What was millennial girl power really about?
The 1990s and the following decade were, it is widely agreed, a bad time to be a girl. Which is strange, because a girl seemed like the best thing you could be then. Certainly better than being a woman. Not as good as being a boy or a man, of course, but since those were out of the question (gender fluidity was still a nascent proposition), you might as well lean into girlhood. For millennial girls like me and Sophie Gilbert (a Pulitzer-nominated staff writer on the Atlantic), this was a confusing period. On the one hand, girls were everywhere. We became teenagers to chants of ‘girl power!’, and later
