Maidens' Mischief
Maidens' Mischief | Growing Girls | Maiden's Spirituality Women's Herstory
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 Real Gorgeous : The Truth About Body and Beauty by Kaz Cooke, Kazcooke At last--an empowering book that tells girls and women how to be friends with their bodies. Packed with jokes, cartoons, and practical ways to find real self-esteem and avoid freak-outs and rip-offs, Real Gorgeous is easy to read, relevant, and an indispensable boost for women ages 11 to 111.
 Let's Hear It for the Girls : 375 Great Books for Readers
2-14 by Erica Bauermeister, Holly Smith (Contributor) Bravo! A much-needed treasure map of heroines and 'she-roes.' With its hundreds of titles and summaries, it blazes an important path in the forest of children's literature. Jim Trelease, author of The Read-Aloud Handbook
   Reviving Ophelia :
Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls by Mary Pipher At adolescence, says Mary Pipher, "girls become 'female impersonators' who fit their whole selves into small, crowded spaces." Many lose spark, interest, and even IQ points as a "girl-poisoning" society forces a choice between being shunned for staying true to oneself and struggling to stay within a narrow definition of female. Pipher's alarming tales of a generation swamped by pain may be partly informed by her role as a therapist who sees troubled children and teens, but her sketch of a tougher, more menacing world for girls often hits the mark. She offers some prescriptions for changing society and helping girls resist.  Brave New Girls : Creative Ideas to Help Girls Be
Confident, Healthy, & Happy by Jeanette Gadeberg, Beth
Hatlen (Illustrator) Being a girl today isn't easy, but this book can help. Brave New Girls provides a hands-on, straight-talking guide for helping girls deal with the problems of growing up. Jeanette Gadeberg discusses what's on girls' minds--family, relationships, money management, body image, sexual harassment--and empowers them to take the initiative to stand up for themselves. 80 illustrations.  For All Our Daughters : How Mentoring Helps Young Women and
Girls Master the Art of Growing Up by Pegine Echevarria For girls between the ages of 9 and 18, relationships with adult women other than their mothers can make a critical difference in the often difficult and confusing transition to womanhood. Echevarria provides wonderful insights for moms, as well as a pragmatic guide for women who are or want to become mentors. Based on her experience as youth counselor, mother, and mentor, this inspiring book offers concrete suggestions for providing guidance and good modeling in five crucial areas of development: physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, and financial accountability. Although the specific ideas offered may not always be appropriate, or even feasible, for every situation, they are sufficient in both number and variety and will inspire creative thinking about other imaginative solutions. Echevarria stresses that although a mentor will never replace a mother, she serves a vital role in a girl's maturation, through nonjudgmental listening and in helping explore opportunities for growth. Mentors model human resilience and resourcefulness, rather than perfection, and can show firsthand how responsible adults handle difficult situations. Copyright© 1998, American Library Association. All rights reserved
 Raising Their Voices : The Politics of Girls' Anger by Lyn Mikel Brown Girls in our culture learn early to be self-effacing and pleasant, greeting the arrival of adolescence with an accommodating smile. Right? Perhaps not. In Raising Their Voices, author Lyn Mikel Brown, with Carol Gilligan (of the groundbreaking book on girls' psychology Meeting at the Crossroads), confronts the image of "passivity, depression, negative body-image and eating disorders, low self-esteem, and indirect expressions of feelings" perpetuated by recent psychological and sociological research on teen girls. In a year of meeting with groups of girls in two Maine communities--one primarily working-class, one middle- and upper-middle-class--Brown engages the young women in discussions about their relationships, their feelings, and the expectations they have begun to sense around being female. The book, liberally seasoned with the girls' rowdy, clever, conflicted talk, reveals a vast difference between the role-stereotype pressure on working-class girls and their middle- class counterparts, and offers the news that all girls do not simply acquiesce to the constrictions of American culture, nor, if given the right support, do they need to. Brown exhorts adults, particularly women, to allow girls their voices, and to suggest to them, as she does, "the possibility, even under the most oppressive of conditions, for creative refusal and resistance." This book offers valuable insight and tools for the parents, teachers, and mentors of young women. --Maria Dolan  Things Will Be Different for My Daughter : A Practical
Guide to Building Her Self-Esteem and Self-Reliance by Mindy
Bingham, Sandy Stryker, Susan All Stetter Neufeldt, Susan Allstetter Neufeldt
(Contributor), Susan Stryker The well-documented drop in confidence, happiness, and sense of worth as young girls move toward adolescence is discouraging and unacceptable. As this interactive book from the authors of the Choices series shows, there are many ways to bolster girls whether starting at birth or considerably later on. Checklists, quizzes, and questions encourage parents to examine their own attitudes, define what it means to be male and female, and learn nitty-gritty strategies to help their daughters. Psychologists, researchers, and regular folks are abundantly quoted in this earnest, often enlightening book.  Growing a Girl : Seven Strategies for Raising a Strong,
Spirited Daughter by Barbara MacKoff Provides effective guidelines to help parents raise daughters, explaining how to avoid sexual stereotypes, widen opportunities, enhance learning, and cultivate strong, spirited, and caring young women.
