In YA dystopias, adolescent girls are repeatedly used as breeders of the new generation and must go to the extremes to protect their offspring from an oppressive society. The motif of the adolescent mother is used both to highlight the vulnerability of the young mothers and the challenges that they face when they bring a vulnerable child into their dystopian worlds. It illustrates inequalities in the distribution of power between the adult generation and adolescents. It is one of several tools that authors of YA dystopias use to problematise adults’ oppression of adolescents in real-life societies through the lens of extreme power abuse in dystopian, future worlds. Through an analysis of Amy Ewing's The Lone City trilogy (2014–2016) and Jennie Melamed's Gather the Daughters (2017), the chapter illustrates in what ways the young mothers are oppressed, how they respond to this oppression, and how they rebel against it. An intersectional approach is applied, which clarifies that intersections between for example youth, motherhood, and gender affect both how the adolescent mothers are positioned in their dystopian society's matrix of domination and what possibilities they have to challenge their oppression for the sake of themselves and/or their child.

Introduction: Conceptions of Girlhood Now and Then: “Girls’ Literature” and Beyond