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A huge thank you to Kelly Fineman whose rant is both dead-on and inspiring. Therefore, I am posting in honor of Women's History Month (which began with International Women's Day (also ignored in this country when others in Europe got a day off...) Below, please find a few of my favorite books  that have to do with girls and women who had historical and political vision and the authors and illustrators who have artistic vision.

From Kathry Lasky and David Caltrow:

She's Wearing a Dead Bird on Her Head!
(Illustrated by David Catrow)

Harriet Hemenway and her cousin Minna Hall are very proper Boston ladies, but they find the latest nineteenth-century fashion in women’s hats appalling. All over town, fashionable ladies are parading around with dead birds perched upon their heads! So Minna and Harriet gather together the most prominent people in the area to form a club to protect the birds—the Audubon Society. Eventually they garner enough nationwide attention to initiate the passage of important bird protection acts.

Also two books by Shana Corey:

Katie Casey is in a league of her own: "She preferred sliding to sewing, batting to baking, and home runs to homecoming." Unfortunately, baseball is not considered ladylike in 1942. But when the male professional baseball players are called away to war, Katie has her chance to step up to the plate.

and

Amelia Bloomer is not a proper lady. She thinks proper ladies of the 19th century are silly. They're not allowed to vote, not supposed to work, and all that fuss about clothes! Ridiculously wide hoop skirts, yards and yards of hot petticoats, and cruelly tight corsets supported by whalebone or steel made women faint at the drop of the hat: "What was proper about that?" So Amelia, being so very improper, sets out to revolutionize the world for women.

(Images and jacket copy swiped from Amazon.com but go to your local independent bookstore to buy these, or shine up that Library card and check them out.)

When White House adviser Karl Rove broke the story of his resignation to the Wall Street Journal earlier this week, he denied that the timing had anything to do with pending Congressional investigations. “I’m not going to stay or leave based on whether it pleases the mob,” he insisted. Rove’s rather derisive use of the word mob raised some eyebrows in political quarters. Monica Hesse of the Washington Post wrote that mob is “a three-letter grenade of a word — so French Revolution, so frothy-mouthed peasants torching the streets.” The word is a clipped form of mobile, which in turn is shortened from the Latin expression mobile vulgus, meaning ‘the changeable common people, the fickle crowd.’ Though the word refers to the inconstancy of the multitude, the English-speaking masses have stayed pretty constant in their usage of mob. As I’m quoted in the Post article as saying, the core sense of mob hasn’t shifted much from its 17th-century origins, and that sense is almost always negative. (more…)

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