Girl power: Celebrating and reclaiming girlhood

Pictured: Ashley Remer. Image: supplied.

Combatting misogyny is a long and complex project. It begins, Ashley Remer says, with girlhood.

The PhD candidate in the Interdisciplinary and Cross-Cultural Research program at the Australian National University is the founder of Girl Museum, the first and only museum in the world dedicated to celebrating girlhood. She’s also the co-author of Exploring American Girlhood through 50 Historic Treasures, published in May. 

Ashley’s PhD research is centred on art history and how girls are represented – or not represented – in museums, and in art and history exhibitions and collections. She chose to come to ANU partly because it is to her, “definitely the best university in this part of the world”. It also helped that Professor Kylie Message, her thesis supervisor, is someone she considers one of the top scholars in her field. 

According to Ashley, there are only a few art scholars who focus on children, and almost none on girls and girlhood specifically. 

“For the most part, people who look at girls and girlhood are in sociology, psychology, education, media studies, literature,” she says. “A bit in history. And nobody in art.”

Ashley will gather data on how other art historians perceive and define girls – and if they even do that.

“Do they even think about them?” she asks. “What can we do to start the movement and that whole de-misogynising process?”

“I believe it starts with recognizing the value of girls and which creates an empathy towards girls and their experiences so we aren’t able to harm them in ways that we do as grown-ups in the context of misogyny.”
 

Head Girl

In 2009, Ashley was in New York and had struggled to land a job in the museum sector in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. So she started her own museum. A virtual one: Girl Museum.

Ashley, who grew up in the United States, has always been interested in children and girls in art, as well as children’s advocacy. This had its roots in her own childhood, as her family worked in children’s rights.

“I grew up in the 70s and had a t-shirt that said, ‘Kids have rights too!’ Ashley recalls. “It was that kind of background.”

Her experiences working at The Metropolitan Museum of Art as a security officer were also formative. Kids would approach her asking where they were represented in the Met. She also often attended to the Little Dancer of Fourteen Years sculpture by Degas. At the time, it wasn’t inside a case and people would lift up the dancer’s skirt, setting off an alarm.

“It made me think about how a statue isn’t even safe from pawing hands,” Ashley says. “That kind of coalesced into this idea of, does how we treat girls have anything to do with their representation? So that was the sort of philosophical basis for Girl Museum.”

Since 2009, Girl Museum has had almost 200 interns from all over the world who contribute to its exhibitions, blog, podcast, and more. Girl Museum has around 54,000 visitors each year, and an advisory board consisting of “internationally renowned women in academia and the museum world”.

In a similar manner to the project of de-colonising museums around the world, Girl Museum is working to de-misogynise museum collections. Its mission, Ashley says, is three-fold: “It’s about wanting to get some of this work out there and doing the research that no one seemed interested in doing,” she says. “So, looking at girls in art through an anthropological lens and through a contemporary issue lens, giving girls a platform for them to speak and share their own stories, and giving them opportunities.”


Sites and objects of girlhood

Exploring American Girlhood through 50 Historic Treasures tells the hidden history and significance of American sites and objects associated with girls and girlhood. 

The first entry in the book is Upward Sun River, an archaeological site located in what is now Alaska. DNA testing on the remains of two young girls discovered there shed light on the migration to the United States of the population that Native Americans descended from. 

In terms of objects, one example Ashley mentions is the statue of Abraham Lincoln in the United States Capitol rotunda. It was created by sculptor Vinnie Ream, the first female artist commissioned to create a work of art for the United States government. She was then 18 years old. 

“We wanted to kind of bring out, like, ‘Hey, girls did this stuff’,” Ashley says.

The book also uses objects to draw attention to the later life of women whose stories are arrested in their girlhood – such as Helen Keller. 

“People don’t know anything about her adulthood,” Ashley says. “So she’s got the opposite problem. She’s kind of fixed as a girl though she became quite problematic in her adulthood for people who don’t like communism.”

Ashley and her co-author Tiffany Isselhardt, Girl Museum’s Program Developer, each included objects that had meaning to them and their peers when they were teenagers. For Tiffany, who is a decade younger than Ashley, that was the Rookie Yearbook One. For Ashley, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume was a formative text. 

“I don’t know who I would be without that book,” Ashley says, laughing. 

Although it was a major touchstone in the 1980s, it still has contemporary relevance: “It’s still given and bought as the definitive book for those sorts of issues because no one’s really written one since.”

Its continued importance aligns with Ashley and Tiffany’s goal of creating a throughline and overarching narrative within their book, to show how history builds on past events and how things happen in cycles.

“That was really important to us, to show a continuity and how girls’ lives have both changed and not changed, while also wanting to bring it as close as we could to the present to show how girls are still, through new tools like social media, still being amazing and affecting change,” says Ashley.

As someone who has lived in New Zealand on and off, and completed her masters degree at Auckland University, Ashley is conscious of how her book might translate to an Australian audience. 

“My hope is that it resonates for the stories themselves, but also to take on board the possibilities for in Australia. Like, how many girls’ stories are out there here that need to be sought?”

And there are a lot of stories out there. We just haven’t valued them historically or value them enough today, Ashley says.

“For art historians, curators, and registrars – we need to step up and seek out these stories and actively collect them; make them a part of what’s going on to build both local narratives as well as national narratives. 

“That’s the way girls will start to be more valued – to have them in the picture to see, yeah, they’ve been around this whole time.”

 

Written by Evana Ho / ANU