This summer, Rosary Academy and the American Legion Auxiliary Post 716 gave me, Christina Vaughan ’26, the incredible opportunity to attend Girls State. The American Legion Auxiliary, founded in 1876, is a women’s group that works to support our military and veterans.
In June, I attended the eighty-second session of the ALA California Girls State. Girls State is a program that empowers young women through a hands-on learning experience with government.
As I boarded a seven-hour bus ride to Sacramento State University at 3 a.m., I felt nervous for the week to come. I had no idea what to expect, and honestly, I didn’t even understand what Girls State was (it’s like the Red & Gold phenomena, you can’t explain it, you just know it’s amazing). When I got there, I was assigned a city and a county group and was immediately sent to set up my dorm.
My dormmates were in my city, Pleasant, and our dorm house was our county, Marshall (think of your typical summer camp-style grouping system). The first few days, we set up our city government–we paid taxes (in Girls State money), appointed a city council, elected a mayor, etc. Then, we moved up to the County level, elected a sheriff, district attorney, made commissions, elected our state legislators and so on.
At the county level, I was appointed to several commissioner positions. I learned so much about how messy and complicated local government can be, but more importantly, I learned about how incredibly important it is. As much as we care about federal politics, local government is what most directly affects our lives and that’s why our votes really count.
To finish out the week, we made political parties and elected a state government. At check-in, we were assigned a party, Nationalist or Federalist. However, Girls State is a utopia; those titles didn’t mean anything until we gave them meaning. As parties, we decided what our stance would be on the major pillars of social, economic and political issues facing the country. In addition, we had many girls file and run for office in our party primaries and eventually for the general election for the state-level positions.
We also had general assemblies each night, and they reminded me so much of Rosary rallies: we learned chants, songs and even had a talent show! Being surrounded by high-achieving females reminded me of being at Rosary; to say the least, I felt so at home there. One of the coolest epiphanies I had while I was there was that I didn’t have to go to Girls State to find such an empowering female space; I just had to step foot on Rosary’s campus.
To explain Girls State in one short article seems impossible, but I felt empowered and inspired by the incredible young women around me (all in the top one percent of California high schoolers!). I learned so much about how the government functions and felt the strongest patriotism and pride for my country. I got the opportunity to come out of my shell during an encapsulated experience (and I have so much more I couldn’t include in this article for time purposes). One of the most unique things about Girls State is that what you do there doesn’t follow you; you can run, you can lose and then you can wake up the next morning and run for something else—and no one at home will ever know.
I failed several times during Girls State, but those failures led me to jobs I truly loved. I also got to be the nicest version of myself. I got to be completely open to everyone because they didn’t know me, and I knew that they were feeling the same nervousness as I was; by the end of the week, I was the person who was randomly talking to strangers, and I was crying because I didn’t want to leave.
Girls State was an incredible experience that I wouldn’t trade for anything. I’m so excited to see which of our juniors will get to be there for the eighty-third session.
