Girls Who Persist: Girls, Literature for Girls, and the Politics of Persistence

In February 2017, Senator Elizabeth Warren was admonished, silenced, and removed from the floor of the US Senate during then-Senator Jeff Sessions’ confirmation hearings for the position of Attorney General. During the hearings, Warren attempted to read a letter written by Coretta Scott King in 1986, in which King protested Sessions’ nomination for a federal judgeship, to demonstrate that Sessions’ judicial record had long been questioned. Senator Mitch McConnell, in his then position as Senate Majority Leader, cut Warren’s speech short, citing a rule that forbids Senators from “demeaning” one another (Victor).¹ McConnell stated, “Senator Warren was giving a lengthy speech. She had appeared to violate the rule. She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted” (“Senate” S855). While McConnell clearly intended to silence Warren, his admonishment had the reverse effect. As Washington Post Correspondent Amy B. Wang notes, women “bristled at the sentiment – essentially, to sit down and stop talking – and noted it was hardly unfamiliar to them.” Indeed, McConnell’s final sentence – “Nevertheless, she persisted” – immediately became a feminist rallying cry.

Together with its accompanying hashtags “#ShePersisted” and “#LetLizSpeak,” that three word sentence – “Nevertheless, she persisted” – rapidly spread around the world, described by Daniel Victor of the New York Times “as a hash-tag ready motto for women at the ready to break barriers.” As Megan Garber observed in The Atlantic, the sentence “was applied to images of not just Warren and King, but also of Harriet Tubman, Malala Yousafzai, Beyoncé, and Emmeline Pankhurst, and Gabby Giffords, and Michelle Obama, and Hillary Clinton, and even Princess Leia. It accompanied tags that celebrated #TheResistance.” Although he intended to reprimand Warren for violating an obscure Senate rule,² McConnell inadvertently drew attention to her tenacity and determination. “Nevertheless, she persisted” became a call-to-arms for women and girls all over the world, many of whom are all too accustomed to being similarly silenced. Six years later, the sentence continues to appear on posters, t-shirts, bumper stickers, and mugs. It has even been taken up within academia, appearing in the titles of dozens of articles ranging from studies of gender and dissent on the Swedish Supreme Court to the influence of adversity on Black women in higher education to single mothers’ pursuing bachelor’s degrees to the representation of women in textbooks to the fight for gender equity in twentieth-century athletics.

As women, we are familiar with the feelings of anger and frustration McConnell’s words provoke. As academics and educators, “Nevertheless, she persisted” and its immediate transformation into a rallying cry interested us for another reason: we wondered how girls responded to the sentence, as well as to the constant rejoinders to persist they encounter throughout their girlhoods. As literary scholars who teach and research children’s and young adult (YA) literature, we turned to literature – specifically to literature for girls – to consider how persistence is represented in those texts, and what such representations can tell us about how persistent girls are viewed. From this interest emerged this special double issue of Women’s Studies.

Written by scholars from across the globe, the twelve essays in this double issue interrogate persistence as it relates to girlhood, and particularly within literary narratives given to girls. The issue is split into two parts: the first (52.5: “Girls Who Persist”) draws on current girlhood studies scholarship and children’s and YA literary studies to investigate the many forms by which girls’ persistence is represented; the second (52.6: “Girls Who Persist … and Resist”) continues that focus while also considering the additional concept of resistance. Our introductions to each part are similarly split: in this first part, we recognize the extent to which girls’ persistence is positioned as an overtly positive and “girl-defining” trait while simultaneously participating in binary-based tensions; we acknowledge the extent to which the persistent girl is the political girl; and we consider how persistence is complicated by the framing of normative and non-normative girlhood. In the introduction to the second part, we maintain our focus on girls’ persistence while complicating it with questions about girls’ resistance and by attempting to define the relationship between resistance, “girls’ literature,” and girlhood studies.