 Great Books for Girls : More Than 600 Books to Inspire
Today's Girls and Tomorrow's Women by Kathleen Odean A unique guide for parents and teachers contains more than six hundred annotated listings of a variety of books for girls, from toddlers to adolescents, that feature female protagonists who solve problems and shape their own destiny.
 What Every American Should Know About Women's History : 200
Events That Shaped Our Destiny by Christine Lunardini From Anne Hutchinson to Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Betty Friedan, American women have been at the forefront of the battle to extend the right of liberty to all Americans. The 200 key events featured in this book extend from colonial times to our own century and covers such issues as social reform, work, family life, and the struggle for equal rights.  Herstory : Women Who Changed the World by Ruth Ashby (Editor), Deborah Gore Ohrn (Editor), Gloria Steinem
(Introduction) For thousands of years the contributions of women to history have been largely ignored: now enjoy a wide-ranging, unique 'herstory' which focuses on the contributions of both familiar and lesser-known female figures throughout history. This series of biographical sketches is presented in chronological order to reveal a different approach to historical developments.  Sugar in the Raw : Voices of Young Black Girls in America
by Rebecca Carroll (Editor), Ntozake Shange With raw candor, elicited by Rebecca Carroll's perceptive questioning, 15 black women between the ages of 11 and 18, from places as diverse as Brooklyn and Seattle, Alabama and Vermont, speak out about their inner and outer lives. What they say about identity, self-esteem, the role of race in their perceptions and treatment, personal values, and their hopes for the future is both enlightening and moving. 144 pp. National pubilcity. 15,000 print.  Women Warriors : A History by
David E. Jones A full yet readable historical survey of women at war that convincingly shows females have long been soldiers and military leaders. To counter the male conditioning that has led women to believe that ``the warrior's power historically and biologically belongs only to men,'' Jones, a scholar of military societies (Cultural Anthropology/Univ. of Central Florida), spans past and present to gather a variety of true-life examples of women warriors from Arabia, India, the Middle East, and Western societies. Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, and Molly Pitcher are presented in detail; so are less well known women, including the Teutonic warrior Thusnelda, the ancient Ethiopian warrior queens called kentakes, and the 20th- century Vietnamese warrior Ming Khai, whose prison cell wall bore a poem written in blood that ended, ``The sword is my child, the gun is my husband.'' The practices of women warriors are no less harsh--murder, scalping, removing a tongue to prohibit dissemination of secrets--and the will to conquer and subdue opponents, male and female, no less fierce than in male warriors. The numbers of women warriors, Jones demonstrates, sometimes ran high, comprising, for example, nearly half of ``some European tribal armies'' and 30 percent of the Sandinista forces in the 1970s. Some may feel empowered by these impressive accounts; others may find them repetitive in their narration of military action. (On a lighter note, this may be a useful sourcebook for actresses searching for good female roles: Before Braveheart, there was Queen Penthesilea.) By sheer accumulation of examples, and by careful adherence to its cultural and historical perspectives, this book succeeds in its goal--to position women as accomplished, worthy soldiers, and to ``reveal a particular truth of female historical experience.'' (13 b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.  Raising Spiritual Children in a Material World by Phil Catalfo The author, Phil Catalfo , May 5, 1997 Why I wrote "Raising Spiritual Children in a Material World" I'm delighted that Amazon is carrying my new book, "Raising Spiritual Children in a Material World." I'd just like to say that this book was prompted by own search for a spiritual path for myself and my family (my wife and I have 3 kids aged 10 to 17), and by the sense that many other contemporary families have likewise struggled to find what I call "an authentic spirituality" for their lives. In the book, I chronicle the winding path my own search has led me on, and profile a number of families (of diverse spiritual practices). I also describe the characteristics I believe we need to encourage in our children *now* if they are to be able to get along, let alone thrive, in the world they will inhabit in the decades ahead. Since my book was published (April 1, 1997), the response has been quite positive, and I'm hopeful that it will prove to be of use to the many families out there who want to add a spiritual component to their family life, to nurture the spiritual process in their children, and to cultivate a kind of aliveness and involvement with the world that will last throughout their lives. And of course I hope that, should you read my book, you'll agree that it does just that. Many blessings on you and your family!
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Venus in Blue Jeans : Why Mothers & Daughters Need to Talk About Sex by Susan Lieberman (Contributor), Nathalie A. Bartle 
Protecting the Gift: Keeping Children and Teenagers Safe (And
Parents Sane) by Gavin De Becker 
The Wise Child : A Spiritual Guide to Nurturing Your Child's
Intuition by Sonia Choquette 
