FROM 01 MARCH 2021 BIGISSUE.COM | 31
hours every day a�ter school. � ey belonged to
six clubs and volunteered every Saturday. � ey
took the SAT three, four, fi ve times. It was not
their fault that they found themselves defi ned
by what they could do rather than what they
felt. � ey had been well-trained in an economy
of external validation, and it is not a system of
their making.
High-achieving boys struggle with this,
too. But I think a crucial di�ference between
their experiences and the experiences of
young women is that, for young men, the
growing-up is culturally celebrated. A boy’s
journey to adulthood is the stu�f of the literary
canon, of fantasy epics, of movies that take
decades to shoot and millions of dollars to
make. We are much less comfortable with
girls’ move through adolescence. � eir stories
are shared less widely, deemed less worthy,
subject to less critical acclaim.
Which is not to say that girls do not wield
economic or cultural in�luence, because
they do. Perhaps you do not use or even
fully understand TikTok (this writer doesn’t,
either). But some of the app’s biggest stars are
teenage girls: 17-year-old Charli D’Amelio and
her 19-year-old sister Dixie made, together,
nearly $10m on the platform in 2020. Maybe
you’ve never heard of Depop, the fashion
marketplace and resale site whose users are
overwhelmingly Gen Z, but the company
raised over $60m in its last investment round.
Girls are a major economic power,
subjected to exacting social pressures and
standards, and yet are neither given credit
for this in�luence nor granted their full
interiority. For many young women, to come
of age is to have exactly this realisation: � at
your body and your tastes and your talents
will be commodifi ed while your voice will be
silenced and your experiences trivialised.
As it happens, I don’t love the phrase
‘coming of age’. It implies an end to the
journey, some moment at which we will have
arrived. And if we are uncomfortable with
girls as in-progress, perhaps it would help if
we remembered that we are all unfi nished. I’m
thinking about how my male colleagues – it
was always men – would sometimes comment
on a girl’s appearance: they didn’t understand
her fake eyelashes, the acrylic nails that made
it hard to type, the super-short skirt that
(in their opinion) seemed to undermine a
feminist argument she’d made in class.
I never wanted to fi ght with these men
about the politics of fashion trends, and I
don’t think that’s what they really meant,
anyway. I heard in their questions an almost
re�lexive scepticism about how girls try to fi nd
themselves, a fi xed belief that these outward
expressions of identity are silly, superfi cial.
Boys are – by comparison – relatively immune
to the same type of criticism, but it seemed
a waste of energy to argue the point. Instead
I just wanted to ask: Did you
always make perfect sense?
Didn’t you contradict yourself
sometimes?
Don’t you still?All Girls by Emily Layden is out
now (John Murray, £14.99)a range of emotional experiences and depth of
character; humanness. As a woman who was
once a teenager and before that a little girl, as
someone who spent the better part of a decade
as a teacher and mentor to young women, it is
a perceived paradox – this distinction between
girls and people – that I have been struggling to
clarify my entire life.
For most of my twenties, I taught English at
various boarding and independent day schools
throughout the US, the majority of them all-
girls. I found that even in these very elite spaces
- built for the advancement of women; many
established when it was a rare and remarkable
thing for a woman to go to school – girls are
still not fully shielded from the sort of
character-�lattening I am describing. In a
capitalist system, a private school tallies its
fi nancial health in enrolment numbers. � e
girls are the product.
My students were incredibly smart and
highly motivated. � ey would recalculate their
grade point averages a�ter every quiz score.
� ey played four sports or went to ballet for fi ve
01
Flames in the Field by
Rita Kramer
� e tragic story of Andrée Borrel,
Diana Rowden, Vera Leigh
and Sonia Olschanezky of the
Special Operations Executive
who were executed at Natzweiler
concentration camp in July 1944.
� e reader learns about their lives
and follows them through their last
few hours. Grisly but fascinating.02
A Train in Winter by
Caroline Moorehead
� e true story of 230 French women
resisters who, in January 1943, were
deported in convoy 31000 from
Paris to Auschwitz-Birkenau. It
was the only train to take women
of the resistance to a death camp. A
story of friendship, determination
and survival.03
The Italian Wife by
Kate Furnivall
� is story of intrigue, power
struggles and murder is set in
pre-war Italy against a backdrop
of rising fascism and Mussolini’s
increasing power. In a world where
no one knows who they can trust
or who is on their side, the main
character, Isabella Berotti, fi ghts for
what she believes is right.04
Lilac Girls by Martha
Hall Kelly
� e story of three women
intertwine to make a beautiful
fi ctitious story taking the reader
from the dazzling lights of New
York City to the depravity of
Ravensbrück concentration
camp. � is tale is one of
tragedy, friendship, but most
importantly hope.05
Hitler’s Furies by
Wendy Lower
A sinister and darkly compelling
book about the women of the
� ird Reich. � e ordinary women
who became SS wives and mothers,
and who in turn became brutal
killers and perpetrators of murder
and genocide.Mission France: � e True
History of the Women
of SOE by Kate Vigurs
is out on May 11
(Yale University
Press, £20)Illustration:Joseph Joyceby Kate
Vigurswomen in wartime
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