The positivity of persistence

As suggested above, the articles within this half of the double issue demonstrate the extent to which persistence, which the New Shorter OED defines as “the action or fact of persisting; firm or obstinate continuance in a particular course in spite of opposition” (2170), has become a key trait among literary girls. From the titular Alice to Jo March, Anne Shirley, and Cassie Logan, among innumerable other iconic and celebrated examples, persistence has been applied as both a characterization and a strategy to innumerable heroines of children’s and YA literature.³ In Madeleine L’Engle’s beloved A Wrinkle in Time, for example, persistent Meg Murry travels through space and time to rescue first her father, and later her young brother, Charles Wallace. Angry at the seeming ineffectiveness of her newly-freed father, Meg realizes that she is the only person who can save Charles Wallace. Her refusal to give up, coupled with her love for her brother (and the gift of her faults), becomes the key to their eventual success. The message that well-loved characters such as Meg impart to girl readers seems clear: if a literary girl persists, if she refuses to give up, she can do anything. By extension, so can real life girls.

Messages of perseverance are widely seen by parents, teachers, and girls alike as positive and are rarely questioned. Persistence in girls is a trait that is valued, encouraged, and promoted – a depiction overtly exemplified in Chelsea Clinton’s and Alexandra Boiger’s 2017 picture book, She Persisted: 13 American Women Who Changed the World, and its 2020 sequel, She Persisted Around the World: 13 Women Who Changed History.⁴ As the sequel states in its opening, “All over the world, girls are more likely to be told to be quiet, to sit down, to have smaller dreams. Don’t listen to those voices. These thirteen women from across the world didn’t. They persisted.” We want to emphasize that – as Clinton’s and Boiger’s picture book makes obvious – when it comes to literature given to girls, this message of persistence surpasses the typical “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” motif found in much nineteenth-century literature for younger readers from Horatio Alger onward. In fact, the articles included in this double issue have convinced us that persistence as a trait is so pervasive in both girl heroines and in literature for girls that it might even be perceived to be a trait of normative girlhood. That is, persistence – and the willingness to persist – in the face of adversity, hardship, and catastrophe is so ubiquitous within narratives for girls that it is possible to consider it a defining element within the social construction of “girl.”

Such a realization is startling and using it as the underlying argument for both parts of this double issue provokes many questions. While some of these questions are tentatively answered within these articles, others remain too broad in scope or too close in time to answer. For example, why are girls expected to persist? How are girls taught to persist? Are girls ever allowed to give up? Is persistence only valued in normative girls – that is, white, cis-hetero, without disability, middle-class girls? Are girls of color, queer girls, girls with disabilities, or girls from the Global South expected to persist? Does such girls’ persistence take different forms than that of normative girls? If we narrow our focus to children’s and YA literature, how is persistence represented within these genres? How are persistent girl characters represented, and how are they perceived by other characters? Is persistence a trope of all “girls’ literature” (a loaded term that we discuss in greater detail in the introduction to the second part of this double issue)? Are persistent girls more prevalent in certain genres, such as speculative fiction or realistic fiction, or does the persistence of girl characters surpass generic boundaries? How are real-life persistent girls represented in biographies and autobiographies?

As the articles demonstrate, investigating girls’ persistence reveals several tensions present in much literature for girls. These tensions are often articulated through binaries such as persistence and resistance, questioning and acceptance, normative and non-normative, power and repression, and representation and perception. By drawing on the sentence “Nevertheless, she persisted” as the origin of our investigation (with our article authors) into literary girls’ persistence, we question many of these binary-based tensions. Thus, “Nevertheless, she persisted” points to three key themes that these twelve essays interrogate: first, a contrarianism that implies the presence of forces against which girls persevere in spite of the ways those potentially-oppressive forces can, and often do, control them (“nevertheless”); second, a focus on the feminine – however defined – which we examine through the age-based lens of girlhood (“she”); and last, questions surrounding girls’ agency in continuing or persevering in spite of opposition or adversity (“persisted”). Put another way, this sentence, through its seemingly contrary structure, encapsulates many of the contradictions that girls, both literary and real, often seem to experience. The analyses included here suggest that to be a girl is to be many things all at once: passive and persistent, strong but not too strong, and mature but innocent; the analyses also suggest that girls should be willing to persevere against hardship while simultaneously adhering to familial and societal norms. In studying narratives of girls’ persistence, our authors thus emphasize the extent to which girls must learn to negotiate a multitude of roles, expectations, and tensions as they determine who they are and who they might become.

