By Amanda Young
Illustrations by Kevin Necessary

Everything that is strong and true in the eyes of a girl eventually turns to glass. When a little girl grows up, she finds her place in a society that adopts women as girls. In everyday language, grown women play on the girls’ team, wear girls’ clothing and drive a girl’s car. Grown men have girlfriends but don’t take orders from girls. Men don’t show their emotions or throw a ball like girls do.

Girl terms slip into conversation without much thought. Yet both sexes recognize a pretty girl or a girl-next-door when they see her.

Gwen Stefani, a fed-up California girl from the pop band No Doubt, lyrically summarized the plight of young women in a patriarchal society: "I’m just a girl in the world/I’m livin’ in captivity ... and I’ve had it up to here." Stefani, a 20-something bleached blonde who can be seen bouncing around stage in a halter top and combat boots, fronts a male band with grace and audacity. And she almost always reveals her navel.

Stefani, and the class of rising female performers, takes this girl business seriously. In the early 1990s, a community of female rock bands cultivated a movement known as Girl Power. Girl Power was more than fashion. Female rockers were promoting individuality and self-respect. So when the Spice Girls invaded America just a few years later, young women received mixed messages surrounding the new pop-inspired Girl Power slogan. With their separate Spice identities - Sexy, Sporty, Scary, Baby and Posh - and body-conscious style, the group claims Girl Power is what they’re all about.

The Spice Girls propagated a teen sensation that has been criticized for its lack of integrity. At one end, Girl Power is the subject of a fashion trend in which "Girl Power" clothes and accessories have been strategically marketed to teens. As a feminist movement, Girl Power seems to be a superficial attempt because it ignores social barriers, such as abuse or the intangible glass ceiling, still confronting women. Scholars and feminists weigh the positive and negative implications differently but agree that its only staying power is the power of marketing.

Real Girl Power started as part of a larger movement, says Jeannie Ludlow, a pop culture professor at Bowling Green State University.

"The term ‘girl power’ comes from the Riot Grrrl music seven or eight years ago, when we started to see women rock bands like L7, Babes in Toyland and Riot Grrrls," Ludlow says.

Girl Power was first expressed in music zines, which are small handmade magazines typically circulated in counter-culture movements.

"A lot of the zines I saw in the early ‘90s were associated with Riot Grrrls, and they were put together by young girls talking about women influencing their lives," Ludlow says. "The issues dealt strongly with family, violence, incest, rape and abusive family members. They also wrote a lot about how our culture abuses women. For instance, there was a serious question of a chemical used in tampons and the possible dangers of using tampons."

Ludlow says some zines were written about being a fat or a pretty adolescent girl.

"There was this huge movement of young girls treating feminist issues," she says. "A lot of zines included sections that talked about being fans of Riot Grrrls or L7. That’s the music zine connection. It definitely wasn’t considered a mainstream group."

Kathleen Hanna of the Olympia, Wash., all-female punk band Bikini Kill has been linked as the founder of the Riot Grrrl movement, says Molly Merryman, director of the Women’s Resource Center at Kent State.

"Hanna became the spokesperson for Riot Grrrl," Merryman says, adding that Hanna published newsletters and encouraged women to start their own Riot Grrrl chapters. "It started as college and high school women involved in the art scene were pushing toward feminism. Even Courtney Love’s band, Hole, was considered a Riot Grrrl band.

"The almost scary femininity was how these women were dressing. The look of baby doll dresses and combat boots became a uniform. Then there were Riot Grrrl groups across the country, from Olympia to Athens, Ga."

By the time anyone in Kent caught on, the Riot Grrrl movement had already ended, Merryman says.

"The name still exists, but it became a record label thing, that any female band was all Riot Grrrl," she says. "Riot Grrrl has been dead for at least six years, and yet the Lilith Fair was tagged as Riot Grrrl."

Merryman says the Spice Girls were created for safe marketing reasons, much like the Monkees were picked to counter the Beatles.

"The Spice Girls are run by male managers," she says. "Men write their music. Even Joan Jett and the Runaways were created like a sexy group, but the women wrote their own music. The Spice Girls were not auditioned as musicians. They were supposed to be racially balanced and have different body types. But you have a woman running around in pigtails who calls herself ‘Baby.’ Is that empowering to women?"

The Spice Girls borrowed and capitalized on the idea of "Girl Power," even changed the spelling, and reinvented it to be marketed to teen-age girls, Merryman says.

"They take on the title and claim that Girl Power is what they’re all about, but the spelling is different," she says. "The Spice Girls only appropriated the sound, whereas the Riot Grrrls appropriated the spelling. The title, ‘Grrrl,’ really connotes growling."

Riot Grrrl bands conveyed messages of autonomy and sexual freedom, but the Spice Girls play with the image of women as sexual objects, Merryman says.

"L7 has songs about using men and making fun," she says. "The message is female-controlled sexuality. They play with the character of a teen-age slut, but the girl is careful. To have it where women are sexually controlling is very threatening to most people."

