4 - Girl power, the new feminism?

Summary

Feminism: ‘an adventure story’ for girls

How can feminism interest young women today? Why should young women be interested in a movement that generally has such a bad press and is perceived to be ‘over’? These are questions feminism currently faces. Researching past feminist literatures and publications, however, I was reminded that getting young women involved in feminism was also a problem that second-wave feminists faced. In her introduction to Feminism for Girls: An Adventure Story published in 1981, Angela McRobbie explains how, given the media depiction of feminists as ‘dull, boring, and quite united in our lack of humour’, it needs ‘an adventurous girl to give feminism more than a second thought’. In the 1970s McRobbie introduced her experience of and involvement with the lives of working-class girls as a research topic at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). Feminism as ‘an adventure story’, while an unlikely proposition, was one that promised the young women that McRobbie met and worked with a ‘new kind of adventure’, based on mutual (cross-generational) support, confidence, and knowledge about women's rights, situations, politics, and bodies.

The idea of feminism as ‘an adventure story’ for girls was also adopted by second-wave feminist theatre-making. The first productions by The Women's Theatre Group, for example, consisted of devised shows specifically aimed at a schools' audience.