The personal girl is political

As the inspiration of this double issue originated in a political moment, it goes without saying that we, as educators, as researchers, as editors, as readers, and as women, view the persistence of both literary girls and real-life girls as inherently political. However large or small, whether it takes the form of Jo March continuing to write despite constant rejection or Cassie Logan working alongside her parents to save the family farm from wealthy white men’s desire to purchase the land at an unfair price, girls’ persistence often leads to change – sometimes personal change, sometimes institutional change – and that change is political. Yet girls themselves are often excluded from the discourse of politics and power, even amongst feminist analyses. As Catherine Driscoll observes, “Despite the exemplary modernity of girls, the Subject on which modern popular, public, and academic discourses center is never a girl, even for feminism … feminist discussions of girls rarely engage with feminine adolescence without constructing girls as opposed to, or otherwise defining, the mature, independent woman as feminist subject” (9). When it comes to examining girls’ persistence in manifesting change, then, it seems obvious that we must consider girls (however broadly defined) in their own rights, not as younger Others against whom we define women.

What becomes particularly obvious in this issue’s articles is the political role that persistent girls play as agents of change, and, more specifically, the myriad ways in which persistent girls’ agency is represented and mediated. Girlhood studies scholars Dawn H. Currie, Deirdre M. Kelly, and Shauna Pomerantz define girls’ agency as “the conscious, self-directed actions of girls” (xvii). Following their formulation, we focus on agency “rather than choice, because the word choice tends to be equated with entirely self-generated and intentional actions” (emphasis original, xvii). Choice, Currie et al assert, “tends to mask the circumstances under which people make decisions; particular material conditions, cultural practices, and social networks influence individuals and shape their decision-making” (xvii). Choice overlooks privilege and power, so that people – including girls – who possess both privilege and power “command a broader range of choices” than those without (xvii). In contrast, agency is contextual; it highlights “human actors and social forces simultaneously; it encourages us to situate individuals in their historical [and geographical] context[s]” (xvii). In positioning persistent girls as inherently political, we see girls’ persistence as an agentic act: persistence assumes the possibility of change, and the form that girls’ persistence takes and how their persistence is both represented and perceived depends on numerous factors, including (but not limited to) the individual’s race, class, sexuality, and location.

Normative girlhood

Of course, such factors – as well as many others related to identity – inform more than a girl’s persistence; they inform the constructions by which our society categorizes, supports, and/or undermines girls. They do so, moreover, according to socially sanctioned definitions of normative and non-normative girlhood. These definitions are broad, but generally “normative girlhood” is represented by white, heterosexual, without disabilities, cis-gender girls. It is a definition that critics Jill Coste and Miranda A. Green-Barteet assert implies a universality of girlhood; that “all girls experience girlhood similarly,” and that, even amidst diverse geographical and cultural contexts, “there is a singular way to be a girl” (84). As Anita Harris contends, such a limited definition of girlhood pathologizes and others girls “outside this category of privilege” (Introduction xx), thereby denying girls who are Black, Brown, or Indigenous, queer or gender non-conforming, with disabilities, and/or socioeconomically disadvantaged inclusion in the category of girl. A non-normative girl, then, is defined in opposition to the normative girl – she is the girl who exists beyond the boundaries of normative girlhood. We shall return to the non-normative girl shortly.

More than positionality, normative girlhood also includes behavior, dress, and even aspirations. Normative girls are stereotypically feminine – they wear dresses and make-up, are interested in clothes, shopping, and boys, and they want to marry and have children. Such girls do well in school, follow the rules, and generally stay out of trouble. When these girls do break the rules, they most often do so to achieve a goal related to normative girlhood. Normative girls are, in Joanne Brown and Nancy St. Clair’s words, “good, good girls” (6).

