The bedtime stories gripping girls the world over
A bedtime story series has given little girls the world over new heroines. Its creators are just as inspiring, says Joanna Moorhead
Francesca Cavallo is telling me a story, and it’s clearly one she’s especially fond of. The setting is a classroom; the event, careers day. The pupils are being asked about the work they’d like to do, but when a girl pipes up that her dream job is to be a surgeon, a boy snorts. Girls can’t be surgeons, he tells her. “And do you know what that girl did, when she heard his remark?” asks Cavallo. “She didn’t get angry, or upset, or tell him he was stupid. She simply said, ‘Oh! He hasn’t read Rebel Girls…’”
To the lexicon of books that have changed the world, we can add Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls. It’s edited by Cavallo and her partner in life in books, Elena Favilli. Published just under a year ago in the UK after the most successful-ever crowdfunding campaign for a children’s book (pledges exceeded the £28,000 goal by an astonishing £456,000), it has now sold over a million copies and been translated into more than 40 languages. This week sees the publication of volume two, with a new podcast launching next week and it’s a safe bet to say that, if your child goes to school tomorrow as one of the Rebel Girl heroines for World Book Day, rather than as Hermione Granger, Cinderella or Katniss Everdeen, she’s on-trend for 2018.
What’s most stunning about the Rebel Girls phenomenon isn’t how wildly successful it’s been, or even how in the digital age a book can still be a global game-changer. No: the most extraordinary thing is that, in our so-called enlightened times, we were so thirsty for a project about something as simple as telling women’s stories. Because that is all Rebel Girls does: volume one told 100 stories of women from Cleopatra to Margaret Thatcher and Maya Angelou; volume two adds Oprah, JK Rowling and Beyoncé. Each entry is accompanied by a lively and colourful illustration; but it is the simplicity of it that takes your breath away.
Like all the most potent ideas, it’s what lies behind the Rebel Girls phenomenon that explains why it’s so successful. Because the surprising truth is that, as women’s lives have changed over the last few centuries, history has not; and literature, it turns out, has been pitifully slow to take account of the alterations. Of 6,000 children’s books surveyed in 2011, all published between 1900 and 2000, only 37 per cent had any speaking female characters at all.
Meanwhile, the teaching of history in school remains fundamentally the telling of the stories of powerful men. “In the UK, you’re lucky because you have queens: not every country has the story of women like Elizabeth I,” points out Cavallo. And many women who did what the book title suggests – rebelled – have been forgotten, and the crucial contribution Cavallo and Favilli have made is to resurrect their tales, as well as to retell the stories of women who are more famous in a different light. “So often, women who have been powerful have had to prove that their gender is capable of that power,” says Cavallo. “Men aren’t asked to do that.”
While history has allowed for men who are imperfect; who make mistakes in positions of responsibility – prior to #Metoo, at least – all too often the same leeway has not been given to women.
“We are unwilling to forgive a woman who fails,” says Cavallo, citing Hillary Clinton. “If a woman is successful and then fails, she is punished far more harshly than a man: in many ways, she’s punished for daring to try, as well as for failing. But failure is how we learn: if we aren’t given the chance, we won’t progress.”
Here, Cavallo is speaking from experience: even when she and Favilli moved to San Francisco – home to start-ups and Silicon Valley investors – after setting up Timbuktu, their media company in 2012, they were told that, as “two girls alone”, they would never raise the money they needed. “Around one per cent of venture capital goes to start-ups run by women,” says Cavallo. “What that’s about is a feeling that women are incapable of running companies; that they can’t do it, and can’t be allowed to try.” She and Favilli, both rebel girls, took to the internet to go direct to the masses, believing there would be more confidence from the equably gender-split public than the male-heavy investment industry. Cavallo says that when she and Favilli were growing up in Eighties Italy – Cavallo is from Puglia, Favilli from Tuscany – they were both acutely aware of the paucity of powerful women’s stories in bedtime literature. It’s a sentiment I would echo: when I was raising my four daughters, I was shocked by how far I had to go to seek out stories that put women in the driving seat. Indeed, my impetus for writing a biography of the Lancashireborn Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington (published last year) was at least in part that I wanted to share the story of a woman who refused to live the way she was expected to. I dedicated the book to my girls, with the hope they will always be able to live like Leonora: on their own terms.
Living “on our own terms” seems to sum up what makes the women in Rebel Girls so important. When I suggest they should add Carrington to the next volume, Cavallo laughs, asks for more information, and tells me I’m doing what keen readers do all the time: suggesting more women.
“After volume one came out, we had an army of people telling us incredible stories,” she says. “So we wrote down all the names, and we researched them.” Iraqi human rights activist Nadia Murad, Irish aviator Lilian Bland and New York firefighter Sarinya Srisakul are three who have made it into volume two.
And it turns out that, behind the deceptively simple idea at the heart of Rebel Girls, there is a genius approach to how the women’s stories are told. “We didn’t want to produce another feminist encyclopedia for kids,” says Cavallo, a former theatre director. “So we are always looking for how to tell the stories in a way that sparks the kids’ imagination.”
In particular, she says, she and Favilli look for a moment in a woman’s story of great significance: “Nadia Murad was held hostage and one day her captors left the door open, and she was able to escape. And that’s such a powerful idea for children: it’s about what it means to have to wait for that one moment, and be ready.
“It’s about not giving up hope, however bad your situation.”