30 Girls in 27 Countries Weigh In On Girlhood Today

Girlhood. It’s a time for exploration, learning, and adapting. To capture some of those changes and transitions, former CNN and Washington Post reporter Masuma Ahuja compiled the stories of 30 girls from 27 countries around the world in a scrapbook-style book. Girlhood: Teens Around the World in Their Own Voices features personal diary entries and photographs, and will be published on February 9.

Ahuja talked to the FBomb about why she felt it was important to feature these girls’ stories in their own voices and what she learned from them.

Your book Girlhood: Teens Around the World in Their Own Voices started as a series for The Lily. Where did the concept come from?

I'm a reporter, and I dreamed up and pitched the series to The Lily when I was traveling around South Asia, reporting on women's and girls' lives. So many of the stories I wrote were framed, as most journalistic work on girlhood is, on gender-based violence. In the news, girls' stories from around the world are told primarily through the lens of victimization, sexualization, and exceptional girls fighting back.

But this isn't what girlhood, as I understood it, have lived it, and was witnessing it, looked like. I wanted to know — what do girls dream about in different places? What are their conversations with their friends like? What are their relationships with their families like? What do they stay up nights worrying about? These weren't questions I could find answers to anywhere, and these were the stories I wanted to tell and to read.

The only way to find out, of course, is to ask girls. So that's what I did.

Why was it important to focus on the stories of teen girls around the world?

Teen girls are such a broad, big group. They're not a monolith in the slightest. (How could millions of people be a single thing!) And still, we have so little understanding of how they move through the world, what they spend their days thinking about and doing, and what they envision for themselves.

Big-picture data makes it abundantly clear that investing in girls is good for our world: The health, education, and success of girls so often determines the future of communities. But still, we don't have spaces that give voice to girls and their perspectives, needs, concerns, hopes.

Why did you want to make sure they shared their stories themselves?

Because who better to tell girls' stories than girls themselves? I want to give girls agency in framing, shaping, and sharing their stories. I want to amplify their voices.

Girls’ stories, in media and in culture, are primarily told by adults, by men, and if we're looking internationally, by creators from the West. I wanted to create a book where girls would own and tell their own stories. A book that girls could pick up and feel seen on the pages, because the stories and voices were of people just like them — whether down the road or across the world.

How did you go about identifying girls from all over the world to contribute to the book?

I wanted to be inclusive of a broad range of countries, circumstances, identities, and experiences, even if I couldn't be comprehensive. Beyond that, I was looking, mostly, for girls who wanted to share their stories.

What common themes came across during the process of compiling the stories?

We all know a lot about the ways in which the mere fact of being a girl in the world is often a political thing: Girls are silenced, shamed, opportunities restricted, denied access to education, married young, face violence simply because they are girls. But while these power dynamics provide a backdrop to life, so much of the real stuff that happens in girls lives and what they're thinking about is universal. For example, every girl talked about her friends and the central role they played in her life. Many of them — in Cambodia and China and Mongolia and Kazakhstan and Kenya — left home to pursue an education and big, big dreams, sometimes crossing borders and sometimes staying in a dorm in the nearest big city. And they all shared so much optimism for what they hoped their futures and lives would look like.

What did you learn about being a teen girl in today's world?

In putting together the book, I was reminded constantly of my own girlhood, and my own adulthood as a 20-something woman. Wherever in the world they were, their words, their struggles, and their aspirations consistently felt so familiar — from a fear of walking home alone at night, to a frustration that boys always won awards, to the joys of spending a day laughing with friends.

The book includes context about each individual girl’s country, community, or circumstances to help put their lives and words in context. In doing that reporting, I was reminded of the immense power of girls; an investment in their education and potential is a driving force to grow economies. They are cultural taste-makers, the ones whose likes define pop culture in every generation. Girls' education is said to be one of the most promising and effective investments to fight climate change.

Did any stories particularly stand out to you? Which ones and why?

As I hope will be the case for every reader of this book, I caught glimpses of my own experiences in pieces of every girl's story, and those were the parts that stood out to me.

For example, I found my own thoughts and experiences reflected on the page when Raksa from Cambodia wrote about missing her family when living far away from them; when Varvara from Russia wrote about a longing to move to leave her hometown where life and the future felt predictable, so she could chase her ambitions; and when Shanai from the United States wrote about wanting a future full of family and books.

Anything else you would like to add or think people should know about?

Just as the series in The Lily made me realize the need for the book, the book left me hungry to create more spaces to invest in girls' voices and to give them a platform to be able to publish and read each other's stories. So that's what I'm creating: storytelling workshops for girls around the world — a media organization that publishes stories by and for girls everywhere. We're just launching a pilot, but already we have girls from more than 20 countries signed up, workshops running, lots of stories are in the pipeline, and a virtual, international community of girls is budding: www.girlhoodstories.com.