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

Journalist Kahn’s sparkling debut profiles young women who have played leading roles in American protest movements and examines “how the tropes of conventional girlhood have made them such able activists.” Focusing on women in their teens and early 20s, Kahn’s time frame spans from 1836, when 11-year-old Harriet Hanson led workers in a walkout at a New England textile factory, to the present day. The narrative touches on the fights for racial progress (Anna Elizabeth Dickinson published her first antislavery piece in The Liberator in 1855 at age 13); bodily autonomy (the Jane Collective grew out of 19-year-old college student Heather Tobis’s efforts to connect pregnant women with trained abortion practitioners in the 1960s); and political equality (18-year-old Charlotte Woodward traveled to Seneca Falls, N.Y., in 1848 for the first women’s rights convention). Kahn’s tone is breezy but never flippant, and she draws vivid, well-informed sketches of her profile subjects, many of whom are lesser known. Concluding that girls “have pushed this nation and forced it to do better,” Kahn calls on adult Americans not simply to pat “ourselves on the back for inviting them to speak to us” but to “ced[e] power to them.” It’s an inspiring and eye-opening look at how progress happens. Agent: Kimberly Witherspoon, InkWell Management. (June)