Here’s a fun thought experiment: instead of entrusting the future of American democracy to one of two old men, what if you put it in the hands of 500 teenage girls instead? Girls State, the sister documentary to Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss’s award-winning 2020 film Boys State, follows the events of a week-long civic engagement camp where high-schoolers create an all-female democracy from scratch.

A feminist manifesto is much easier to compose than a real solution to culturally ingrained inequality

Girls State and Boys State programmes have given argumentative American teens an education in the necessary evil of politics since the 1930s. Each state has its own variations of the camps, where high-schools nominate students in their penultimate year to apply via a highly competitive, state-wide interview process. The top applicants are invited to spend a week creating their own government: running for office, debating bills, hearing court cases. Attendance, at least at Boys State, bestows the prestige of being part of a group of (in)famous alumni: Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney, Chris Christie, to name a few.

The decision to follow the 2022 Missouri Girls State, which took place during the same week as Boys State, makes for fascinating viewing. While the boys are encouraged to listen to real politicians speak about public affairs, the girls gather in auditoriums to sing songs with silly hand motions. At Girls State, the adults enforce a strict buddy system and dress code, constantly reminding them they cannot go anywhere alone and must cover up their backs and shoulders inside, even in all-female spaces. The boys, naturally, are free to roam, solo and shirtless.

‘Does it get political at any point?’ asks one Girls State attendee, Emily Worthmore, who is frustrated with the ‘fluff’ of the camp – making bracelets, decorating cupcakes, trying to become best friends with everyone, moaning about the buddy system. With her heart set on becoming governor of Girls State, the camp’s highest elected office, Emily finds the other girls’ insistence that women are constantly told they can’t do things because they’re women to be a confusing concept. It is not only false but self-reinforcing, perpetuating the idea that being female implies being disadvantaged.

Emily, a preacher’s daughter and firm conservative, is an unlikely hero for the documentary’s two Californian directors whose star in Boys State was Steven Garza, the son of Mexican immigrants who door-knocked for Bernie Sanders. But Emily’s reluctance to sign on to the more strident feminism of her left-leaning peers (you can tell who’s a liberal, she says, by how loud they are) makes her discovery of her own limitations a compelling, somewhat heartbreaking watch.

Emily is in for two bitter reckonings. First, that her campaign strategy of ‘reaching across the aisle’ and running on bipartisan patriotism isn’t as appealing to young women as railing against the patriarchy. (She loses the gubernatorial race to another girl who delivers a ‘feminist manifesto’.) Second, that a feminist manifesto is much easier to compose than a real solution to the fiscal and culturally ingrained inequality she finds herself subject to.

After her loss, Emily turns her focus to an investigation into the inequalities between Girls and Boys State for the camp newspaper. She discovers that Missouri Boys State received $600,000 in funding, while Girls State received a third of that. The adults running Girls State say the camps are designed to be different and are therefore ‘incompatible for comparison’.

Things get emotional but never nasty. Mean Girls, this is not. We see the girls-only Supreme Court holding hands before hearing a case, reciting mantras of reassurance and self-forgiveness. It’s reminiscent of a quip in Barbie, where Supreme Court Barbie says, ‘I have no difficulty holding both logic and feeling at the same time and it does not diminish my powers. It expands them.’

But this is no Barbie Land. It is the Real World, with its obstacles intact. These young women will go to the polls for the very first time in November with still no hope of electing a female president. Sure, there’s a morbid but slim chance for Kamala Harris to end up in the Oval Office, but her approval rating, which is tanking even faster than Joe Biden’s, is evidence that girl power only gets you so far in American politics.