Women

Eleven famous leaders — including Pocahontas, Harriet Tubman, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Helen Keller, and Margaret Mead — are profiled in this picture biography. A women’s history time line and bibliography are included.

Ann Maria Weems was a slave who lived during the mid-1800s in Maryland. When she was 13 years old, she disguised herself as a boy and escaped to Canada. This carefully researched historical novel tells her story, which is one of adventure and escape fused with careful details about the Underground Railroad.

Rosemary Wells’s mother was a ballerina who believed that Maria Tallchief was America’s greatest dancer. So it made sense for Wells to seek out this famous ballerina to collaborate on a picture biography. Wells does a marvelous job telling Tallchief’s story, from her early years on an Osage Indian reservation in Oklahoma to the stages of New York. Young readers will see that persistence and practice pay off.

This “head-to-toe” guide answers all your questions, from hair care to healthy eating, bad breath to bras, periods to pimples, and everything in between. With tips, how-to’s, letters from girls, and facts from the experts, here’s straightforward advice you can really use.

The Daring Book for Girls is the manual for everything that girls need to know — and that doesn’t mean sewing buttonholes! Whether it’s female heroes in history, secret note-passing skills, science projects, friendship bracelets, double dutch, cats cradle, the perfect cartwheel or the eternal mystery of what boys are thinking, this book has it all. But it’s not just a guide to giggling at sleepovers — although that’s included, of course! Whether readers consider themselves tomboys, girly-girls, or a little bit of both, this book is every girl’s invitation to adventure.

Clover, a young African American girl, lives in a place where a fence separates the black side of town from the white side. Her mother has warned her that it is not safe to climb over the fence to the white side. But one summer a white girl named Annie begins to sit on the fence. Soon Clover joins her and transforms the fence from a divider into a resting place for children, both black and white. This is a touching and powerful story in which “young girls are the activists, the people making the change.”

In November 1960, America watched as six-year-old Ruby Bridges, surrounded by U.S. marshals, walked through a crowd of threatening segregationists to enter her elementary school. Forty years later, Bridges tells how she made civil rights history by being one of the first African American students to attend an all-white school in New Orleans.

This picture book is based on the true story of Mary Kingsley, a British woman who traveled to West Africa during the 1800s. Author and illustrator Don Brown colorfully captures her adventures, which include staring down a hippo, smacking a rude crocodile with a canoe paddle, and surviving the treacherous rapids of the Remboué River.