Why Are We So Afraid of Adolescent Voices?
... and how to find the courage to support real power for teens in schools and society by Dana Anderson
Written by Dana Anderson for Provocations Magazine.
On a recent trip to Washington D.C., I visited the Women’s Equality Museum, a modest building that houses the bold stories of brave suffragists who fought for women’s right to vote.
What now seems like an obvious right of a huge group of people wasn’t obvious at all just over 100 years ago. Women were arrested and even force fed on hunger strikes for peacefully using their voices to demand the right to have real decision-making power in a free society.
Among the museum’s artifacts, a tattered cotton banner captured my attention most:
“THE YOUNG ARE AT THE GATES”, it declared. One week after the first picketers were arrested in front of The White House in 1917, this slogan appeared in the publication The Suffragist, along with this declaration:
“What is the potent spirit of youth? Is it not the spirit of revolt, of rebellion against senseless and useless and deadening things? Most of all, against injustice, which is of all stupid things the stupidest? …The old stiff minds must give way. The old selfish minds must go. Obstructive reactionaries must move on. The young are at the gates!”
The woman who wrote this slogan, Lavinia Dock, forcefully asserted her belief that the way to clear the decks of old, bad ideas was to support the youth in rebelling against these “senseless, useless, and deadening things.” In this case, disenfranchisement of women.
The suffrage movement, which eventually broke through centuries of systemic exclusion of half the population, brought women into the formal social power structures that shape their lives and society as a whole. Similarly, I have long wondered: What will it take for adolescents to be welcomed into the formal power structures that shape their lives and our futures?