Thanks!

(not pictured--Alex Baugh, The Children's War)

With over 15,000 visitors to this site during the month of March, we hope we've done our small part in honoring Women's History Month through the medium of children's literature.  Our sincere thanks to all the wonderful authors and bloggers who contributed their time and their thoughts about women's history; without all of you, the project would not have been possible.  For both contributors and those who have been following along, we'd be interested in your feedback as to whether we should continue next year and whether you'd be interested in participating again or helping to identify other contributors.  Please leave us a comment below with your thoughts.

Women Heroes of WWII

March 31 - Today's post provided by The Children's War

Women Heroes of World War II: 26 Stories of Espionage, Sabotage, Resistance and Rescue by Kathryn J. Atwood

           When I was 10 years old, I decided to dress up as my mother for Halloween.  My costume was simple: shoes, dress, a church hat and a big old purse she no longer used.    Nothing really fit, but I didn’t care.  Why my mother?  Well, as a World War II nurse, she was my hero, the first in what was to become a long list of women heroes who have served as historical mentors in my life.  So, when I think of this year’s theme for Women’s History Month, Our History Is Our Strength, I know exactly what that means. 

            Now Kathryn Atwood has written a very moving account of 26 strong, courageous women who stood up and said no to the Nazi scourge at great risk to their lives.  Some of these women joined underground resistance movements in Nazi-occupied countries, others rescued Jews and Allied soldiers caught behind enemy lines, and still others worked as spies, mingling with the enemy to gather useful information.  Some of these women were quite young.  In Poland, 19-year-old Irene Gut worked for a high ranking German officer in his villa.  She was able to hide 12 Jews in the basement of the house, right under his nose.  When he found out, he gave Irene a choice: become his mistress or he would turn them all over to the Gestapo.  She made the first choice, never told anyone about it and eventually Irene was able to lead these Jews into the forest, where they were liberated.

Sophie Scholl

            Sophie Scholl, a college student in Munich, Germany wasn’t much older than Irene when she began her Resistance activities.  Along with 10 others including her brother Hans, Sophie belonged to the White Rose (die weiße Rose.)  The group wrote and distributed six extensive anti-Nazi leaflets urging people to denounce Hitler’s government in word and deed.  Anti-Nazi behavior was considered treason, punishable by death.  Sophie and Hans were arrested, and later tried and executed on the same day. In a country where people no longer had any civil liberties, her actions were courageous and heroic.  Silence, I believe, is a sign of acceptance, and these students refused to accept what the Nazis were doing in their beloved country.

Josephine Baker

            Other women in Women Heroes of World War II were surprises to me, for example, Josephine Baker and Marlene Dietrich.  Josephine Baker, an African-American, had lived in Paris for many years after leaving the US in part because of the racism she encountered here.  As an entertainer, Josephine had the perfect cover for a spying.  Before France fell to the Nazis, Josephine did some espionage working for the Deuxième Bureau, a French intelligence agency.  Her celebrity status allowed her to mingle at parties where she would listen in on conversations and acquire much need information.  Later, when France was occupied by the Germans, Josephine retired to her chateau.  Her chateau was then used as a stop-off for resistance workers, a safe house for refugees, and storage space for weapons.  Later, Josephine toured Spain, Portugal and North Africa, again partying in order to gather information. 

Marlene Dieetrich

          Marlene Dietrich, though German born, was an American citizen who worked against the Nazis and volunteered to entertain troops for the USO, often at great risk to herself.  Sometimes, she was so close to the front lines, she could hear gunfire and bombs going off.  When she started to use her signature song, Lilie Marlene, in English for the troops, the Nazis were livid, that had been their World War I song.  But she also sang it in German for the Soldatensender West, an Allied radio program broadcast in German and directed at Hitler’s soldiers, along with other anti-Nazi propaganda.  It turned out, German soldiers has listened to Soldatensender West, even though it was forbidden.  

            These are just a few examples of the lives of the extraordinary women who risked everything to help others in very dangerous situations that are included in this book.  Though every story is different, the women were motivated by the same thing: when the time came, they did what they felt was right.  Later, many received awards and medals for they work and some were even awarded the title “Righteous among Nations” by Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to the Holocaust, for the Jews they saved.