We pause here to emphasize that girlhood – that is, the experience of being a girl – is not at all universal (regardless of the implications asserted by definitions of normative girlhood), and that any discussion of normative or non-normative girlhoods is necessarily reductive. There is, after all, wide variety in what it means to be a girl, or in how girls grow and develop. As historians Miriam Forman-Brunnell and Leslie Paris note, girls’ diverse lives indicate “their particular racial, class, ethnic, and regional backgrounds; their divergent legal status; generational cohorts; and individual family circumstances” (1–2). Thus, although scholars of girls, girls’ literature, and girl culture must necessarily rely on reductive definitions to make broader assertions about the role of girls, most recognize that girlhood is not simply “a biological state” (Forman-Brunnell and Paris 2). Rather, it is a highly constructed and contextualized concept:

it is a period of life whose meaning and endpoint have been made in particular historical [and geographical] contexts. The term encompasses both cultural constructions of girlhood and girls’ own lived experiences … The parameters of girlhood have been defined as much by legal designations, social practices, girls’ degree of biological maturation, and broader ideological and political forces as by age. (3)

These are, of course, the same forces that also work to position girls according to socially sanctioned categories of normative and non-normative girlhood. These categories are not subtle, nor are they meant to be: they are classifications that are structured around a political claiming – and one, moreover, that can be both cross-cultural and cross-historical. For example, in both the Global North and the Global South of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the category of normative girlhood was directly informed by girls’ lack of power and their position in the home. As Forman-Brunnell and Paris explain, historically girls “had little access to power, and even the most elite girls did not expect to attain the same citizenship rights at adulthood (such as voting rights) as did boys of their class” (2). In most cultural and geographic contexts, normative girlhood meant that girls were relegated to the home and were expected to become wives and mothers (although what it meant to be a wife and a mother differed considerably). Even in cases where girls worked outside of the home to help support their families, the pressures of normative girlhood meant that they were still expected to complete domestic tasks at home, after work.⁵ The result of such normative girlhood was that girls of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – particularly those in North America and Great Britain – were meant to be pious, submissive, and virtuous, as well as innocent, inexperienced (both in terms of the world and of sex), calm, quiet, demure, polite, and passive.⁶ As Brown and St. Clair assert, “even at their most spirited (even resistant) moments,” normative girls are meant to be “paragons of spotless virtue” (7). It is perhaps self-evident that although these characteristics are historical, they continue in both implicit and explicit ways to define normative and non-normative girlhood.

While normative girlhood informs how real girls may be perceived, it is equally present (often intentionally) within media and literature given to girls. An obvious example are the protagonists – like Angie Morrow of Seventeenth Summer – found within highly conservative “junior novels” of the mid-twentieth century. These texts, published primarily in the United States between roughly 1942 and 1967, functioned as a new genre of adolescent literature aimed at teenage girls, showcasing “the brave new world of malt shops and high school clubs, as well as eagerly narrating the first loves, dances, and class rings that formed the teen girl realm” (Allen). As one might expect of texts published during this conservative period, the archetypal junior novel protagonist is white, cisgender, heterosexual, without disability, and middle-class – the embodiment of normative girlhood both then and now. Typically, she sweetly represents the “good girl,” even if she occasionally missteps by hanging out with the wrong crowd or dating the wrong boy as she navigates her way through her adolescent social milieu. Junior novel plots and tropes vary between authors, but there exists an underlying sameness that permeates the majority of texts within this genre – a sameness that generally emphasizes conformity. It is perhaps entirely unsurprising to note that this conformity is tied specifically to “good girl” teen behavior of the time; the junior novels – like many texts intended for girls, particularly when written during more socially-conservative periods – are texts that stress conformity to normative girlhood.

Non-normative girlhood

The articles included within this double issue articulate multiple ways in which girls are socially pressured to conform to normative girlhood. Still, for many reasons – some that are problematic, some that are based on identity and privilege, and some that suggest girls’ agency – not all girls conform. These “other” girls represent non-normative girlhood, which might be defined in simplest terms as a girl who either falls outside the confines of normative girlhood or one does not exhibit normative girl behavior. Thus, it is perhaps simplest to define non-normative girlhood by considering what it is not, even as we recognize that doing so reinforces the concept of normative girlhood as the standard against which all other girls are measured.

