GIRLS AND YOUNG FEMINISTS ARE AT THE FOREFRONT OF SOCIAL JUSTICE MOVEMENTS DRIVING SYSTEMIC CHANGE, EVEN AS THEY FACE PROFOUND STRUCTURAL HARM.
Being young and navigating gendered power - particularly as girls, young women, or gender non-conforming people - places them at the margins of social power, exposing them to heightened risks of violence and discrimination. These harms are intensified by intersecting systems of inequality — including class, race, caste, ethnicity, sexual orientation, immigration and citizenship status, marital status, and disability — that shape everyday experiences of exclusion and injustice.
Yet girls and young feminists are not passive subjects of these conditions. They are powerful organizers, architects of systemic change, first responders, educators, artists — and everything in between. Their leadership not only meets urgent needs but also transforms the systems that produce harm. Across homes, communities, nations, and global movements, girls and young feminists organize, resist, and reimagine what is possible.
“Girls push back against the everyday oppressions that are so often synonymous with girlhood, and against the forces that define and form the nature of the oppression. Girls resist marriage, violence, fight to stay in school, push back against how others name them, and seek to separate them from the platform and resources that are their right.”
Documenting the Collective Power and Contributions
This research responds to an urgent need to document the critical role of girls and young feminists in driving systemic change—both historically and in the present moment. As authoritarianism deepens globally and overlapping crises intensify inequality and harm, recognizing and following their leadership is essential.
By documenting the collective power, strategies, and contributions of girls and young feminists, this research strengthens our capacity to advance genuine transformative change across systems and scales. It also builds the evidence needed to ensure resources flow to their work and that programs, policies and investments are driven and shaped by their leadership, strategies, and lived realities.
About Us
The research is led by Our Collective Practice, a feminist hub working in partnership with movements, sectors and culture change makers to build narrative, knowledge and collective power – with and for girls.
Fania Noël
RESEARCHER LEAD
Fania Noël is an Afrofeminist scholar, writer, and organizer. She is a Visiting Research Scholar at the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her work sits at the intersection of political sociology and Critical Black Cultural Studies. Fania Noël holds an M.A. in Sociology from Paris V René Descartes University and an M.A. in Political Science from Panthéon-Sorbonne University, and earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from The New School for Social Research.
She is currently completing a manuscript titled In the Name of the Dead Black Wife: Absenting, Blackness, and Gender in Science Fiction (forthcoming, 2027). Her third book, 10 Questions sur les Féminismes Noirs, was published in 2024 by Libertalia. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Alaso, a trilingual (Haitian Creole, French, and English) Haitian feminist revue published by the Haitian feminist organization NÈGÈS MAWON.