            Women Heroes of World War II is a well written, well researched book.  Ms. Atwood profiles the resistance activities of women from eight countries: Germany, Poland, France, The Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Great Britain and the United States.  There is a brief summary of the way in which each country entered World War II.  This information really helps the reader appreciate the dangers and obstacles these woman faced.  Each woman’s story is also supplemented with additional material, for example, passages from the leaflets written by Sophie Scholl and the White Rose, or the edict issued when Denmark was forced to surrender to the Germans.  At the end of every woman’s story is a list of resources where the reader can go to find more information about her.  The beauty of the organization of this book is that it can be read from cover to cover, as I did, or in parts.  Each narrative stands on it own.  This makes it ideal as a teaching tool and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

            Out of curiosity I asked Ms. Atwood what made her decide to write Women Heroes of World War II.  She said that her dad had been a young tail gunner in Europe during World War II (tail gunner, I have learned, was a very lonely, dangerous position) and she was always fascinated by his war stories.  Another parental hero!

            Because of her Dutch heritage, Ms. Atwood was also familiar with women resistance workers in the Netherlands, such as Corrie ten Boom and Diet Eman, both included in her book, and both amazing women.

Women Heroes of World War II is recommended for readers age 12 and up.

This book was purchased for my personal library.

For an interesting story about how Kathryn Atwood touched history while writing Women Heroes of World War II, please visit  http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/511628-touching-history to read her story.

            For the last 30 days, I have been introduced to and celebrated a wide variety of other incredibly strong, brave, daring women.  Among their accomplishments, they are trailblazers who broke barriers, crossed lines, saved lives and gave us beautiful music.  These women certainly embody the theme “Our History Is Our Strength.” They all refused to live in the margins of their time, and we are women who refuse to let they live in the margins of history.  And now we have come to the last day of celebrating Women’s History Month and since I can’t say let the celebrations begin, I will say

                                       Let the Celebrations Continue!

Editor's Note: 
Watch for a final wrap-up post tomorrow from organizers Margo and Lisa!  

Amelia Lost

March 30 - Today's post provided by Candace Fleming



I began work on Amelia Lost back in 2007, but Amelia Earhart has been on my radar (no pun intended) for much longer.  Years ago, my mother told me a story about how she felt after learning of Amelia’s 1937 disappearance. Mom was ten years old at the time, and couldn’t believe the news.  It was impossible.  Amelia Earhart was the woman who could do anything.  She couldn’t be lost at sea.  So my mother, who lived in a small town on Lake Michigan, stood on the beach and gazed up into the sky.  She was convinced that if she stood there long enough, she’d eventually spot the aviatrix, winging her way through the clouds to safety.  Isn’t that wonderful?  Can’t you just see her there?  That’s how connected my mother felt to Earhart, how vividly the pilot’s life had captured her imagination.  And through my mother’s retelling decades later, Amelia captured mine.  I knew I would someday have to write about her.

And really, who wouldn’t want to research and write about Amelia Earhart?  She is, after all, America’s favorite missing person. So I spent two weeks at the Purdue University Library, shifting through the vast holdings of the George Putnam Palmer Collection of Amelia Earhart Papers.  I gathered digitized files from the collection of the National Air and Space Museum, as well as from the Schlesinger Library, the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the USCG National Maritime Center, and the Seaver Center for Western History Research.  Best of all, Ric Gillespie, executive director of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), generously shared his organization’s miles of documents, including those marvelous pages from Betty Klenck’s notebook.

  It was my exploration of TIGHAR’s documents that made me eager to tell about the seventeen-day search for her downed plane  --what the press called “the greatest rescue expedition in flying history.”  It’s a dramatic, suspenseful tale.  And believe it or not, it’s never before been told in a book for young readers.  Sure some of the pieces of the search are well-known, and have been used selectively in the past to support various theories about her disappearance, but the entire picture, scattered and dispersed among dozens of archival files and private collections has been hard to decipher.  Luckily, Ric Gillespie and the smart people at TIGHAR helped guide me through the historical record, providing me with a day-to-day, in some cases minute-by-minute view of what really happened.  That view can be found in the book.

