Mid-City Christian: Growing Up in the Girl Power Era

Thursday, July 16, 2015

Growing Up in the Girl Power Era

July 16, 2014

Growing Up in the Girl Power Era

I can't think of the first time I felt empowered and proud to be a girl. I remember my whole childhood awash in swirly, positive '90s-era "girl power," from the stickers on my notebook to the Gwen Stefani in my Discman. I knew so many girls who played sports and excelled at math and science that I barely realized there were still stereotypes to the contrary until I graduated high school.

Some of my earliest female inspirations came from books. Before Nancy Drew and the candid Alice series, I read—and re-read—all the American Girl titles. Morgan Lee brought back some childhood nostalgia this week with her tribute to the AG books and much-coveted dolls. "The American Girl Company provided young girls with stories about these historical, distinctive, and complicated female peers," she writes. "They were successful enough to dominate library requests and birthday wish lists for thousands of girls like me growing up in the '90s."

And their legacy is strong. Plenty of us can date back our love of reading or history or sense of adventure to our introduction to the American Girls more than 20 years ago. (Quick aside I couldn't skip over: American Girl's website was the first I ever visited. From there, I ventured to early hubs for girls on the web, including the fun and funky gURL, where I learned basic coding and cobbled together my own [neon pink] homepage.)

Womanhood and feminism seemed easy and obvious to me growing up, which sounds so naÏve now. As "pop feminism" faded, gender roles reemerged as a point of contention... this time with men worried that the success of women comes at their expense. Author Carolyn Custis James, who addresses ongoing patriarchy in her new book Malestrom, writes about how the church might respond to the so-called manhood crisis.

James reminded me of examples far more historic than Lilith Fair or even the American Girls: the women of the Bible. She discussed Ruth and Deborah and Mary and more—how their successes were good news for the men around them:

In Scripture, the rise of women happens with remarkable regularity. The fact that these risings occur within a full-fledged patriarchal culture makes them all the more significant. Surprisingly, the men in their stories aren't wringing their hands or finding it harder to "be a man." They are cheering women on—actually benefiting from and depending on their rise.

I hope that this can be part of my understanding of position as a woman going forward. It's not something to take for granted, or something to celebrate because of pop culture trends, but an identity given to me by God to be used for his purposes.

PTL and girl power,