Step into any bookshop today and you’ll find too many compendiums of feminist heroines designed for both children and adults. The books might be recently published, but the formula is well-established: colourful illustrations opposite short descriptions of the lives and works of pioneering women such as Jane Austen, Frida Kahlo and Hillary Clinton. This publishing avalanche owes its existence to a single commercial success: 2017’s Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls.
Italians Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo, who are romantic partners as well as co-founders of their own company based in California, longed to correct the gender imbalance they saw in the world of children’s media. In 2016, the idea of a children’s book with the word “rebel” in its title came to them. As Favilli explained to the Bookseller magazine, “Rebel is usually considered a negative word… especially when it’s associated with women.” Within months of starting a crowd-funding campaign for the project on Kickstarter, they had raised $1m. Rebel Girls became the most funded original book in the history of crowd-funding.
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