(Amelia Earhart source:
 http://www.americaslibrary.gov/
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As for Amelia herself, the most surprising part of my research was the discovery that she was… well… sort of a fibber.  Time and again, I unearthed a telling detail, or charming anecdote only to learn that it wasn’t true; that Amelia had made it up to maintain her public image.  Take, for example, the often-repeated story of the flier’s first glimpse of an airplane.  According to Earhart, this happened at the Iowa State Fair in 1908, when she was just eleven years old.  “It was a thing of wire and wood,” she wrote in her memoir, The Fun Of It.  “I was much more interested in an absurd hat made of an inverted peach basket which I purchased for fifteen cents.” It’s a sweet story, but placed in the context of aviation history it can’t possibly be true.  Or, take that popular anecdote about Fred Noonan and the around-the-world trip.  According to Amelia, Fred was confined to the navigator’s station in the rear cabin and could communicate with her only in notes passed forward over the fuel tanks by means of a bamboo fishing pole.  True?  Absolutely not.  In fact, Fred spent much of his time in the cockpit with Amelia, clambering over the fuel tanks in the rear cabin only when he needed room to spread out a chart.  At first, I was frustrated by these (and so many more) fabrications.  I started to think I should retitle the book, Flyer, Flyer Pants On Fire.  But then I began to see her fibs as a challenge – a challenge to finding the real Amelia behind the public persona, and discovering the events that led to her disappearance.  My hope is that readers will be able to glimpse the real woman through the pages of this book.

Editor's Note:

"Candace Fleming awarded herself the Newbery Medal in fifth grade after scraping the gold sticker off the class copy of  The Witch of Blackbird Pond and pasting it onto her first novel—a ten page, ten-chapter mystery called Who Done It? She’s been collecting awards (her own, not Elizabeth George Speare’s) ever since.

Today, Candace is the versatile and acclaimed author of more than twenty books for children, including the Boston Globe/Horn Book Award-winning biography, The Lincolns; the bestselling picture book, Muncha! Muncha! Muncha!; and the beloved Boxes for Katje." 

Visit Candace Fleming's blog to find out more about Candace and her books.

I'll Pass for Your Comrade: Women Soldiers in the Civil War

March 29 - Today's post provided by Anita Silvey



          Before I ever attempted to write I’ll Pass for Your Comrade: Women Soldiers in the Civil War, I worked as a family historian, or genealogist, for about twenty years. In that time I discovered why I knew only the first name of so many of my female ancestors. I grew to understand why a matrilineal descent line – from mother to mother to mother – is the toughest assignment in genealogy. I also learned to value small details, such as the mention of several quilts in a family will. At least I knew that this great-grandmother created them and that the family valued her work highly.

            When I took on the project of writing about the 1,000 women who defied convention, put on men’s clothing, and went to fight in the Civil War, I knew that in many cases I would be building my book on small pieces of evidence. Sometimes all that we have of one of these soldiers is literally their bones, later identified when burial grounds were moved. For other women only one record exists – a newspaper article, a letter from a male soldier, or a detail in a Civil War regimental history.

            Often my fabulous editor Dinah Stevenson would ask about a woman that I had presented in a paragraph, “Tell me the rest of her story. What happened to her?” Almost always, the answer to Dinah would be, “we don’t know. That is all we know about her.”

            I admire Laurie Halse Anderson’s Independent Dames because she found an ideal format to utilize scraps of history to present the accomplishments of women. But I was writing a photo-essay of 112 pages. Hence I decided to devote each chapter to one of the stages of being a soldier – motivation, enlistment, training, battle, hospitals, prison camps, and coming home. Then for each one I selected a woman who left many records of her life– books, autobiographies, or letters – and allowed her to carry much of the chapter. Then I added in small vignettes about other women, less well-known, less recorded. To create a composite picture of the life of a female Civil War soldier, I had to become a quilter of words and images.

          In this book, I pay tribute to these independent, idealistic, and driven women, who went to any length to do what they wanted to do. Like my female ancestors, they deserve to have their accomplishments recorded -- even if that means that as writers we have to work harder, be extremely creative, and do extensive research to reconstruct their stories.

Editor's Note:

Anita Silvey's latest project is the Children's Book-A-Day Almanac.  Find out more about Anita Silvey on her website.