As Marnina Gonick states, the concept of normative girlhood – and even the category of “girl” – advantages “white, middle-class and heterosexual girl[s],” and limits the “possible meanings of girlhood” (122). Within literature, Whitney Monaghan similarly observes that texts that uphold normative girlhood fail to “disrupt longheld views about … what it means to be a girl” because they overlook “the pluralities” of girls and girlhood (28). Anita Harris extends these assertions, arguing that girls who are not “optimistic, self-inventing, and success-oriented” do not fit into the normative category of girlhood (Future Girl 25). Such girls are “unlikely to be middle-class, but they are generally of particular ethnic minorities. These young women are often seen as either most at-risk or those most likely to be risk takers” (25). Harris classifies these girls as “at-risk” (25) and emphasizes that they are “vulnerable [because of] their circumstances – living in poverty, in unstable homes, in communities known for violence, drugs, and crime, and so on” (25). Harris simultaneously acknowledges that the term “at-risk” shifts large societal issues onto the individual, leading the so-called non-normative girl to be stigmatized for failing to overcome systemic discrimination on her own. Put another way, within non-normative girlhood, the adverse circumstances that many girls who identify as Black, Brown, Indigenous, queer and gender non-conforming, with disabilities, and/or socio- economically disadvantaged face are “recast as poor personal choices, laziness, and incompetent family practices” rather than structural inequities (25). Such girls are often defined by their problems rather than their abilities.

While more conservative texts such as the junior novels provide clearly defined literary examples of normative girls, the positionality of non-normative girlhood means that representing it through a single genre or time period is both unhelpful and misleading. Instead, and as the articles in this double issue suggest, non-normative girl characters exist in every genre of children’s and YA literature, from realistic fiction and romance to dystopian fiction and historical fiction. For example, famous literary girls from earlier periods, such as Jo March and Anne Shirley, are often cited as non-normative. Although they are both white and seemingly cisgender and heterosexual, both are non-normative in the ways that they challenge stereotypical perceptions of girls. Jo wants to be a writer rather than marry (at least at first), while Anne’s imagination and desire for education often place her at odds with her expected domestic role. As we move forward in literary time – and particularly to books published in the last few decades – the list of seemingly non-normative girls grows expansively. We might include, for example, Toni Morrison’s Pecola Breedlove and Sula Peace; Angie Thomas’ Starr Carter and Bri Jackson; Justina Ireland’s Jane McKeen; Leah Johnson’s Liz Lighty; Erika L. Sanchez’s Julia Reyes; Marie Lu’s Talin Kanami; Malinda Lo’s Ash; Francesca Lia Block’s Pen and Hex; Suzanne Collins’ Rue and Katniss Everdeen; and Wab Kinew’s Bugz,⁷ among many others. Whether these girls are seemingly normative but do not behave in normative ways, or whether their identities exclude them from the category of normative girlhood, each of these “non-normative” girls share a key trait: they are all persistent.

Persistence as a celebrated trait of normative girlhood

If both normative and non-normative girls demonstrate persistence, the contrast between them is made clear in the extent to which their persistence is celebrated or censured. As the long history of literature provided to girls may suggest, persistence is most often socially-sanctioned – and applauded – when it is espoused by normative girls. Anita Harris observes that normative girls are celebrated for their “desire, determination and confidence to take charge of [their lives], seize chances, and achieve [their] goals” (1). Harris defines these figures as “can-do” girls (17–18). While she never uses the word “persistence” in her theorization of successful girls, it seems to be implied: can-do girls succeed because they do not give up until they reach their goal, after which they develop new goals, and persist in achieving them, as well.

