girls have long been woefully underestimated – but now they’re roaring back
- Written by Michelle Smith, Associate Professor in Literary Studies, Monash University
Teenage girls are typically the least powerful and most underestimated group within Western cultures – where adults are seen as superior to children, and men are privileged above women. Girls can also provoke cultural fears and anxieties because they occupy a transitional space between childhood and adulthood.
How old is a “girl”? The definition has shifted, along with things like the age of consent and marriage. The significance of marriage has tended to mean young women are called “girls” even into their early twenties. While female children are also understood as girls, a distinct girls’ culture begins, it’s generally thought, around the pre-teen years.
The separate stage of life we know as girlhood originated in the second half of the 19th century. It was brought into being by two major transformations: the raise of the age of marriage to the early twenties and girls working outside the home. In Britain and the United States, these changes created a time of independence for young women, between being under the control of parents and the confines of marriage, as literary historian Sally Mitchell has written.
The reality of girls having financial and personal freedom was a worrying prospect. As Mitchell writes, the way a girl is seen as both immature and occupying a liminal stage “gives her permission to behave in ways that might not be appropriate for a woman”.
Yet a separately designated period of girlhood also gave rise to a girls’ culture designed to cater to their unique interests, such as books, magazines and organisations. This “girl culture” would expand and become more visible in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Today’s girls enjoy a wide range of interests and pursuits, from Taylor Swift fandom to political action and elite sport. Yet their interests are often trivialised or dismissed.
Girls of substance
Girls are often framed as “at risk”, or as potential dangers to themselves via sex and drugs. At the same time, they are typically dismissed in terms of their political or cultural influence. A popular nursery rhyme suggests girls are made of “sugar and spice and all things nice”. This implies a pleasant, compliant nature, rather than challenging the status quo.
When girls have made a political impact and risen to international prominence, they have often been the target of significant hatred. For example, activist Greta Thunberg gained global notoriety as a 15-year-old when she began the School Strike for Climate movement in 2018.
She became a figure of online hate, especially after sailing to the US in 2019 to participate in climate talks. Thunberg was criticised for having political passion (“whining” and exhibiting “anger”), and for daring to speak up when she was only a “child”.
Even Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai, who survived being shot by a Taliban gunman in Pakistan in 2012 and subsequently became an activist for girls’ education, has been the subject of waves of “Malala hate”. Her acceptance into Oxford University, her Nobel Peace Prize and high-profile interviews in magazines such as Vogue have only heightened the volume and vitriol of the disapproval.
Malala Yousafzai delivers a statement after winning the Nobel Peace Prize in the Library of Birmingham.
Facundo Arrizabalaga/AAP
Girls of substance, such as Thunberg and Yousafzai, defy feminine expectations by being assertive and refusing to accept social and political norms largely established by male leaders. The degree of irritation these outspoken girls have provoked illustrates how they disrupt the cultural expectations of girls as compliant and unimportant.
Boys vs girls in popular culture
Just as girls themselves have been dismissed when they have attempted to influence politics or culture, the interests and passions of girls have typically been derided as trivial in comparison with those of boys and men.
One of the first visible manifestations of female fandom was teenage girls’ early enthusiasm for The Beatles in the 1960s. As expert on media fandom Mark Duffett explains, the enthusiasm of girls and women for the band was distinguished as “feminized ‘hysterical’ affect” in contrast with “intellectually mature, artistic appreciation”.
The idea that the aspects of culture girls are attracted to are inferior or disposable is another way their interests have been belittled.
A tearful Beatles fan in 1964.
Bob Daugherty/AAP
Words associated with the music girls primarily consume, such as “bubblegum” pop, signal its “sweetness” and lack of substance. In the 1980s and 1990s, girls’ fandom of “boy bands” such as New Kids on the Block and the Backstreet Boys was disparaged.
More recently, there is some animosity towards “Swifties” and dismissal of the musical quality and likely longevity of Taylor Swift’s music. However, her undeniably successful recent tour to Australia attracted reams of positive media coverage. Articles celebrated girls and their mothers wearing glitter and sequins and attending concerts together.
Fans of US singer songwriter Taylor Swift pose for a picture.
Mourad Balti Touati/AAP
In the realm of cinema, superhero and comic films are big business today: the Marvel cinematic universe is the highest-grossing franchise in history. These films, with huge production and marketing budgets, are derived from publications and toys typically associated with boys. Though some of these fictional universes include female characters, they are less commonly at the forefront.
In contrast, girls’ interests and hobbies have been so derided and marginalised that Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (2023) was one of the first films to elevate a girls’ toy to major cinema prominence.