Merryman says the Spice Girls, despite their diluted brand of Girl Power, could be considered a movement, depending upon how the term "movement" is defined.

"Political meaning often becomes fashion," she says. "When there’s political momentum, it becomes something that’s on the cover of fashion magazines. The same thing happened in the ’60s with the hippie movement or just two years ago with the African Kente cloth. Kaufmann’s was selling a line of clothes that was designed after the traditional African Kente cloth. Or look at tattoos, piercing, Doc Martens - these were all over-marketed. This is how a capitalist society deals with oppression. You don’t oppress it. You mock it and sell it."

Contrary to the pop-based, sugar-coated Spice Girls, the Lilith Fair was a grass-roots effort. In 1997, singer and songwriter Sarah McLachlan organized the first all-female, summer music tour.

McLachlan named the event for Lilith, Adam’s first wife in Jewish legend. Unlike Eve, Lilith was not spawned from Adam’s rib. She was created by God out of dust, just as was Adam. But as Adam and Lilith were joined together, they began to quarrel, and Adam said it was Lilith’s duty to obey him. Lilith said they were both equal and that she would not be submissive to Adam.

The Lilith Fair distinguished itself among various sweaty, male-dominated music tours.

"The reason for the success of Lilith was a culmination of certain key women having the strength to put that together," Merryman says. "Lollapalooza was meant to be an expression of alternative music, but it didn’t include any female performers. Perry Farrel started Lollapalooza, but he was bought out, and it became so commercial. There are more and more women in the music industry. That’s what created the Lilith Fair. But it’s interesting to see what will happen, if it will end up like Lollapalooza."

Merryman says the Lilith Fair was based on marketing from the beginning.

"You could buy the outfit that looked like what Paula Cole was wearing on stage," she says. "It already started off with a much more capitalist bend."

Girl Power is a multi-faceted phenomenon, says Jean Byrne, an associate professor of health education at Kent State. Byrne, who teaches a human sexuality course, recognizes Girl Power as a movement.

"There are different standards on the level of attractiveness," Byrne says. "When it gets in schools, it’s accepted younger and younger. I think girls will grow up with this. This feminism isn’t moving from girls up to women; it’s doing the reverse. It’s transmitting down to young women."

Byrne says women athletes and musicians are a major impetus on the Girl Power movement.

"Many girls are staying in sports," she says. "Before, girls’ only claim to fame was their boyfriends. The Nike ads empower women because now they have some of the same adventures and accomplishments. Sports leads to self-esteem and self-efficacy in young women."

Byrne adds that the rise of the Women’s National Basketball Association and women’s hockey have helped to change the perceptions of women.

"But we still have the expectation that we want our female athletes to be gorgeous," she says.

Byrne says Girl Power is providing more options for women but is so in-your-face that neither women nor men win the power struggle.

"This doesn’t make a level playing field for boys and girls," she says. "It would be nice if we could elevate both groups. Maybe when the pendulum swings that far, it comes back to a balance. With the burning of the bra in the ‘60s and ‘70s, there was a lot of hatred toward men. Sexual harassment is a case where the pendulum is swinging. Hopefully it’s starting to swing back, and we’ll see some improvement in the relationships between men and women."

Merryman says Girl Power has the potential to instill positive attitudes in young women, but it receives a lot of resentment from second-wave feminists who make a compelling argument: Don’t call me girl.

"Positive attitudes about Girl Power do exist," Merryman says. "There is a certain population of young women with rising expectations, but they’re not getting it through Girl Power. And some simply see it as fashion. Pop culture phenomena spin out rather quickly."

Ludlow says mostly 10- to 15-year-old girls listen to Spice Girls. There are some fans between 15 and 20 but few older than 20.

"That might be explained by who the movement’s audience is," Ludlow says. "Young girls get easily excited about trends. The Spice Girls didn’t coin the term ‘Girl Power,’ but they used it very effectively in the media. It may be that we see the value in it for younger women, and we may use it for our daughters, friends or relatives.

"I’m in my 30s, and women spend so much time trying to get people to stop calling them girls. As a culture tries to take back some power, they use those terms the way they want to."

Are women, in a sense, a culture trying to take back power?

Girls have a rich bank of female role models, says Susan Roxburgh, an assistant professor of sociology at Kent State.

"It’s important to remember that young girls have a plethora of women role models, from women scientists to Hillary Clinton, in every walk of life," Roxburgh says. "There’s no shortage of empowered women."

Roxburgh says she perceives Girl Power as a commercial endeavor more than a movement.

"Youth culture gets eaten up by the mainstream," she says.

"The Spice Girls may be positive, but they’re pretty trivializing as role models in the sense that they speak for influence."

Chrissie Hynde, a Cleveland native and former Kent State student, has said her success was just a matter of timing, and that she doesn’t consider herself a pioneer.

Hynde put it this way in an interview for Angry Women in Rock, volume one: "I’ve been asked endlessly about being a female in a man’s field, and it’s tedious because I didn’t think it was a man’s field. I was in it, for a start."