Within a literary context, “can-do” girls fill the pages of numerous texts, appearing in early twentieth-century texts such as Pollyanna (as Marcie Panutsos Rovan’s article within this issue makes clear) or, to return to our earlier example of normative literary girls, in the mid-twentieth-century junior novels. Betty Cavanna’s junior novels, for example, are filled with can-do girls persisting in achieving skills – flying a plane, singing, training dogs, sailing, becoming an artist – that will enable them to enter future careers and support themselves financially (or at least until they are married). These are normative girl protagonists, and thus, their persistence is both praised and positioned as a defining element of what it means to be a girl.

As many of the articles in this double issue demonstrate, girls’ persistence is often celebrated only insofar as it remains in service to normalizing forces. Cavanna’s junior novels, for example, praise the persistence of their girl protagonists while simultaneously (but subtly) undermining it. The girls persist in acquiring skills, but they internalize the belief that such skill-seeking makes them less feminine. They often feel like failures because they are unable to embody normative girlhood, particularly when they compare themselves to the more popular girls. The result is a bevy of persistent protagonists who believe themselves to be inadequate until the narrative’s conclusion, when they achieve their expertise and promptly drop their persistent skill-seeking to don a beautiful dress, apply a little makeup, and melt into the arms of their hegemonically-masculine boyfriends – in other words, when they more fully assume the trappings of normative girlhood in this period. In these novels – as in many other narratives for girls – persistence is celebrated as a defining trait of normative girlhood, but normativity itself remains the true source of celebration.

Of course, while normative girls’ persistence is commended, non-normative girls’ persistence is often censured, particularly when non-normative girls refuse the normalizing forces that surround them: when they resist. Although the articles in this first issue focus on persistence, they also consider many moments of resistance, such as the resistance shown by the girl characters within Regan Postma Montano’s article on activist girls within Hemispheric Latin(x) American youth literature or Pecola Breedlove’s performance of childhood innocence as analyzed within Sarah Blanchette’s article about Pecola as a non/child in The Bluest Eye. Still, since the articles included in the second half of this double-issue make the intersection of persistence and resistance one of their defining sites of analysis, we leave this current discussion of non-normative girlhood and resistance somewhat unfinished, and ask readers to turn to the introduction of the second issue for a more comprehensive overview of girls’ resistance, particularly as it relates to the concepts of “girls’ literature” and “girlhood studies,” which are explained in greater detail there.

Part 1: “Girls Who Persist”

As this brief introduction suggests, the contributions to this volume, as well as to its successor (“Girls Who Persist … and Resist”), offer diverse perspectives on the role of persistence as it relates to girls, girlhood, and narratives for girls. Taken as a whole, this issue invites critical reflection on the political, theoretical, and literary significance of girls’ persistence, starting with our opening article: Marcie Panutsos Rovan’s “Affective Discipline, Persistence, and Power in Pollyanna.” Exploring concepts of affective discipline (the use of love as a tool for power) and moral suasion (persuasion via rhetorical appeal) within the sentimental tradition, Rovan uses Eleanor H. Porter’s Pollyanna and Pollyanna Grows Up as textual examples to demonstrate the surprising power of the orphan girl figure. While current popular culture often positions Pollyanna as annoyingly and naively saccharine, Rovan articulates the extent to which Pollyanna uses her vulnerability as a form of power that enables her to effect real social change. In doing so, Rovan reveals and considers both the influence and the limitations of affective discipline when wielded by a persistent orphan.

The relationship between affect and girls’ vulnerability also appears in Feifei Zhan’s essay, “Persistent Girl as National Propaganda: Storytelling and the Emulation of Ethnic Model in Heroic Little Sisters of the Grassland.” Zhan examines adaptations of the legend surrounding two Mongolian sisters, Longmei and Yurong, to demonstrate how the relationship between the girls’ vulnerability and seemingly heroic persistence was used during the Cultural Revolution to position them as examples of ideal citizens. She demonstrates that the “adaptation and dissemination of the story reflects how the labels of marginal, female, child, and racial minority are recruited by the dominant, patriarchal, Han chauvinistic national narrative” (522). Thus, Zhan makes visible the ways in which Longmei’s and Yurong’s individual persistence is appropriated within Communist discourse to emphasize the group. As Zhan explains, “Within these texts, persistence is highlighted not as a trait that brings individual benefits, but as something contributing to the collective good; or rather, that benefits the nation” (521–522).