Unlike the seven-film Transformers franchise, which has grossed over $5 billion, Barbie exhibits a high-degree of self-awareness and irony about the toy and how girls play with it. Barbie, which has grossed 1.45 billion US dollars at the box office, was widely dissected as a measure of contemporary feminism.
A Barbie moviegoer.
Rodrigo Jimenez/AAP
While a predominantly male viewership can uncritically watch action films about robots that change form for entertainment, a story about an iconic fashion doll for girls carried many other expectations – because of its rarity and the sense that girls’ toys and interests are frivolous.
From dismissal to lucrative market share
In the 1870s, in both Britain and the United States, doctors argued against the value of girls’ education by suggesting girls entering puberty required the limited supply of energy available within their bodies to prepare their reproductive systems for womanhood. If girls undertook rigorous academic study, their ability to have healthy children and to retain “their natural grace and gentility” might have been compromised, writes historian Kathleen E. McCrone.
These historical opinions highlight two perceptions of girls: first, that they were physically “weaker” beings who were not capable of the same physical and intellectual activities as boys; and second, that their primary purpose was to bear children.
Things have changed a great deal since. Teenage girls, for instance, are participating in the Olympics in notable numbers as peak athletes. Skateboarding in particular features girls such as 14-year-old Australian skateboarder Arisa Trew, who became the youngest ever Australian Olympic gold medallist this week. (She also became the first woman to land a 720 – two full rotations while mid-air – in competition.)
Girls now have a different kind of cachet: market power in a capitalist economy. In 2000, a Disney executive observed the number of girls dressed in generic princess costumes for live Disney on Ice performances. In response, he initiated the Disney Princess line of merchandise. These toys, costumes, books and accessories reached annual sales in the billions in the early 2000s.
World premiere of Enchanted 2007.
John Hayes/AAP
In 2023, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, which appealed largely to girls and young women, became the highest-grossing tour of all time.
Nevertheless, Swift attracts criticism that her performances are as not as legitimate as those of male bands who cater to an older fanbase (which includes more men). In a direct reference to the Eras Tour, the Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl, for example, joked with a live audience that his band was undertaking the “Errors Tour”, “because we actually play live”.
One cultural arena where girls dominate is reading. The 2024 Report of the Australian Teen Reading in the Digital Era project shows twice as many girls are “fiction fanatics” (avid readers) as boys. And boys are far more likely than girls to abstain from reading altogether.
Most young adult fiction is written by women, for an audience of primarily girls and young women. Girls are highly influential on the book industry, by sharing their opinions about books on BookTok and exerting pressure on publishers through social media to increase the diversity of published authors.
The gendered nature of teen reading is commonly framed as a “problem”, with campaigns for more fiction to be published that will directly appeal to boys, to improve their rates of literacy. However, research has repeatedly found male characters have been historically overrepresented in children’s literature. This continues to be the case, despite modest improvements in recent years.
Until comparatively recently, girls have been expected to identify vicariously with male protagonists in fiction and film. Yet it is typically presumed that boys are not willing to read or view stories about girls or written by women, just as men largely refuse to read books written by women. Author of the Harry Potter series, Joanne Rowling, famously adopted the pen-name “J.K” because of her publisher’s assumption that boys would not read a book written by a woman.
The women of tomorrow
In 2024, young women comprise around 60 per cent of Australian university students, reflecting women’s entry into numerous professions. Meanwhile Kamala Harris is a serious contender to become the first female US president, showing girls they can aspire to almost any role in life.
Yet despite movements towards equality for girls and women, sexism continues to permeate many institutions and girls continue to experience sexual assault at double the rate of boys.
Girls are the women of tomorrow. To improve the future for women, it is important to reevaluate attitudes towards girls’ culture and interests. We need to consider why they are often dismissed, compared to the hobbies and passions of boys.
For parents, there is a vital role to play in counteracting stereotypes about girls. Adults can also improve their engagement with girls to prepare them to face a sometimes hostile world.
Chelsey Goodan’s Underestimated: The Wisdom and Power of Teenage Girls, for instance, talks about the need to trust girls to make their own choices, the importance of discussing complex issues, such as sexuality, with them honestly, and why we need to listen to them in ways that allow them to reveal difficult emotions, such as shame and fear.
As Goodan suggests, by dismissing girls with labels like “hormonal”, “crazy” and “dramatic”, our culture “minimizes their voice until it’s silent”.
Most importantly, we can empower girls to speak up. We can also improve our level of respect for them and what they have to say. Devaluing the period of youth for half of the population contributes to attitudes that diminish the contributions, achievements and interests of women, too.
Authors: Michelle Smith, Associate Professor in Literary Studies, Monash University
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