Stories for Rebel Girls
Women are half the world’s population and the majority of university graduates. They are most of the young doctors, lawyers and accountants. A girl can grow up to be a prime minister, a priest, a prison guard, and yes, even a princess. There’s a million and one ways to be a woman in today’s world, but you’d never know it from looking at children’s books.
Britt Mann tracked down the people rewriting that narrative.
Once upon a time a woman named Elena Favilli and her girlfriend Francesca Cavallo decided to change the world.
Favilli, a journalist, and Cavallo, a playwright, had built the world’s first iPad magazine for children in their kitchen in Milan, Italy. Later they moved to California, where they progressed their project in Silicon Valley.
Favilli and Cavallo’s foray into this male-dominated tech world highlighted for them just how important it was for women to have other women to look up to in life – it would have helped them be more confident in general, they reckoned, and set bigger goals. But they were alarmed to discover – after taking a closer look – the dearth of girls in leading roles in books and on TV. This was a problem that had persisted for a long time, they realised, and so they hatched a plan to fix it.
Their book, Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls, chronicles in fairytale fashion 100 women who’ve shaped the course of history. Serena Williams is in there, as is Frida Kahlo. Amelia Earhart, Oprah Winfrey and Hillary Clinton, too. Favilli and Cavallo’s crowdfunding campaign to self-publish the book raised more than US$1 million (the largest amount an original book has ever crowdfunded online). Rebel Girls has since sold more than
1 million copies, and has been translated into more than 40 languages. Its sequel – which features JK Rowling, Angela Merkel and Beyonce, among others – was released last month.
Rebel Girls’ success has sparked a slew of similar
titles: Shout Out To The Girls: A Celebration of Awesome Australian Women, also released in February, and a homegrown version, Go Girl: A Storybook of Epic NZ Women, will land in bookshops later this month.
While all this was happening, Spanish author Isabel Sanchez Vegara released the first books in her series
Little People, Big Dreams. Vegara, who had always dreamed of becoming a writer, started the project before the birth of her twin nieces.
“I had discovered a lot of great children’s books for my oldest nephew that were full of brave and enthusiastic boys ready to conquer the world. But… it seemed to me things were slightly different whenever I looked for female protagonists,” she writes in an email.
Unlike Rebel Girls, the adorably illustrated Little People books each champion one famous, inspiring woman.
“Real women are much stronger, more courageous and incredible than the ones we see in fiction,” Vegara says. “I’ve never met a sleeping princess, but I’ve met many ordinary women with extraordinary lives.”
THE ‘REBEL GIRLS EFFECT’
Tanya Gribben, a manager at The Women’s Bookshop in Auckland, notes the proliferation of non-fiction depicting extraordinary women aimed at younger readers.
“We used to have one book – Girls Who Rocked the World – that was the only one we had for that 10-12 age group. We’d sell it and sell it... and now we’ve got 20 [similar books] in the shop, easy.”
“The publishers are only publishing them because people are buying them.”
Gribben thinks such books are a hit with readers for the same reasons as the new wave of mainstream adult feminist literature has been – women are more comfortable with labelling themselves a “feminist”, plus there’s a renewed understanding that the battle for equality hasn’t yet been won. Mums and aunties and grannies are buying these books for their kids to empower them, Gribben says: “I think they’ve seen that [equality] still isn’t happening and they think, ‘These are the books I would have loved.’”
In writing a children’s book with leading ladies, an author becomes something of a Rebel Girl herself. When Go Girl hits shelves in a few weeks’ time, it will buck a trend of picture books still dominated by male characters in traditional gender roles – even in a country where our elected leader is a woman, and her partner is soon to be a stay-at-home dad.
Go Girl author Barbara Else cites a study published in Science last year, which showed 6-year-old girls were less likely than boys to think members of their own gender could be “really, really smart”, and more likely to eschew activities requiring exceptional intelligence – a distinct change from attitudes only one year earlier, at age 5, when girls were just as likely as boys to think they were capable of greatness.
“None of the women in the book have limited themselves at all,” Else says of Go Girl.
“They’ve decided what they’re interested in, what they want to work at, and they’ve just gone for it.”
Both Else and her editor Catherine O’Loughlin name Georgina Beyer, the world’s first openly transgender mayor and MP, as one of their favourite Go Girls.
An anecdote of Beyer burning her belongings the day she transitioned genders particularly captured Else’s imagination.
“I thought, what a wonderful image that is... [that] there’s a moment in your life when you think, ‘That’s what I’ve got to do.’”
O’Loughlin says while the notion of a female protagonist, or a true story about a famous New Zealander, isn’t new to the children’s genre, demand for non-fiction that’s beautifully illustrated is increasing. Among Go Girl’s colourful pages, readers will also recognise the likes of Lucy Lawless, Janet Frame, Beatrice Faumuina, and Helen Clark.
“I think in the past as a nation, the New Zealand notion of hero has been stereotypically male,” O’Loughlin says. “We hope the girls and boys who read Go Girl will come away with the clear and firm understanding that women can be and have always been heroes too.”
WHEN ART DOESN’T IMITATE LIFE
Last week, The Sapling, a website which promotes discussion of children’s books among Kiwis, released research by book publicist and reviewer Elizabeth Heritage, examining the best-selling children’s books in New Zealand in 2017.
An analogous study published in the UK by
The Observer newspaper of the 100 most popular children’s picture books last year showed the majority were dominated by male characters “often in stereotypically masculine roles”.
Male characters were found in twice as many leading roles, and given far more speaking parts than females, who were missing altogether from a fifth of the books ranked. As for lady baddies: “Only one book, Peppa and her Golden Boots, portrayed a sole female villain, acting alone: a duck who steals Peppa Pig’s boots and takes them to the Moon.” Even non-human characters were 73 per cent more likely
Even non-human characters were 73 per cent more likely to be males. Whether animal, mineral, vegetable or crayon, if you’re in a picture book, you’re probably a bloke.