raise your hand and i will call on you and we will have the mic come on you. You dont have to be shy, its okay. Im curious more about the Research Process because i would imagine as you said like youre doing this sort of searching through footnotes and i know that women stories have not been as well told so sort of what did that look like as youre trying to piece together a comprehensive understanding of the women in their roles. I always think about the stories because nobody wrote them down. For me the illuminating parts of that, i was trying tofi figure t when i first started the book sort of story of ludington, warned her father that thee british were coming. 17, amazing, perfect story for the book. You either immediately embrace or discard based on whether it belongs in the book. This is great. This is a greats place to start and then in trying to track her down i could barely find fact, the first thing i found was someone saying i dont think she really existed. Like she wasnt real or if she was she didnt do quite what people said she did and i have to go find her grandchildren, great necessaries had written their owny memories of what thy thought she had done and what i found most is how she had been used in speeches by everyone from anticommunists to second wave feminists to Nuclear Disarmament activists, her story had sort of taken on the shape it needed to take for generation of activists and it turned into a better metaphor for the book than i could have ever hoped because here is thea girl who livered, who we know nothing about but shes been useful for people ever since. So sometimes that happened. I think the great thing is that if youre writing a book about history thats lesser told you will find dozens of academics who have devoted their entire life to this who are waiting for you to email them and you know what im interested in your research. They will talk to you for hours and sendyt you everything that tthey have. Thats great. And and other than that its like living in the record and ecknowing that you can fill in s much as you can and especially later talk to people who are still alive and asked them who wasnd there, what did you see, o was around you, what do you feel like nobody ever writes about and to neglect that in the older history theres so much thats not available and to feel the frustration that i felt being limited by covid because you can ask a librarian who was so helpful and will scan many documents for you but you can only ask them aboutut things tht you know are there. You cant ask them to scan every paper in the library and see whether theres some 15yearold no one has ever heard of so its a frustrating process i would say but i learned to live with it barely. All right. Yes, back there. Hi, im excited to read. Do you have a sense of what percentage of these young activists came from progressive families that supported them and how many were rebelling against restrictive families . I dont think i have a percentage breakdown. I would say in the earlier phase of the book, sort in the pre1940s, 1950s phase there was a lot of continuity, a lot of girls that were the children of quacker abolitionists, that comes up a lot. Daughters of School Teachers at the time where most mothers werent working. Later, it becomes much more of a rebellion. You know, there are exceptions to that t but i think generationally a sense of rebellion that motivates people to join these movements and a lot more geographic distances become possible so people start leaving their homesr to go to e college or to get higher s education in some way travel becomes possible and literal rupture where you come from becomes instinctual and drivers people to want to find meaning in joining the more collective actions but, yeah, thank god for quacker abolitionist parents because a lot of good things came out of them. One thing i was really struck by reading your book, mattie, how many girls were treated poorly, not just by the public but by other people in the social change movements that they were a part of and you talked earlier about the story of claudet te co lvin and how she was dropped from the Civil Rights Movement. Helping them to stay in the movement and not be sort of, you know, turned off by their experience. Yeah, i mean, i think the prevailing feeling of many elders, that girls are publicists for movements and helpedin attract attention and e adults are going to get in the room and leave girls on the outside. The extent to which young people can even stay in the literal conversation where decisions and strategies are being discussed that they are not on the other side of that door is a big possibility and i think now you see that in School Board Meetings where young people are testifying and these these interactions and sometimes confrontations that happen between adults and children in these kind of civic spaces and the more that young people can have a presence there and then, you know, sit through the debate that comes after thats just like a way of keeping people in it in a way that wasnt possible when somebody went into another room and shut the door in their face. So i think i think thats a piece of it and, you know, where where budgetary decisions are being made and young people can say, well, this is what i value, what would that look like monetarily, having the conversation about what how a want becomes an action item and keeping them just in the discussion goes a long way as i think a lot of what the girls express in their book is frustration as not being part of, not being part of the discussion and i think the other thing is if girls are only showing up for you behind microphones in public settings, youre not really involving them in the movement. If youre treating them mostly as a crowd gatherer or as a soundbite generator, youre not really involving them in the work of social change so i think involving young people as much as possible in the strategy of actual organizing, first of allt its a gad idea because eventually they will grow up and these are good skills to be passing onto the next generation so lets just think critically about that and also think it helps feel it helps them feel less used and thats a sad thing that many girls in the book feel at one point or another, just used. Any other questions . Given that there areho so may Different Girls that you described, different historical periods but also very different lived experiences, can you tell us is there a common characteristic of that individual or was it that particular event of being in the moment, you know, as a father of two daughters imug very interested to hear about what your thoughts are about what made them become activists. Yeah, i think general dissatisfaction is a common a common feeling. [laughter] so if youve ever heard somebody say that theyre not pleased with how things are going, that tends to mint really great activist historically. I think a lot of times what is actually helpful is that at one point or another someone in a Young Persons lives says truly, literally the question what are you going to do about it. Foro Barbara Johns led a walkout it was a music teacher as she was expressing annoyance over poor conditions in her high school she said what are you going to do about it. Sometimes the sort of lit match that helps girls realize that theres more ine their power tn they think. Ia would say frustration is a predictor for social change and i think i think we all know that leaders of all kinds are are sort of born or develop over time a sense of conviction about whats right and whats wrong so fostering that to the best of our ability, looking around and not saying, well, things are just this way but saying things are this way for now and they can change andnd they have chand helps people realize that progress is possible and i feel like one of the things i didnt want to do while being honest about girls and about these protest movements was to say that i dont think that thats true. I think the book is hard at times but is a testament to the fact thates change has happenedo often andit it really is doable. I think we have time for one more question. Yeah, back there. Hi, i have not read the book but it sounds like you did a lot of research. My question for you is have you considered looking into movements in other countries, for example, iran, pakistan, africa where people dont have opportunities to express themselves, they dont have any support, whats your thoughts on it . Yeah, it was hard to limit the book just to the United States partially i did it because i felt like that was the book i was capable of writing. It was really hard but i felt like im up to the challenge. The global scale, i wish other people would write this book where they know more about the history of a certain place, certainly finishing this the book and picking the cover and, you know, putting it together as iranian girls were protesting in the streets risking their lives and inspiring people around the world told the global story which is that this is not unique to america, young people are voices for change wherever they are and there are many more volumesof of the bookic to be written from the various perspectives. I i am loathe to admit my limits but had to in the writing of this book and felt like this is the storyis i can contribute but nothing would make me happier than to see people realize that this is really a global expression and it has been and those are books that i would love the read so if one wants to read i am their first reader. Thank you all so much and thank you so much, mattie, young and restless is such a feat. It is amazing. I loved reading it. I know you will too. Matt the ie is going to be signing books up here and there are plenty of copies to buy at the register. Thanks so much for having us. Yeah, thankan you. [applause] weekends on cspan2 are intellectual feast. Every saturday American History tv documents americas stories and on sunday book tv brings you the latest in nonfiction books and authors. Funding comes from these television companies. Hi. But friends dont have to be. Along with the Television Company supports cspan2 as a