Geri Halliwell, Victoria Adams, Emma Bunton, Mel B and Mel C. Photo / @spicegirls
OPINION:
Some people think Millennials are a generation defined by MSN Messenger, seeing Titanic at the theatre, and being the first users of social media. I think we are defined by a group of five females that changed the way we think about all women.
We are the Spice Girls generation.
If you're younger than 25, you will have skipped the Spice Girls as a movement. You'll be fans of their music – everybody knows the lyrics to Spice Up Your Life – but you'll have missed out on the introduction to Girl Power, the phenomenon.
The celebration of strong independent females as individuals is something we know as "normal" today. But celebrating ALL women and girls (and telling them they can do anything) was something the Spice Girls gave us back in the mid-1990s.
They brought about a new feminist movement, one that even convinced men to see women as not just equals, but sometimes even superiors.
In 2021, this sort of thinking seems like a given. Why would girls NOT be able to do everything? Why would boys NOT have encouraged that?
If you're between 30 and 40, you can now look back and realise you were the test market for the 21st-century brand of feminism. We absorbed the Spice Girls' Girl Power like a sponge. We have taken it from something that lived on Sony Discmans to something we now consider standard.
See, the Spice Girls were five unique personalities, turned into characters of different kinds of women. There was the powerful one (Geri), the tomboy one (Mel C), the confrontational one (Mel B), the young one (Emma) and the demure one (Victoria). They were Ginger, Sporty, Scary, Baby and Posh.
None of the five fit the "traditional" mould of woman; one predicated by 20th-century ideals of marriage, motherhood and where they sat in men's lives.
Instead, they all had a distinctive contribution to a new, multifaceted way of womanhood. The Spice Girls allowed all girls to be themselves – and helped us boys realise that was OK.
Geri Halliwell (later Geri Horner, after her marriage to Formula 1 team boss Christian Horner) was the unofficial leader of the Spice Girls. She had the strongest voice, the strongest look, and got the most airtime. Geri was brash and loud, which weren't qualities that women had ever been celebrated for. She was confident and sexual before Carrie and Samantha on Sex and the City. She was outspoken before Lady Gaga. She was crass when women were still supposed to be "ladylike".
Melanie Chisholm can singlehandedly be credited with making tomboys mainstream. While the other girls were all very feminine, from day one (with the Wannabe video) Mel C was playing with the gender binary. She was a "soft butch" icon in snap-down trackies and sports bras. She never wore skirts like the other girls – always pants. She was not afraid of exuding a masculine energy and helping other females be comfortable doing the same.
Melanie Brown was the life of the party. She was crazy, rowdy and dominating. She was the one who didn't know how to be quiet. The unfiltered one who said what she meant, and meant what she said. She could own a room. She was the woman of colour who wasn't subservient or at all "less than" the white people around her.
Emma Bunton was innocent, sweet and girly. She is perhaps closest to the ideal of "girl" we all previously had before the Spice Girls. She was young and shy; only just discovering who she was (and taking the lead from the other girls around her). She was the kind of girl other girls wanted to take under their wing and care for.
And then there was Victoria Adams (later Victoria Beckham, after her marriage to footballer David Beckham). She was the conservative one. Yes, she still had the glitz and glamour, but she was timid; a wallflower. She didn't want to take up much attention, instead preferring to lurk in the background as the eternal observer. She was the Queen of Introverts, and only now (with her business empire) do we see she wasn't "the quiet one who couldn't really sing". She was the smart one who was taking notes of the other girls' mistakes, preparing to be the most successful of them all.
On the surface, the Spice Girls weren't intimidating and that's why their message of Girl Power was easily digestible. It was fun, and so easy a child could understand it.
But when you peel those characters back and see what they all stood for, you see how they uniformly gave all girls permission. Permission to be whoever they wanted to be.
For boys and men like me, the Spice Girls also told males all females deserved the same – if not more – respect as us. "Play my game or get left behind" wasn't just a Spice Girls song lyric, it was a message to all the men of the world.
For a whole generation, the Girl Power ethos defined a whole adulthood. The Spice Girls were a young girl's ideal of being a grown-up, rather than an actual representation of how women behaved during that era.
This gave girls the space to imagine, and, 25 years later, have enabled us all to strip away expectations of womanhood, and create a much healthier, more diverse picture of it.