Girl Power and the Consumer: Part I

In 1999, Jancee Dunn followed the lives of twelve teenage girls for Rolling Stone magazine. All of the girls were from Connecticut, with parents firmly in the middle class. All of the girls aged between fourteen and sixteen. They lived typical suburban lives. They attended school regularly, after school they hung out in their rooms gossiping or talking on the phone. When they could, they liked going to the mall. At the mall these girls go to, the popular place to hang out is the Liberty Tree. There they did another typical teen girl thing, talk about cute guys. “Angel from Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” one girl says.  “Joshua Jackson,” another girl yells out, as she takes a sip from her iced coffee with whipped cream, chocolate shavings, caramel, cinnamon and vanilla syrup all while Lilith music plays in the background. On average teen girls will visit the mall 54 times a year. Of the 31 million teenagers, the largest in the nation’s history, teen girls spent 60 billion dollars. The girls in the Rolling Stone article favorite stores are Delias, The Limited Too, Gap, Pacific Sunwear and spent between twenty and one hundred dollars each time they visited. Shopping for clothing is nothing new. Girls have been doing it since the invention of premade clothing in the 1920s. While the stores are new, nothing else seems to be any different from that of past generation. In fact, these girls’ lives are considerably different from that of previous generations. These girls could see films and watch television shows that showed girls and women in empowered roles. They could listen to music made by women singing about empowerment. At the mall, they could shop in stores solely designed for girls that promoted empowerment and sold the latest fashion trends.  Rolling Stone wrote the twenty-two page article on their lives, because of the evens that happened when these girls were much younger and was still affecting them, yet in a much different way.

During the early 1990s, a new wave of feminist activism, known collectively as the third wave and consisting of many different organizations and individuals took place. These groups and individuals aggressively worked to better society by empowering girls to face the realities that surrounded them in all aspects of their lives. The influential reports commissioned by the American Association of University Women’s (AAUW) illustrated the disparities still facing girls in American society. Guided by these reports the Ms. Foundation created Take Your Daughter to Work Day in 1991. As Mary C. Wilson president of the Ms. Foundation in the early 1990s stated, “Girls realize the world is not listening to them nor valuing them. The Ms. Foundation instituted the program to build girl’s self-esteem by showing them the world did care about what they had to say. An interview of ten young girls taken part in the program demonstrated exactly what the program attempted to change. The reporter asked the girls why only girls should take part in the program. All of the girls argued girls are better behaved, they know how to sit still and be calm. One ten year old stated, “Girls were not as rambunctious and were able to be polite and quite.”  Girls in America were being raised to be silent, polite and most of all not to bother anyone. It was an absurdity third wave feminists worked to correct. The girls and women of the Riot Grrrl movement actively contradicted that idea. Begun in the early 1990s, the movement formed by girls under the primary belief of “girl love, not competition.” They were the embodiment of the Ms. Foundation’s actions to empower girls to voice their opinions.

The Riot Girls fought against discrimination based on gender, race, class, sexual orientation, religion, and appearance. They coined the phrase Grrrl Power to encapsulate the movement’s ideals as well as reclaiming the word girl from its historic meaning of voiceless and benign individuals within society. The definition of girl power is, being able to: “say what you want to say and not be afraid, voice your mind and opinion, to express yourself in any shape or form, to wear what you want to wear and look the way you want to without being degraded for it. It’s about not letting anyone judge you, because it’s not about limitations!”  As the movement developed, marketers would pickup on the word girl power, distort it by creating limitations and use it as a marketing tool for girls, but during the early 1990s, the meaning stayed true to its original definition.

These two groups have had an incredible impact upon our society.  The psychiatrist Dr. Mary Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia brought the ideas of third wave feminists to anyone who had a library card. In her book, she outlines the struggles facing girls in American society in the early 1990s. Her book based on revelations made while treating her patients is to the third wave as Betty Freidan’s The Feminist Mystique is to the second wave.  Following in the footsteps of Pipher, publishers put out numerous other books that educated the public about the problems facing girls or books specifically aimed at girls urging them to express themselves. Third wave feminism had exposed numerous problems in society, while third wave feminist exposed the problems for girls many began to ask themselves if this is happening to girls what is happening to boys. In the book, Real Boys : Rescuing our Sons From the Myths of Boyhood, William Pollack examines this question. Diane Ravitch wrote about the subject for Forbes magazine in 1996. In her article, she counters several of the AAUW’s claims from “How Schools Shortchange Girls,” by pointing out more boys kill themselves while girls are more likely to go to college and graduate at a high frequency than boys. Clearly, girls were not being short changed, yet ironically without the AAUW’s reports, she probably would never have written the article. Her article was very anti-feminist, but she followed the same ideas many feminists have, by simply pointing out problems in society.

