Thank heaven for little girls - they're changing the world 

Figures including Greta Thunberg and Malala Yousafzai are changing the face of activism

Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg. Picture: AP Photo/Eduardo Munoz Alvarez

ON HALLOWEEN, 1926, Uldine Mabelle Utley, a 14-year-old Oklahoma-born farmer’s daughter, stood before a horde of 14,000 in Madison Square Garden in New York and cried, “Repent.” 

She had been giving testimony — in the evangelical sense — since the age of 11. She was small and clad in white, a vision of purity despite her bobbed hair, which at the time was the scandalous trademark of the flapper but could be read as an attempt to forgo the trappings of gender, or at least postpone the arrival of womanhood.