The notion that girls’ persistence can be leveraged in service to others also plays a key role in Jennifer Gouck’s investigation of the reductive Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope. In “The Problematic (Im)Persistence of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl in YA Fiction and Popular Culture,” Gouck observes that a tension exists between the Pixie’s textual and cultural lives, and calls this tension “problematic (im)persistence” (526). She demonstrates how the Pixie’s existence is almost entirely dependent on the needs and desires of the teenage boys who inevitably share her narrative. Noting the discord between Millennials’ recognition of the problematic aspects of the Pixie and the failure of traditional media to recognize those same problems, Gouck suggests that the (im)persistent Pixie’s continued existence does not indicate girls’ persistence per se, but instead demonstrates “the dominance of patriarchal values against which real-life girls must persist” (540).

Contrasting the (im)persistent Pixie are activist girls of youth literature. In “Girls Save the World: Activism, Persistence, and Solidarity in Hemispheric Latin(x) American Youth Literature,” Regan Postma-Montaño uses a hemispheric scope across the Americas to explore three contemporary novels, Guadalupe García McCall’s All the Stars Denied (USA, 2018); Nuria Santiago’s Olivia, el bosque y las estrellas (Olivia, the Forest and the Stars), illustrated by Ángel Campos (Mexico, 2014); and Lola Larra’s Al sur de la Alameda (South of Alameda), illustrated by Vicente Reinamontes (Chile, 2014). Using Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of conocimiento (self-reflective processes of transformation via knowledge and awareness toward social justice action), Postma Montano makes the case for a helpful connection between the texts’ window into young people’s experiences of oppressions and real girls’ persistent activism in enacting change.

Girls’ persistent resistance to oppression is also key in Sarah Blanchette’s “Black Girlhood Persists: Pecola’s Persistence as Non/Child in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.” Observing that Black girlhood “is both a site and act of persistence,” Blanchette draws on Black Girlhood studies, Black Feminist theory, and Mad Studies to examine how Black girls exist in a paradoxical and liminal non/child position. She argues that eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove performs the tropes of childhood innocence – historically denied to Black girls, who are instead subject to adultification and corresponding hyperpunishment, hypersexualization, and anti-Black-girl violence – to insist on her right to that childhood innocence. As Blanchette reveals, Pecola’s childlike behavior, deflection of mature topics, and use of make-believe – all of which are often problematically pathologized in many adult readings of the text – in fact demonstrates Pecola’s creative coping mechanisms. Thus, Blanchette makes clear that Pecola’s claim to make-believe blue eyes and an imaginary friend is both self-care and political resistance against the conditions of white supremacy that dehumanize Black girls, including Pecola.

The culminating essay in part one of this double issue is Suhaila Meera’s “Nevertheless, They Persist: The Iconicity and Radical Politics of Malala Yousafzai,” in which Meera uses behind-the-scenes accounts from a local Pashtun journalist, Irfan Ashraf, to demonstrate the extent to which both corporate media and academia have repressed the Marxist components of Malala Yousafzai’s political history. Meera explores the overdetermined nature of Malala’s access to a global platform, investigates the New York Times’ reliance on Islamophobic and melodramatic tropes in making Malala’s youth legible to a Western audience, and considers the role of Malala’s own performances in demonstrating how “she learned to emote in adherence with hegemonic notions of innocent childhood” (587).⁸ In so doing, Meera reads Malala as both constructed victim and performer and moves “beyond singular narratives of [Malala’s] iconicity and consider instead the complex network of actors, affects, and aspirations involved in the creation of her persona” (587).

