Movers and Shakers! Shaking Things Up: 14 Young Women Who Changed the World by Susan Hood

Here are 14 young rebels (one just 6 years old, another only 13) who broke down walls to pursue their interests, talents, and rights.

The world is a better place for all of us because they stepped out of the box.

Susan Hood's Shaking Things Up: 14 Young Women Who Changed the World (Harper, 2018) offers fourteen poems about fourteen women and girls whose actions or lives really broke the mold. There is Ruby Bridges, a six-year-old African-American girl who alone walked through a jeering crowd into one of the previously segregated schools of New Orleans and thirteen-year-old Mary Anning, thrilled with the idea of prehistoric fossils beneath her very feet in London, who in 1812 discovered the first gigantic icthyosaur skeleton ever recovered.

Mold-breaking young women were groundbreakers for their gender: Molly Williams, the young black cook for Oceanus Engine Company No. 11 in New York was the only one not sick with flu at the volunteer fire station when the alarm sounded, so she herself dragged the big pumping engine to the site of the fire and extinguished it herself, earning the lifelong title of Volunteer #11 and the only woman firefighter at Oceanus Company until 1982.

In raging flames and choking smoke the brave Molly took the heat.
With hose and axe, she met the blaze to save the house and street.

There was Annette Kellerman, a dedicated nineteen-year-old swimmer who pioneered a sleek one-piece swimsuit for women. Arrested in 1919 for indecency at Revere Beach, Boston, Annette came up with the bold and streamlined swimwear which made it possible for Gertrude Ederle, sans soggy pantaloons, ruffles, and skirts, to become the first woman to swim the English Channel in 1926.

Other path-finding young women featured include Frida Kahlo, the first Mexican artist to win a place at the Louvre, nineteen-year old Maya Lin, who won the architectural competition to design the Vietnam War Memorial, reporter Nelly Bly who won the Around the World in 80 days competition in 1890, and Malala Yousafzai, the youngest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. Author Susan Hood offers varied poetical biographies and informational prose for each woman, and the book is illustrated in the unique styles of fourteen noted women artists such as Melissa Sweet, LeYuen Pham, and Sophie Blackall.

This is a poetic feast for the eyes and an eye-opening look at how girls and women have overcome barriers to be the first and the best at what they accomplished to change the world.

Leading the Way: This Little Trailblazer: A Girl Power Primer by Joan Holub

Ada Lovelace.This little trailblazer helped think of a way to do math with machines, called computers today.

Ada Lovelace wrote one of the first computer programs, named ADA in her honor by the United States Government.

Ada, Countess Lovelace, the aristocratic daughter of English poet, Lord Byron, is an unlikely modern heroine, but her early love of mathematics, unheard of in the early 1800s, led her to her work with  a Cambridge mathematician, in which she wrote the world's first computer program for his "Difference Machine."

The formerly little-known Ada Lovelace joins more famous young women who were trailblazers in their careers or in public life. She joins women like Rosa Parks, who stood up for her rights by sitting down on a bus, Coco Chanel, who became one of the first women fashion designers by popularizing simple, comfortable, but stylish couture for twentieth-century women, Maya Lin, the youthful architect who was selected to design The Vietnam War Memorial which draws millions of viewers each year, and Ruby Bridges, the first-grader who all alone integrated a school and ultimately her hometown.

There are a disparate group of women pioneers in veteran author Joan Holub's This Little Trailblazer: A Girl Power Primer (Little Simon, 2017). Included among these women firsts are Sonia Sotomayor, the first Latina woman justice of the Supreme Court and Florence Nightingale, the nineteen-century founder of modern nursing, Maria Tallchief, first Native American prima ballerina, Wilma Rudolph, first African American Olypic gold medalist, and Pakistani Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai. A brief appendix lists other famous women--Abolitionist and Women's Suffrage leaders Harriet Tubman and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Bessie Coleman, first licensed African American woman aviator, and Indira Ghandi, prime minister of India. More than a history lesson, this little board book informs and challenges all girls everywhere to be trailblazers themselves.

Declaration of Independence! She Persisted: Thirteen American Women Who Changed The World by Chelsea Clinton

What took us so long?

When Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson signed the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, more than half of "we the people" were not really citizens. Some were slaves, of course, but most were simply... females. Adult women had fewer rights than little boys. They often had no schooling. They couldn't own property, even that inherited from their parents; everything, even their personal wardrobes and jewelry, legally belonged to their husbands. And of course, they couldn't hold political office or vote.

It took 132 long years for women to get the vote, but women had been busy all along seeking the right to be free to control their own lives. And now, almost 100 years after getting the vote, women are still working at equal opportunity. How do they do it?

They persist.

In her best-selling She Persisted: 13 American Women Who Changed the World (Philomel Books, 2017), author Chelsea Clinton tells those story of those women who persisted in finding personal freedom--women like Helen Keller, Nelly Bly, Margaret Chaise Smith, Maria Tall Chief, and Sally Ride--those who were the first to break their own glass ceilings to gain equality in their public and professional lives.

Other famous "first timers" included in this collective biography are also Clara Lamlich, a worker who first negotiated labor rights for her fellow female garment workers, Ruby Bridges, the African-American first grader who all alone integrated her school, Virginia Apgar, whose persisted to become a surgeon and created the Apgar Scale by which all newborns are still evaluated, Claudia Colvin, who "sat in" on a bus even before Rosa Parks, Florence Griffith Joyner, Olympic multi-medalist, Oprah Winfrey, media mogul, and Sonia Sotomayor, the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice. All had different spheres of interest and special abilities, but they all shared one thing--persistence.

With a lively narration that describes the various childhoods of these pioneers and the charming illustrations of noted artist Alexandra Boiger, this celebration of personal liberty should be a first purchase for all middle readers. In their starred review, Publishers Weekly says this one is a "lovely, moving work of children’s literature [and a] polished introduction to a diverse and accomplished group of women.”