Picture a karaoke mic passed hand to hand around a pool deck, girls and nonbinary youth belting out a song loud enough to embarrass themselves and not caring, cannonballing into the water still laughing. A few hours later, some of those same voices were in a circle asking how you actually dismantle the patriarchy, and meaning it, waiting for our answer. That same week, they braided each other’s hair on the floor of a cabin, put on a talent show with no stakes and no judges, and stayed up long past when they should have, whispering about what they hope for and who they want to become. That’s girlhood.
We don’t think of it as a phase to be gotten through, something to age out of and leave folded up in a drawer along with old diaries and other outgrown things. We think it’s a discipline, and it was never only for girls. It belongs to anyone still willing to imagine the world exactly as they want it, before someone tells them to be reasonable about it. That’s why our Solís Policy Institute Youth program exists for femme and nonbinary young people alike, and why the word girlhood, in our hands, is wide enough to hold all of them.
It’s not a coincidence that this is the same summer 40,000+ people filled a field to watch women hand each other a microphone and call it a movement. Whimsy is having a moment, and we’d argue it never should have needed one. A friendship bracelet and a talent show aren’t a break from the work. They are the work, practiced in miniature. Trust, softness, the willingness to be a little silly in front of people you’re also planning to organize with. You cannot build a movement with people you’ve never laughed with.
That’s what we watched happen this July, over three days in Sonoma, with a cohort who came for the retreat and left having rehearsed, out loud, together, what a freer world might actually look like. They built an altar to the women who came before them, said their names out loud, and stood a little taller knowing whose shoulders they were on. They sat with Kate Schatz, who writes the Rad Women series, and with NYT bestselling author Dr. Anna Malaika Tubbs, and asked them both, how you keep going when the story you’re trying to tell gets hard to write? Then they practiced telling their own “stories.” They stood in front of strangers and gave public comment for the first time, voices shaking, standing firm in their bravery.
One fellow wrote afterward that they’d never been in a space that didn’t gatekeep information the way their own school does, where being motivated and caring meant actually sharing what you know instead of hoarding it. Another said they finally felt heard and seen, taken under the wing of peers further along than them, in a group of people who wanted to be listened to but also wanted to listen. A third called it sisterhood and said every young woman should get to have it. We’d only add: so should everyone else who found themselves in that room.
Every policy that now protects someone started with a young person somewhere deciding the current world wasn’t the only one available. Dreaming isn’t the opposite of organizing. It’s the first draft of it.
These fellows aren’t done. Starting in October, they carry this into eight more months together, our Feminist Learning Lab connecting them monthly with SPI alum, organizers, and leaders across our network. Sonoma was the spark. This is where we build the fire alongside them.
With equal parts hope and whimsy,
Miyana Evans, she/her
Program Manager, Youth Leadership & Trainings, Women’s Foundation California