A brand new book, Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls is offering young girls real life heroes to aspire to, and they’re not pink princess girls!
The book begins with the story of Malala Yousafzai with “Once there was a girl who loved school” and continues with the stories of 100 inspirational women who have rebelled against gender norms for a modern age.
The book came about through crowd-funding after inspiration on social media and is a collaboration between two Italian authors, Elena Favilli, and Francesca Cavallo. They realised that children’s books are still full of gender stereotypes and wanted to respond to that with realistic characters without the gender bias, and what better way to do that than with real heroines.
Fully illustrated the book tells the story of many high-profile women, and some lesser known ones too, including Grace Hopper, the pioneering American computer scientist, and journalist-turned-weightlifter Amna Al Haddad from United Arab Emirates.
There’s no denying a need for books such as this one In 2011, academics at Florida State University found that gender bias in books has existed for more than 100 years. They identified that in almost 6,000 picture books published between 1900 and 2000, only 7.5% depicted female animal protagonists.
We all read to learn and reflect the people we are and become and to do so we need good role models without the gender bias.
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