For older readers and/or the scientifically-minded, Jim Ottaviani's Dignifying Science: Stories About Women Scientists is an excellent choice. While I applaud these women for working within their systems, a book that aims to empower girls with “you can do anything boys can do” undermines its message when it adds “as long as you pretend to be a boy.”įor kids who need a gentle nudge toward gender equality, I'd steer them to Girls Think of Everything: Stories of Ingenious Inventions by Women, or give them a full biography on one of the women featured here. I’d have preferred a broader scope to this book, one that focused not just on women who lived as men, but on women who did men’s things as women. There are very few distinct 'looks' to the characters, making it difficult to know who's who.

The artist doesn't use any shading-it's strictly black or white, which makes the chapter about the couple escaping slavery particularly hard to decipher. Of these seven works, one is a picture-book translation of a folk poem, one an excerpt from a collection of tales about female pirates, and two are novels. There is a list of 'further reading' in the back of the book, offering one title per subject. The fictionalized accounts contain a lot of speculation, most of which could probably have been clarified with a little research-and if there really are no good accounts of a person, then maybe a story based entirely on hearsay isn't the best choice for a collective biography. From legendary figures like Hatshepsut and Mu Lan to unknowns like Sarah Rosetta Wakeman, these are women who refused to let a little thing like their gender stand in the way of their goals.Īt about 10 pages per subject, each story is at best a cursory glance of what happened-at times so cursory I found myself flipping back, sure I'd missed a page because there was no logical flow to the story. This is a really great idea-stories about women who disguised themselves as men to get what they really wanted.

No Girls Allowed by Susan Hughes