The phrase "Girl Power" is a term of empowerment, expressed a cultural phenomenon of the mid-late 1990s to the early 2000s, and is also linked to third-wave feminism.

Early usage

The phrase is sometimes spelled as "grrrl power", initially associated with Riot Grrrl. "Girl power" was later utilized by a number of bands during the early 1990s, such as the Welsh indie band Helen Love and the Plumstead pop-punk duo Shampoo.

Spice Girls and scholarship

The phrase entered the mainstream, however, during the mid-1990s with the British singing group, The Spice Girls. Professor Susan Hopkins, in her 2002 text, Girl Heroes: the New Force in Popular Culture, suggested a correlation between Girl Power, The Spice Girls, and female action heroes at the end of the 20th century.

Other scholars have also examined the phrase, "girl power", often within the context of the academic field, Buffy Studies. Media theorist Kathleen Rowe Karlyn in her article "Scream, Popular Culture, and Feminism's Third Wave: I'm Not My Mother" and Irene Karras in "The Third Wave's Final girl: Buffy the Vampire Slayer" suggest a link with third-wave feminism. Frances Early and Kathleen Kennedy in the introduction to Athena's Daughters: Television's New Women Warriors, discuss what they describe as a link between girl power and a "new" image of women warriors in popular culture.

Oxford English Dictionary

In 2001, the Oxford English Dictionary added the term Girl power," defining this phrase as:

Power exercised by girls; spec. a self-reliant attitude among girls and young women manifested in ambition, assertiveness, and individualism. Although also used more widely (esp. as a slogan), the term has been particularly and repeatedly associated with popular music; most notably in the early 1990s with the briefly prominent ‘riot girl' movement in the United States (cf. RIOT GIRL n.); then, in the late 1990s, with the British all-female group The Spice Girls.

The OED further offers an example of this term by quoting from "Angel Delight", an article in the March 24, 2001 issue of Dreamwatch about the television series Dark Angel:

After the Sarah Connors and Ellen Ripleys of the eighties, the nineties weren't so kind to the superwoman format — Xena Warrior Princess excepted. But it's a new millennium now, and while Charlie's Angels and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon are kicking up a storm on movie screens, it's been down to James Cameron to bring empowered female warriors back to television screens. And tellingly, Cameron has done it by mixing the sober feminism of his Terminator and Aliens characters with the sexed-up Girl Power of a Britney Spears concert. The result is Dark Angel.[http://www.darkangelfan.com/news/254.shtml E y e s <-> <-> O n l y