Abortion is front and centre in revealing documentary
In the summer of 2022, days before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, some 500 high school girls gathered in Missouri for a weeklong mock government camp in which they elected their own governor and seated an all-female Supreme Court that would rule on their own bodies.
Not everyone came from the same part of the political spectrum or agreed about abortion. But, for a few days, theirs were the voices that counted. It was during that week that documentary filmmakers Jesse Moss and Amanda Mcbaine chose to film the followup to their award-winning 2020 film Boys State.
“It felt like we had gone from this sort of — not quite utopia — but this imagined, wonderful world where we had control of our bodies and we were involved in these conversations,” says Nisha Murali, one of the teens in the film. “And then it just got ripped away from us.”
Girls State is, like 2020's Boys State, an election-year documentary where national political discourse is experienced and reflected through coming-of-age teenagers.
“The programs are uniquely sensitive instruments, picking up these frequencies of American political life. It's not a surprise that abortion would be front and centre in that conversation,” says Moss. “We knew the court would hear a single case. We prayed it wouldn't be speed limits — which has happened.”
While there are many corollaries, Girls State is, in compelling and illuminating ways, not a twin to Boys State.
The Boys State program, run by the American Legion since 1935, is more well known and better funded. (Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney and Rush Limbaugh are past participants. So is Mark Wahlberg.) The 2020 documentary, which chronicled the Texas Boys State, sought to capture whether the political attitudes of former U.S. president Donald Trump had filtered into young men. The results were a riveting microcosm.
Emily Worthmore signed up for Girls State expecting an experience like she saw in that film. Worthmore, an ambitious, conservative-leaning young woman from the St. Louis suburbs, arrived ready to engage in political debates.
“But ours, because of the way it played out, it wasn't set up for us to be having these big debates and be fighting and all of that,” says Worthmore. “Instead it was like: So why is it like this?”
What Worthmore and others realized was that the system of Girls State wasn't the same as the Boys State being held across the campus at Lindenwood University. The girls' program was funded by a separate organization, the American Legion Auxiliary, had a dress code that some deemed too strict and didn't schedule sports activities the way the boys' did. There was a camp cheer for the girls but not the boys. The Missouri governor attended the final ceremony at Boys State, but not Girls State.
As they do in so many facets of life, the women of Girls State found themselves simultaneously pursuing a goal while being keenly aware of limitations placed on them.
“To me, one of the powers of this movie is making an invisible thing that's baked into the structure of everything visible,” says Mcbaine. “I love that that then becomes part of the conversation after watching this film.”
There's a bond that connects the young women of Girls State. The film isn't short on tension, disagreement or competition. But it's more marked by moments of supportiveness. One counsellor addresses an assembly: “We all have, in our own different ways, grown up in a world where we've never seen a female president.”
“Even in going into Boys State, people said, `It's going to be Lord of the Flies.' And to some degree that is what you see. They're competitive and they lash out. But more what we saw — and it was overwhelming with Girls State — was the need to connect,” Mcbaine says.
“As women we all kind of cloak ourselves in this idea of who we're supposed to be ...” Murali says. “For me, a big part ... is this image of being very competent, very knowledgeable ... Girls State for me was about trying to figure out how much of that was real.”