Akron Public Library

Young Parvana lives with her family in one room of a bombed-out apartment building in Kabul, Afghanistan. Because Parvana's father has a foreign education, he is arrested by the Taliban. Women cannot appear in public unless covered head to toe, go to school, or work outside the home, so the family becomes increasingly desperate until Parvana conceives a plan.

Attempting to break free from the oppression of women in the nineteenth century, sixteen-year-old Devonny steps through time hoping to find the power to change her fate.

"Jasmine and Chelsea are best friends. This year at their NYC high school, they plan to rock the theater and poetry clubs ... until Chelsea realizes the poetry club is more interested in the "classics" than poems that matter, and Jasmine has an experience that is more drama than theater. Sick over the way even their progressive school fails to listen to their voices, they start a new club, one dedicated to writing and creating work that supports women's...

In India in the 1940s, thirteen-year-old Leela's happy, spoiled childhood ends when her husband since age nine, whom she barely knows, dies, leaving her a widow whose only hope of happiness could come from Mahatma Ghandi's social and political reforms.

"In a dystopian future where gender selection has led to [boys outnumbering girls] 5 to 1, marriage is arranged based on a series of tests. It's Sudasa's turn to pick a husband through this 'fair' method, but she's not sure she wants to be a part of it"--

In 1901, fourteen-year-old Mable Riley dreams of being a writer and having adventures while stuck in Perth County, Ontario, assisting her sister in teaching school and secretly becoming friends with a neighbor who holds scandalous opinions on women's rights.

Mari is getting ready to make a sign with crayon as the streets below her fill up with people. "What are we making, Mama?" she asks. "A message for the world," Mama says. "How will the whole world hear?" Mari wonders. "They'll hear," says Mama, "because love is powerful." Inspired by a girl who participated in the January 2017 Women's March in New York City, Heather Dean Brewer's simple and uplifting story, delightfully illustrated by LeUyen Pham,...

This story imagines what it was like when Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass got together for a cup of tea and discussed their struggle for civil rights.

The definitive political biography of Rosa Parks examines her six decades of activism, challenging perceptions of her as an accidental actor in the civil rights movement and presenting a corrective to the popular notion of Rosa Parks.

This board book highlights ten memorable female trailblazers.