From Pollyanna, Chinese nationalist heroines, and (im)persistent Pixies to hemispheric Latinx American activist girls, Pecola Breedlove, and Malala Yousafzai, the girls within these articles act as representational portraits of the many varied ways by which persistence is positioned in relation to girlhood. In the second issue, they will be joined by contributors’ explorations of upper-caste Hindu girls, fairy tale heroines with disabilities, sexual assault survivors, Indigenous girls within the settler colonial landscape of Canada, punk Mexican American girls, and Black girls in Afrofuturist YA literature, each of whom persist and resist. As these articles reveal, girlhood persistence is constructed through narratives that variously celebrate, support, tolerate, constrain, and punish girls. Such persistence is positioned as overtly positive and as a defining trait of girlhood, yet it is also political and complicated by binary-based tensions and by the categories of normative and non-normative girlhood. Together, the contributors in this special double issue of Women’s Studies identify, explore, question, and disassemble the many narratives by which persistence is constructed in girls, in girlhood, and in girls’ literature. Their girls may face multiple obstacles and forces of oppression; nevertheless, they persist.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Senate Rule XIX stipulates that “No senator in debate shall, directly or indirectly, by any form of words impute to another Senator or to other Senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a Senator” (“Senate Fistfight”).

² The rule McConnell claimed Warren violated is Rule XIX. It is worth nothing that the rule was created in 1902, when, from the Senate floor, John McLaurin, the Junior Senator from South Carolina, called the state’s Senior Senator Ben Tillman a liar. Tillman punched McLaurin in retaliation. The chamber descended into chaos as the members tried to separate the two. Following this altercation, both men were censured, and the Senate created rule XIX, which states, “No senator in debate shall, directly or indirectly, by any form of words impute to another Senator or to other Senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a Senator” (“Senate Fistfight”).

³ We refer to Alice of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Jo March of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Anne Shirley of L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, and Cassie Logan of Mildred D. Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.

⁴ In the dedication page to the 2017 picture book, Chelsea Clinton makes direct reference to “Nevertheless, she persisted” by stating that the text is “Inspired by Senator Elizabeth Warren and in celebration of all women who persist every day.”

⁵ In their Introduction to The Girls’ History and Culture Reader: The Nineteenth-Century, Forman-Brunnell and Paris cite Lucy Larcom as an example of such a girl. As a child, Lucy lived in a small Massachusetts town, where she attended school and helped her mother care for the home and her younger siblings. When her father died, her mother was “unable adequately support her children at home,” and she moved the family to Lowell, Massachusetts. She opened a boarding house while “Lucy left school to become a factory worker at a textile mill,” while continuing to help her mother run the boarding house (1). We include this example to emphasize that girls have long been expected to support their families, both through domestic work in the home and through paid work outside of the home.

⁶ In these first three traits, “pious, submissive, and virtuous,” we refer to virtues extolled by the “Cult of True Womanhood,” a concept developed by historian Barbara Welter that specifically applies to women and girls in the nineteenth-century United States. However, along with others who study girls and girlhood, we contend that girls all over the globe are often expected to uphold these virtues in some form or another.

⁷ We refer to Pecola Breedlove of The Bluest Eye and Sula Peace of Sula, both adult novels that feature girl protagonists by Toni Morrison. We also refer to Starr Carter of The Hate U Give and Bri Jackson of On the Come Up, both by Angie Thomas; Jane McKeen of Justina Ireland’s Dread Nation duology; Liz Lighty of Leah Johnson’s You Should See Me in a Crown; Julia Reyes of Erika L. Sanchez’s I’m Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter; Talin Kamani of Marie Lu’s Skyhunter; Ash of Malinda Lo’s titular novel; Penelope and Hex of Francesca Lia Block’s Love in the Time of Global Warming; Rue and Katniss of Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games Trilogy; and Bugz of Wab Kinew’s Walking in Two Worlds.

⁸ Rather than using her surname, we refer to Malala by her forename. Although we recognize that doing so is problematic, we use the same rationale that NPR managing editor Mark Memmott articulates: namely, that minors are usually referred to by their first name, and that since Malala was fifteen when she was shot in 2012, reporters following AP’s style at the time referred to her as “Malala.” She is no longer a minor, but Memmott observes that “One major reason not to change yet is that she’s known as ‘Malala’ around the world.”