The movement was widely accepted and put into practice. All across America, mothers and fathers took their daughters to work. In schools, teachers made aware of the inequalities in schools through the AAUW reports, begun encouraging girls to speak up and express themselves.  In 1992, Girls Incorporated updated the Girls Bill of Rights. The original version outlined rights every girl should have to prepare her, “for her future all-important job of homemaking and motherhood.”  The 1992 version was a dramatic shift away from its original version encapsulating the ideas of equality for all, the updated version states, “Girls have a right to be themselves – people first and females second – and to resist pressure to behave in sex-stereotyped ways.

As the movement developed and gathered more followers, the idea of empowerment and equality entered the consumer market through astute marketers. Historians, Betsy Isreal and Kelly Schrum, have noted that these marketers historically followed social trends to sell products.

On the silver screen, the American consumer could see numerous movies depicting the virtues of third wave feminism. Betsy Isreal has pointed out in her book Bachelor Girl, this was not always the case. The role of women and girls in films has changed over the years to be in tune with social realities.  During the depression of the 1930s, films depicted women as being “heartless.” Women stole jobs from men and casually jumped from one man to another depending on who could provide for them. In the post World War Two era the “holdout” film, popular with teen bobby-soxers and reflecting the countries fears of the rising divorce rate, depicted women settling for any man, even it he was irresponsible or less than satisfactory. However, in 1991, the change had begun. Films depicted women and girls as empowered. Americans watched Clarisse Starling outwit the psychotic Hannibal Lector to catch a serial killer in Silence of the Lambs. The widely popular film grossed over 130 million dollars at the box office. In 2000, the film Coyote Ugly was released and grossed nearly 61 million dollars. Thousands of Americans watched Violet Sanford, an aspiring singer, succeed in becoming a songwriter after receiving the help of her friends and coworkers from the bar she worked out and where she was forced to face the inequalities of life represented by the customers of the bar.   While these are just two examples, one can easily find films that depict women and girls as people first and females second. Betty Shutt, president of marketing at Universal Pictures, summed up why these types of movies were being made, “by sheer bulk, the young girls are driving cultural tastes now  Having been directly affected by the actions of third wave feminists, preteen and teen girls spent millions collectively on films they could relate too. Yet marketing executives failed to see the connection. Seen more for their buying potential, Teenage Research Unlimited predicted girls would spend 84 billion dollars in 1998. Titanic the widely successful film about an upper-class girl, Rose Kalvert, who rejects the classism exuded by her peers and parents and falls in love with a poor third class boy, Jack. The character of Rose represents the ideology of the riot grrl movement, but Women and Amp Marketing having analyzed the reasons why the movie was so popular suggested, “the twin themes of romance and independence,” and not those put forth by third wave feminists, should be used in any campaign geared to girls

In music, a similar change occurred during the 1990s. Meredith Brooks released the song Bitch in 1997 and famously covered by Alanis Morrisette. In it Brooks sang, “I’m a Bitch, I’m a Lover, I’m a child, I’m a Mother,  I’m a sinner, I’m a saint, I do not feel ashamed, I’m your hell, I’m your dream, I’m nothing in between,  you know you wouldn’t want it any other way.” In the song Brooks articulates girl power to her listeners. Other bands did the same. L7, Bikini Kill, Hole, Garbage, Bratmobile, among others. encompassed what girl power meant.  In 1996, arguably the most popular girl band was introduced to America. Baby, Scary, Sporty, Posh and Gerri, the Spice Girls for better or worse exploded in the United States. While some may argue against their sexual nature or the fact the father and son management team Bob and Chris Herbert created the group, their lyrics about girl power resonated with millions of girls and remained true. Sales of their first two albums, five million in total in 1998, helped women for the first time in history, make up 51 percent of music buyers. In the late 1990s, as women became a larger segment of music buyers, retailers took notice. In an interview by NPR, Don Jefferey Merchants and marketing editor for Billboard magazine pointed out what was changing and why it was. Based upon market research, females, undaunted by male dominated record stores, were shopping for music in larger chain stores, Walmart and Kmart for example, where they felt more comfortable.   Women and girls, Jefferey explained, felt empowered to listen to females like Alanis Morristte, Jewel and the Spice Girls.

As we will see in the next segment of Girl Power and the Consumer, women and girls commanding such a large percentage of music buyers will have a dramatic and lasting impact upon the lives of teen and preteen girls.

Click here for Part Two

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