The manufactured British pop band, however, can't actually take credit for "girl power." First, there's the term itself; the mantra first began to spread in Olympia, Washington, with the rise of feminist underground punk groups, starting with Bikini Kill and later Riot Grrrl. The Spice Girls have often been accused of ripping their pro-woman, revolutionary messaging from radical groups like these without giving them proper credit. And while there's no real way to tell how much of their ethos was "borrowed" (Horner told Vice in 2016 "I think we were all influenced"), there's no denying that it was the Spice Girls who made that rallying cry mainstream. Thanks to these five women and some savvy marketing, "Girl Power" was plastered on little girls' lunchboxes, empowerment was blaring out of every radio, and feminism was cool again. In the mid-'90s, this was no small feat. Backlash, a book by journalist Susan Faludi, had just made waves after its 1991 release for pointing out the ways society and the media had turned feminists into a negative stereotype after the feminism wave of the '70s. Back then, the word feminism was a word saved for Gloria Steinem and liberal arts college classes.